In the spring of 2011, Kokatat Ambassador Erik Boomer and Jon Turk set out to become the first team to circumnavigate Ellesmere Island, one of the most complex and physically demanding polar expeditions in modern times. The total journey covered 1500 miles and three seasons, over a kaleidoscope of solid ice, followed by melting, fracturing, and shifting ice, leading eventually into open water.

The team launched on May 7 from Grise Fiord, the only civilian settlement on Ellesmere, the tenth largest island in the world. The sun shone brightly 24 hours a day, dancing rainbows in the sub-zero snow. For the first six weeks Jon and Erik traveled on skis, pulling their kayaks as one would pull a sled on any arctic expedition. By the third week in June, however, the sun was melting the ice surface from above, while from beneath, tides and currents were fracturing the ice into a kaleidoscope of interlocking floes. The crux of the expedition came in the Nares Strait, along the northeast coast, where Ellesmere and Greenland squeeze together, and where the entire North Pole ice pack compresses into a narrow, constricted channel, as the mobile floes are driven southward by currents and wind.

Finally, donning their Kokatat dry tops and PFD’s, Erik and Jon paddled the last 500 miles in walrus, polar bear and ice-congested polar seas. For further information on the journey, see the expedition website at www.jonturk.net/content/Ellesmere.