Journey to the North Pole with Sarah Gilboe
And her (ancient) Garmin  Legend!

Her cruise started from Murmansk, Russia and traveled to the north Pole on the nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker, Yamal.
You might be interested in reading how to set your GPS to UPS Polar Coordinates (HERE)
The cruise was provided by Quark Expeditions.

(Click on the pictures below for larger sizes)

Sarah Guides the Russian Nuclear-powered Icebreaker to the Proper Spot!

90° North
...
Here Sarah is standing over the North Pole where Longitude has no meaning, but notice the GPS attempts to figure it out.
The elevation is about 15 feet, so if Sara is holding the unit about 5 feet above the ice, then the ice is 10 feet thick.

Making a GPS Chart of the North Pole

First, one must find a good chart of the North pole
This IBCAO.jpg chart comes from (HERE) and (HERE)


Next we rotated the chart 30° clockwise, so that the starting point (Murmansk) would be at the bottom.

The hardest part was registering the chart with Ozi Explorer, since it didn't support Polar Coordinates.
After much experimenting, the Equidistant Conic (EQC) projection and the WGS 84 Map Datum gave the best results.

Here we have used seven known points on the chart to "force feed" the registration with Ozi.
For a fully registered DRG chart compatible with OziExplorer, get (THIS) file.

Now to place Sarah's waypoints and tracks on the map.

The trip starts at "EMBARK", (red), and then back to the Franz Josef Archipelago (magenta).


This is a more detailed view of the northern tracks

(Click on thumbnails below for larger sizes)
The first waypoint, WHALE-1
..........

BEAR-1
..........

..........
This fellow had a nice breakfast.








Layout and text by jack yeazel