Sometimes a holiday is positioned right where you need one…and today’s was no exception. I can’t remember a day in recent history (i.e. the last decade :-)) when I spent the entire day at home. I only left the house to go out to the car to get something. Marian was home all day as well and it meant we made great headway on several expedition tasks. We started the day tackling my climbing skins. Climbing skins adhere to the bottom of your skins allowing you to climb hills without sliding back down. As I’m using nordic touring gear, it’s hard to get a pair of skins narrow enough for my skis so we had to trim them down. In the pictures above and below, Marian is using the special trim tool to cut the skin to side and expose the ski edge.

I’ll be taking two set of skins…one full length for the really uphill stuff and kicker skins for when we are the ice cap and I just need traction in order to pull my pulk (sled). The glue on skins is pretty amazing as it allows the skin to be stuck to the ski and removed over and over again. You store the skins by sticking the glue sides together. We have to Macgiver tip loops for my full length skins since the ones that came with the skins are about 15 mm too big…looking for potential fill-ins will be a good excuse for a trip to Canadian Tire or Princess Auto (on a side note, my dad often called Princess Auto La Senza for Men).

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been moving gear down into the living room a.k.a. expedition staging area and putting them in a pile on the couch. Today we did a second pass through the gear list with me showing each gear and clothing choice to Marian for approval and for checking off of the list. I suspect, left to my own devices, I might pack a wee bit light…then again, light is right when it comes to expedition packing. In the picture below, you can see how the process transformed the amorphous pile of gear into well organized categories that are ready to go into zip bags. All the electronics are charged and the good news was it was sunny enough to test the solar charging system and the really good news is that it worked to charge the sat phone! Zipper pulls got installed along with a pocket on my wind pants. I checked out the long hours of daylight we can expect at 70 degrees North and we’ve got the last of the shopping/small bits to buy tomorrow in between the two holidays!