When we decided in February to postpone Nansen2020 to next year, things were looking good for us. We had a 10-day training expedition to Norway coming up, and we had 18 months to assemble our team again and fundraise. We were confident the unfortunate delay would be to our favour in the end. But as we all experienced soon after, life doesn’t quite stick to plans. Since COVID hit Europe in early March, we’ve been sitting and waiting for the situation to develop. We hoped that we would be able to travel again by summer, which would still allow us enough time to organise a trip for next year. Unfortunately, infection numbers are rising again in Europe, and it is becoming clear now, that COVID will likely stay with us for the coming autumn and winter and that the European nations won’t open their borders quickly again. So we were facing the question if we can actually make a Greenland crossing in 2021 under these circumstances. Sadly, our answer is “No”.
Today, we regret to announce that we will be postponing our Nansen2020 expedition for a year until 2021. We have already touched base with all our expedition partners and are grateful that all our collaborations and the expedition concept will remain in place for next year as well.
It has been quite a while since you’ve heard from us on our blog. For the past few months, we have been working behind the scenes on our next big thing. We are going to cross Greenland without resupplies and using only human power, following the original Nansen route in 2020. You can find all the details of that expedition at nansen2020.org. Now where our Hardangervidda trip was basically just Lauren and me flying to Norway to ski for a bit, this one is going to be a proper big expedition. We are putting a team together, working with various research partners, and raising money for charity with the trip. In other words, this is going to be a lot more organising work than our Norway expedition. But how do you get something like this off the ground?