​Meet the Couple Who Just Spent 120 Days Traveling Through the Arctic on a Dogsled

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

One hundred and twenty-six days ago, Sarah McNair-Landry and Erik Boomer set out on a quest to circumnavigate Baffin Island by dog team. Earlier this week, the pair returned to their starting point, Sarah's hometown of Iqaluit, Nunavut. All told, they spent 120 days outside, on the land, completely exposed to the ever-changing conditions of the Canadian Arctic.

I first met McNair-Landry and Boomer (as he is called in these parts) just over a year ago as they were in the planning stages of Yurt Fest, Iqaluit's own frozen version of Burning Man, which thanks to VICE, featured Rich Kidd performing on a stage made of ice. Friendly and unassuming, the duo's casual demeanor masked their accomplishments as extreme adventurists—McNair-Landry, the youngest woman to reach both the North and South Poles, and Boomer, a professional kayaker and nominee for National Geographic's Adventurer of the Year. And, oh yeah, did I mention that they're in love? Talk about a power couple.

Soon after their return to Iqaluit, I joined McNair-Landry and Boomer for a waffle breakfast. At the table with us was Matty McNair, mother to Sarah, polar explorer and guide, and half the inspiration behind their lengthy dogsled trip. As they told VICE prior to embarking, the couple decided to recreate McNair-Landry's parents' Baffin Island circumnavigation on its 25th anniversary. As Boomer tended to the waffle iron and McNair-Landry brewed creamy coffees, we reviewed their trip to talk dogs, money, and love—with the occasional quip from Matty.

VICE: I imagine that 120 days traveling in the Arctic brought no shortage of challenges. What was the most difficult part of your trip?
Erik Boomer: One of the most difficult things was keeping the dogs interested and motivated, because they've got pretty much unlimited energy, but sometimes when they get bored and they start to slow down, they'll act like they don't have energy. And you start to wonder, man, is this really going to be possible? And then it takes just one thing to catch their interest. Whether it's garbage or—

Sarah McNair-Landry: Skidoo trail, some bird.

Boomer: We had to be cheerleaders all the time and continually figure out different ways to keep it interesting for them. Sometimes that meant taking a little puppy that was in heat and skiing in front, and they would just go as hard as you can imagine to catch up.

McNair-Landry: We're so dependent on [the dogs]. We can't push a sled around Baffin Island. We need the dogs to be happy, we need them to want to pull. You can't tell them, "Guys it's just three days and you get a meal! Just keep going!" But they don't know. For all they know, we're just going somewhere, and we'll never go back home. They don't have egos. They don't need to get into VICE. [laughs]

Boomer: Doesn't matter if there's a storm or what, they're just dicking around, ready to get into a fight or ready to go piss on something.

McNair-Landry: We just spent a lot of time talking about the dogs and how they're doing. The dogs, they're like your entire life. Keeping them happy is a big thing. It was a lot more strategy and a lot more guessing, too. And hoping.

Clearly this wasn't an easy trip by any means, but were there any really dangerous moments, a time where you feared the worst?
Boomer: We got a message from Willie, the other organizer of Yurt Fest. He said, "Big storm coming your way. Build snow walls. 90 km/h storm." We were about four days into the trip and we'd just made it up to this really high plateau on our way to Pangnirtung. This plateau is really notorious because it's so much higher than Iqaluit, so it's always about ten to 15 degrees colder and winder. Iqaluit was experiencing solid -40 with 70-90 km winds, so we had at least -40 to 70-90 k winds, probably more. The dogs started to not want to run into these huge winds, so I went up to motivate them and point them in the right direction. The dogs decided they wanted to turn around and go back down the hill, but as they did that, the lines looped around Sarah's foot, and then they bolted down the hill. They had a ton of energy and so much power and the sled was really heavy and downhill was really fast. Sarah was dragging and getting sucked underneath the sled until the sled was literally on top of her leg going down the hill.

The first thing I did was I ran to her to try to get the sled off of her leg, and I lost my glove trying to unclip her bindings. As I picked up the sled, that made the dogs pull back harder because when there's resistance, they pull harder. That just made it worse.

McNair-Landry: It properly got the sled on top of me.

Boomer: Sarah was just yelling, "Put the dogs down, put the dogs down!" and I had to pull my ski off with a bare hand and use my ski to tell them sit down, sit down, sit down. Once they were all sat down, Sarah was able to get out from the sled. And at that point I realized that my hand was really cold. It was definitely the coldest I'd ever got. If we're counting windchill, I'm sure it was -70 Celsius.

McNair-Landry: I was being dragged backwards, too, so I couldn't see. If a rock comes, I couldn't see what was coming. I was like, "I'm going to break my leg. I'm going to bust my knee right now." On day four!

Boomer: By the time the situation ended, we had zero visibility. If the team had just bolted off or say we'd both fallen down, we wouldn't be able to find them. You lose visibility at about 20 yards.

McNair-Landry: It does make you realize that it's great to have all those communication tools, but if you lose your sled, there's your mothership. There's your tent, your phone, and everything. And it's great that you have a phone, but nobody can come and get you during the storm. You're on your own.

Sarah, you've done a slew of polar expeditions since you were a teen. In terms of extreme travel, how would this trip rank?
They're all extreme in their ways, you know? They're all different, what you're dealing with. And the dangers are different. This one definitely had a lot of them combined. Like, Antarctica has crevasses, but you have no open water, you have no rocks, you have no hills. This one, you definitely have exposure and cold, just as cold as a lot of other winter trips. Nobody travels in February and there's a good reason for it.

Boomer: As far as difficulty, too, it seemed to me that what made this trip difficult on top of all those other challenges was just the sheer mileage. This one was 4,000 kilometers [2,500 miles]. The Northwest Passage is only 3,500 kilometers [2,200 miles], so this was longer than crossing the top of the continent. It was really long.

After visiting all the hamlets on Baffin Island, which community would you say made the strongest impression on you?
McNair-Landry: They all have their little highlights. Pond Inlet was definitely one that stands out. It was just so beautiful with Bylot Island and the mountains, and it was sunny and a beautiful day. We travelled up the coast with a friend from Clyde River. He had to get his dogs up there anyway to run the Nunavut Quest, and he dogsledded up with us. It was super welcoming and warm. People were really into the dogs. You know how it is in the north—a lot of people are scared of the dogs, but there I felt like there was a big dogsledding culture. There were a lot of other dog teams around.

Boomer: Pond was pretty awesome, and the next one for me that I thought was up there is Arctic Bay. There was an elder [named Qappik Attgutsik] that we met that is 94 and lived in this little shack heated by qulliqs.

McNair-Landry: Somebody told us we should go down and meet her, but she doesn't speak English. Then this kid came down and wanted to help us feed our dogs, so he helped us cut seal. He was maybe ten or something.

Boomer: You ask him, "What's your favorite thing to do?" "Helping elders." Just a genuine, nice little kid.

McNair-Landry: We asked him if he knew [Qappik] and he said yeah so he came over and helped translate.

You're not only extreme adventurists—you're also in a romantic relationship. How did you guys meet and start dating?
We met in Oregon. I was going down to kitesurf. I would spend my summers down there. I met Boomer on a kite beach.

Boomer: Sarah decided that it was a good day to get a bottle of tequila, so really we probably owe that bottle of tequila to us meeting. And she didn't know my first name was Erik for at least a month. And Sarah's mom is right over there eavesdropping on this conversation.

McNair-Landry: Maybe I'll tell you the real story when my mom leaves.

Matty McNair: I know it, because I was supposed to meet you at a restaurant and you friggin' never turned up! Where was she? She was romancing in Hawaii.

McNair-Landry: $300 round trip! How could you not go to Hawaii? My friend found tickets for like $250 return to Hawaii leaving the next morning at 6 AM, so we're like, sweet, who should we invite? So we just invited a bunch of people and we invited Boomer.

Boomer: I checked my bank account and I had $400 in my bank account so I was like, Sweet, I can do that.

McNair-Landry: We packed up some kites at midnight, drove to Portland, got on the plane, and went to Hawaii for five days to kite.

Boomer: The day I got back I hopped in a car full of my friends we drove north to this crazy river in Alaska. I'd known Sara that one tequila night, which I didn't remember very much, and then those few days in Hawaii, but I just had a feeling that I'd be hanging out with her again. I think the next thing we did, was Sarah had a little bit of time before North Pole trip and wanted to do something different. So we looked up a company that taught paragliding in Utah, and we wrote them a letter and said hey we want to take pictures and write some stories if we can do a paragliding lessons, and see if we could get a deal so we could afford it. So we learned how to paraglide for a week and did photos and videos for that company. That's kind of how every date would go.

So Sarah was going back and forth from the North Pole, Boomer was a professional kayaker. Do you think you could date someone who doesn't do these things?
I could and I have, but it didn't make me very happy. This relationship is a lot easier for me, because Sarah understands how I feel about these adventures and putting it on the line and really just making adventure a priority. Looking at it like it's as important as a job or school or anything else. She totally supports me to go do all those things. and because of that, I also realize how important it is to her and I totally support her in that. And it's really double awesome when we get to go do the same thing. In other relationships I've felt like I've had something pulling me back. There was this struggle between life out there and life back home, and with this [relationship] I just feel untethered to do whatever I really, really want to do.

McNair-Landry: Good answer.

Sarah, do you feel the same way?
Boomer: Sarah doesn't think that deeply.

Most couples have trouble getting along on a one-week holiday to Europe. How did you manage to get through four months of being together 24 hours a day, on the land, in such challenging circumstances?
I kind of prefer it. I enjoy the time out there with Sarah more than right now [laughs].

McNair-Landry: I think a lot of people are in a relationship and they work and then they see each other at night. From the beginning, because Boomer lives on the West Coast and I'm up in Baffin in the middle of nowhere, it's always been that when we see each other, we do something together.

Boomer: We'd go from not seeing each for a month or two to, Let's do two weeks on this river trip.

McNair-Landry: We're either together, and when we're together, we're together all the time, or we're apart. When I did my Northwest Passage trip and he was in Ellesmere, we went six months without seeing each other because the expeditions overlapped. It's always been all or nothing.

Alright, you're home now with coffee and waffles and time. What about the dogs? What are they doing now?
They're on holidays. They're eating. Lots of fat and meat. They know they're home. As we got closer and closer, they started just running faster and faster and faster.

Boomer: I bet they miss the running right now, though.

McNair-Landry: And us.

Boomer: These dogs are people dogs. One of the main times that there's a little tension or maybe a dog fight is when they would catch up to the skier and all the dogs just surround you and they all want pets. The one in the back that's not getting it will start to get jealous. They all want to get petted and you can only pet one at a time. Pretty much all they wanted the whole four months was just some puppy love.

McNair-Landry: And to pee on stuff.

You can learn more about Sarah and Boomer's trip at wayofthenorth.com or on Facebook at Pittarak Expeditions. And be sure to follow Boomer on Instagram for more of his epic and inspiring photography.