Day 5 (4 April 2007)

This day was horrendous. Our main objective was to get off the mountain, and down into better conditions in the forest. The day's sledding was in 3 main parts:

• A blizzard with a strong wind, horizontal snow and limited visibility, which varied between 50 and 200 metres. This was very tricky, but much worse was to come!
• In the lull before the storm, the snow stopped falling and the visibilty improved. It was a real pleasure sledding in the mountains well above the tree line.
• For the final part of the day, the wind increased to Storm Force 10 (around 60 mph). It wasn't snowing, but the wind blew fine snow along the ground. The conditions appeared to be very similar to a sand storm in the desert. The visibility at times was less than 20 metres. The strength of the wind, the very poor visibility and the blowing snow caused the illusion of rapid movement when you were actually stationary. The dog sled train got split up into two groups, and it took ages to get back together again. This was really quite scary, but we had every confidence that our leader would lead us to safety.

We travelled around 60 km today, but we could not get off the mountain. In the end, we stayed the night in a single hut - very crowded and very cosy. This was a long long day, and it was dark before we had finished feeding the dogs, never mind ourselves.

We learned on our return to Tromso that the airport, the harbour and all of the mountain roads in Northern Norway had been closed due to the weather. The only movement seemed to be our team of dog sledders in the mountains!

Finally, the conditions were so bad, that I did not take any photographs!