Nighttime travel means that we have the sun at our backs as we ski south. Since the sun is low in the northern sky, it casts a gentle light that is just so special to experience. It’s hard to describe; it’s sort of like the light that you see before the sun starts to set. It just lights up mountain peaks and the ice in a really, really nice way.

Night travel also plays with our minds, so we lose sense of our typical chronological reference points. Sometimes we lose track of where we are on the clock and the calendar and feel kind of lost, not in a bad way, but it’s a funny feeling.

The land up here feels like a place that time has forgotten in some ways. People rarely travel to a lot of these parts. It is largely an animal world, and in the past 48 hours we’ve been experiencing that. We’ve seen three wolves very close to camp, a huge herd of musk ox that included 31 animals, including eight calves. We’ve also seen at least 41 Arctic hares in the past 48 hours, including one huge group of 23. We have seen wolves so many times that sightings seem almost commonplace. The fact that the wolves look like really big dogs also adds to that effect.