Over in the Yukon, Stefan is making good progress finding the right dogs for our expedition. We're planning to pull together a team of 20 dogs to start our training, from a variety of Yukon-based kennels. We'll soon be posting photos and details of the individual dogs on this site. Stefan has also mapped out our route.

Lost Patrol 100 is a dogsledding expedition from Herschel Island in the Beaufort Sea to Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon Territory, a distance of roughly a thousand miles. It commemorates the centenary of the ‘Lost Patrol’, a group of four Royal North-West Mounted Police who, almost a hundred years ago, lost their way while mushing along this same route during a routine police patrol. In temperatures that dropped to minus 54C, they ran out of food, then ate their dogs one by one. The first three men starved to death. The fourth shot himself.

In February 2009, Polly Evans and Stefan Wackerhagen will travel by dogsled along the route of the Lost Patrol. Our journey will take us across the ice of the Arctic Ocean, past the camps and cabins where these desperate, emaciated men breathed their last, to their graves at Fort McPherson, and finally along their intended trail to Dawson. We’ll cross hundreds of miles of pristine wilderness, where jagged gems of hoar frost glisten on the spruce boughs and, at night, the northern lights weave green and red across the skies. No humans live in these parts; the forests and frozen rivers are patrolled instead by wolves, moose and caribou. As we travel, we will attempt to solve a mystery that has for the last century lain buried beneath the Arctic snows: just why did these experienced outdoorsmen lose the trail and die?

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