Meeting Mieke

Yesterday Boudewijn, Joost and myself, met Mieke, a lady that did the last two degrees (88°-90°) in 2006. We read an article, in diary format, of her published in a mountaineering magazine. The article was written in such a way that we could truely imagine how the journey would be. By coincidence, a friend of hers was a mutual friend to Joost's girlfriend. Mieke invited us to share her experiences of her trip. It was a very learning evening, we were treated with a slideshow of pictures, and with everyone of them came a story. Stories about the cold you carry with you, about being and staying focussed on yourself and every movement, about the importance of being guided by a pole expert, about the beauty of nature that had a huge impact on her and many more. Eventhough we all three read quite an amount of books on the polar regions, and saw many pictures, we still were impressed about her presentation. The leads we will have to cross seem larger than expected - sometimes 200-400m width- and the pukas used as boats to cross them immersed deeper than we thought. The walls of ice blocks, formed by the collision of two iceplates, are much higher when you see them in relation to a human being than on landscape pictures, and crawling them seemed a very hard and tough job. Some pictures gave us comfort and confidence - after all we're preparing for about two years-, others made us realize we have quite a dangerous and acrobatic event ahead. We were happy to see the picture of her final destination: the Northpole, a view of the GPS screen with 89°59'59'. We kinda had to laugh with the fact that the real Northpole wasn't reached, but Mieke challanged us to come back with a screenshot showing 90°. Knowing that the ice moves fast and we will have to jump around to even get a 89°59'5x', we took the challange and we will not go for less than the 90°. A big thank you from all of us to Mieke, for putting her house open, sharing her experiences with us and sending us back home with an almost impossible mission.