She went back to teaching. Gym class, St. Paul, kids in the hall — that's what came after about two months on the sea ice north of Ellesmere, which I find much more interesting than the pole itself.
The loads first. Five sleds, roughly half a ton each at the start, forty-odd dogs, no resupply, temperatures down near minus fifty, and pressure ridges you haul over rather than around. Will Steger and Paul Schurke ran it. Brent Boddy, Richard Weber, Geoff Carroll, Bob Mantell, Bob McKerrow were on it too — two came off early, one with a bad back, one with frostbitten feet. And Ann Bancroft, born 1955 in Mendota Heights, hauling the same weight as everyone else in 1986, then home to the whistle and the register.
The eating is the part I'd never manage. At minus fifty you're losing heat to the air constantly, so the body just burns fuel to hold about 37 degrees — and that's before you've hauled anything. Polar hauliers have run on something like 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day and still come home thinner, which tells you how much of it goes straight out as warmth. Ines, mostly butter and lard, I gather.
Hauling like that you're burning something like six thousand calories a day, so the food goes mostly to fat — butter, cheese, pemmican — and at minus fifty it's rock hard, so you chip it and let it thaw in your mouth. Anyway, no cooking to speak of, just melting snow and heat.