(NOTE: This article appeared in the May 29 print edition of the Timberjay)

ELY — On Monday, 81-year-old explorer Will Steger was waiting beside the Horton River in Canada’s Northwest Territories, watching for the Arctic spring to finally loosen its grip.
The river had begun to break apart, but not enough yet to carry him onward. During the day, chunks of ice drifted and jammed against each other. At night, freezing temperatures returned. Wet snow fell Monday morning.
For Steger, the pause is part of the journey itself.
“This is actually day one of the wait,” he said in a satellite dispatch recorded earlier this month after deciding conditions had become too unstable for over-ice travel.
Since April 3, Steger has been chronicling his latest expedition through near-daily satellite calls posted online, offering an unusually intimate real-time portrait of a solo Arctic journey unfolding hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement.
The Ely explorer began the trip after being flown north from Yellowknife to Great Bear Lake by longtime bush pilot Dave Olesen, who has ferried Steger to the start of numerous expeditions over the decades. From there, Steger set out alone, hauling roughly 260 pounds of gear across the snow on three sleds bound in tandem behind him.
His planned route would take him more than 800 miles through territory above the Arctic Circle, following the Bloody River north to the divide before descending toward the Arctic Ocean through the Horton River system. Along with the sleds, he carried a seven-foot inflatable raft intended for the breakup season he knew would eventually overtake the ice.
By Monday, Steger said he had spent 10 days waiting for the river ice to fully release. The expedition had simply entered a new phase.
The first days on the trail were slow and exhausting. After landing on Great Bear Lake on April 3, Steger began hauling his sleds north up the Bloody River through deep snow that at times reached thigh-high.
“I wasn’t out to make any big distances today,” he said in his Day 1 dispatch. “I just wanted to haul three or four hours to get some exercise.”
At first, much of the effort centered simply on settling into the rhythms of the expedition itself. Steger spent time reorganizing equipment, refining routines and adapting to constantly changing conditions while hauling three heavily loaded sleds.
“It’s quite a relief to be up here right now,” he said during the opening days of the trek. “It’s really silent.”
As the miles accumulated, Steger described the gradual fading of what he called the “chaos” of everyday life. During the first days, he said, his dreams were crowded with disconnected scenes, people and events from the outside world.
“I belong to the American culture,” he said during a rest day early in the trip. “Even though I may not participate in all the craziness that’s going on, I’m still in a culture, with people in a society.”
But he said the Arctic gradually stripped that away.
“Within a week or less all of this chaos disappears,” he said.
In its place came a slower rhythm. Steger said his attention narrowed almost entirely to the immediate realities around him – weather, snow conditions, equipment and the changing terrain ahead.
As he moved farther north and above the tree line, the landscape became harsher but in some ways easier to read.
Wind-scoured crust often allowed him to haul all three sleds at once, rather than the relay style at other points in the trek. At other times, whiteout conditions flattened the world around him.
“You couldn’t tell top from bottom,” he said after one stretch of poor visibility. “If you turn around, you get totally disoriented.”
On another day, while struggling through hazy conditions along the river, Steger found himself following the tracks of a lone wolf moving ahead of him across the snow.
“The wolf has the tendency of following the better snow,” he observed. “So, I basically followed his tracks.”
By then, Steger said thoughts of home had largely disappeared into the daily demands and rhythms of the journey.
“I’m pretty much in the present moment,” he said. “I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to be anywhere or have anything different.”
The travel, however, remained unforgiving.
“You’re not allowed too many mistakes,” Steger said during one dispatch after describing wind chills reaching 30 below zero and nights spent sleeping in all of his clothing inside the tent to stay warm.
Despite the conditions, Steger gradually crossed the divide separating the Bloody and Horton river systems, descending onto the Arctic watershed that would eventually lead toward the ocean.
Along the way, small signs of spring began appearing across the western Arctic.
During one warm spell, Steger described turning over a rock and finding insects already moving beneath it. Elsewhere, marshlands near the river began releasing meltwater “like a sponge” as temperatures climbed and the intensity of the sun increased.
Birds began returning as well.
“There’s a robin up today, and that’s a new phenomenon,” Steger said during one dispatch, noting that he had not seen robins arriving that far north so early on previous expeditions. He later speculated that climate change may be contributing to the shift.
“Things happen very, very fast,” he observed.
Even amid the harsh conditions, moments of companionship occasionally appeared in unexpected ways. During one stop, Steger described a fox lingering near camp while he spoke softly and sang to it.
By mid-May, however, the Arctic spring that Steger had been watching gradually move across the landscape finally began overtaking the ice beneath him.
The turning point came during a lunch break along the Horton River. Steger had already begun questioning whether conditions remained safe enough to continue crossing the ice and decided to stop briefly and reassess the route “with fresh eyes.”
He stretched out on a foam pad after eating soup and rice. When he woke a short time later, a spoon beside his cup caught his attention.
“Just in that 45 minutes or so break,” he said, “it melted it into the ice.”
Lashings on his sleds had begun doing the same.
“And just in that short hour period, 45 minutes, it had become even more questionable,” he said. “So, I decided not to try to cross there.”
The river itself also began changing rapidly. Ice that had previously been brittle and relatively easy to read softened within hours. Along the shoreline, meltwater started flowing into small channels and whirlpools.
“Whirlpools are really scary, ominous,” Steger said. “They sound almost like a friendly brook, but they’re off on a kind of a sinister type of a note.”
“I made the decision at that point,” he said. “I’m not going to be pushing anymore.”
“The game’s over,” he said.
Not the expedition itself, but this phase of the journey.
Instead, Steger established camp along a stretch of the Horton River and began waiting for the breakup season to fully unfold around him.
At first, warmer temperatures appeared to speed the breakup. Steger described the river ice fracturing into thousands of drifting pieces that repeatedly jammed downstream.
Then the weather shifted again.
After several days of warming temperatures that appeared to be accelerating the thaw, north winds returned along with freezing nights and thick clouds, slowing the breakup that only days earlier had seemed ready to surge forward.
“And then this morning, I looked out, and it was just real thick, wet snow falling,” Steger said. “And it was like the worst possible miserable.”
But the experience also brought an unexpected realization.
“I actually had a sense of joy,” he said. “I had a sense of hope of what it would be like and how glorious it will be like when I see the sunshine again, which hopefully will be soon.”
On Monday evening, after the snow finally stopped falling, Steger walked upriver through the wet snow once again to check an ice dam. A light south wind had begun to return, a positive development.
But for now, the wait continued.
Continue following Steger’s progress on the expedition webpage at https://www.stegercenter.org/2026log.