ARCTIC ICE SLEDGING AS IT REALLY IS Perhaps it will assist the reader to form a more vivid picture of the sort of work that now lay before the expedition and which the expedition eventually performed, if an effort is made to make him understand exactly what it means to travel nearly a thousand miles with dog sledges over the ice of the polar pack.

In that belief, I shall at this point endeavor to describe as briefly as is consistent with clearness the conditions that confronted us and the means and methods by which those conditions were met.
Between the winter quarters of the _Roosevelt_ at Cape Sheridan, and Cape Columbia, the most northerly point on the north coast of Grant Land, which I had chosen as the point of departure for the ice journey, lay ninety miles in a northwesterly direction along the ice-foot and across the land, which we must traverse before plunging onto the trackless ice fields of the Arctic Ocean.
From Cape Columbia we were to go straight north over the ice of the Polar Sea,--four hundred and thirteen geographical miles.

Many persons whose memories go back to the smooth skating ponds of their childhood, picture the Arctic Ocean as a gigantic skating pond with a level floor over which the dogs drag us merrily--we sitting comfortably upon the sledges with hot bricks to keep our toes and fingers warm.

Such ideas are distinctly different from the truth, as will appear.
There is no land between Cape Columbia and the North Pole and no smooth and very little level ice.
For a few miles only after leaving the land we had level going, as for those few miles we were on the "glacial fringe." This fringe, which fills all the bays and extends across the whole width of North Grant Land, is really an exaggerated ice-foot; in some places it is miles in width.

While the outer edge in places is afloat and rises and falls with the movement of the tides, it never moves as a body, except where great fields of ice break off from it and float away upon the waters of the Arctic Ocean.
Beyond the glacial fringe is the indescribable surface of the shore lead, or tidal crack--that zone of unceasing conflict between the heavy floating ice and the stationary glacial fringe.