Day 23
Position: N 78° 20' W 094° 42'
Distance traveled: 21.3 km / 13.2 mi

Today was a short day but it would be difficult to convince my muscles of that. With fully loaded sleds it is difficult to make good distance and even more difficult to move the sleds when they get stuck on ice ridges. So far we have been lucky and have not encountered rubble ice, for if we did at our current weight it could be crushing to the spirits of our dogs and our team members. Luckily for both we spent the last two days resting.

Another important aspect of taking a rest day is the ability to set up the our two Brunton solar panels in the more powerful noon sun light. Both panels under ideal conditions are capable of providing 104 watts of power, just enough power to run a large incandescent light bulb, or about enough power to run six compact florescent light bulbs. For us this power is stored in two battery packs so that we can use the energy to charge a variety of small electrical appliances when it suits our needs. Our list of electronics includes two iPaq PDA's , four iridium satellite phones, two video cameras, three photography cameras and three iPod shuffles. It's a lot to charge, but our system is well capable of handling the load.

Photovoltaic cells have been in existence for a long time, although in their infancy they rarely left the laboratory as they were expensive to make and were inefficient compared to other sources of electricity. It was only later when NASA and other space programs were interested in long-term power supplies that solar was taken seriously and developed into an expensive but useful technology. Later, during the oil crisis in the 1970s, solar was again under experiment, yielding higher efficiency and lower cost of production. Nonetheless, even today solar is one of the most expensive forms of renewable energies and is generally only used in areas of isolation far from a grid or where maintenance cost would be high. Promising new technologies such as nano-tube tech, and more efficient production methods may make photovoltaic electricity an important part of our future.

Eric McNair Landry