'It's incredible to think this has only been one day,' Masha commented in the tent. I laughed out loud in agreement. Thinking of where we had come from and where we are now is nothing short of crazy... And long, but we did get a five-hour nap in - more on that later.

It was the normal hurry up and wait in Longyearbyen yesterday morning. The initial plan was to fly to barneo at roughly three pm but we received a message that the first technical flight was delayed. A few hours later we got the green light, but the Antonov was still in the air. 'Meet at the airport at 10:30 pm,' Leo, Victor Boyarsky's right hand man texted a while later.

We watched the Antonov land then we all pitched in to help load gear. It was a regular UN of last degree expedition heading to Barneo: Bengt's Norwegian team, Eric Phillips' Australian team, a few British teams and my team - now four strong consisting of Julie (German), Masha (Russian - but now British living in France), Colin (American) and Rohan (originally from Jamaica but living in Connecticut).

We landed at Barneo roughly two and a half hours later. Amazingly in just a few days time, the a new runway had been cleared and a temporary camp erected. When Masha inquired as to the difficulty of constructing the new runway in such a short time, one of the snow camouflaged soldiers replied, 'in our language we don't have a word for difficult.'

We then loaded all of our gear into a large MI-8 Orange and Blue helicopter and flew with Bengt's team to the 89th parallel at the 135th east meridian. Flying low over the sea ice, I tried not to think about the overall surface conditions.

'A lot of pressure and a lot of open water,' were the reports that we received in Barneo.

It was 6 am when the helicopter lifted off and we hadn't slept since the day before. We didn't want to loose a day of travel but we also need to make sure we started with at least a good level of energy so we quickly set up the tents, crawled inside and took a four hour 'nap'

We were out and traveling again in the afternoon and managed four hour-long 'shifts'. The ice started out relatively flat with only a few small ice chunks, then devolved in to most pressured blocks and drifts. Then an old lead that had refrozen. Then worse. Several times I unhooked from my sled to help everyone through a particularly rough section.

As my Arctic Ocean luck would have it, we also saw a set of polar bear tracks - probably a young male - heading off to the west. While it is amazing to know these animals are here - after several very close encounters with polar bears, I will be happy if this one stays far away.

Distance traveled: 4.3 nautical miles