Day 20 - Towards the Final Victory

It feels pretty bold to talk about a final victory on a 20/50 skiing day, right? For us, too. Nevertheless, our minds turned to that position this morning. We finally, for the first time, got half skins working. This immediately increased the skiing speed, and it started to feel like “now we got the show starting”.

Didn't start. Antarctica showed again who rules and who whines. We reached the area of new snow. At first, it also felt easy, but not for long. We had to do some serious work. Add to that one detached ski skin and minor friction problems, and the day had turned from excellent to not-so-good.

On the second last leg of the day, we served ourselves mint teas, shouted some curses (in the direction of the east, of course) and skied out of the motivation hole. The mind is still optimistic: we have everything ready and waiting for better days. This year, all the expeditions have complained about a significant amount of slow snow and sastrugi - including Polar Preet, who skied the same route last year and hence has a reference point.

We are in no hurry and ski according to what Antarctica serves us. Towards the final victory.

By the way, the mind plays tricks here. Or protects the stupid head from itself. Here, it is pretty normal to have thoughts such as:

• we're already at lunch, only four hours of skiing, that's not much. (How often do you go skiing for four hours in Finland, huh?)
• no more than 30 days of skiing. Not bad. (Whoa. There is probably no need to comment on the bias of this idea)

In today's photo, Mikko dreams of our and Ukraine's victory.