A funny old day today: we woke up to beaming sunshine and not a breath of wind, but by the time we were taking the tent down the breeze had piped up and the sky was turning a flat grey.

Within an hour we were travelling through complete whiteout into a headwind that was painful enough to necessitate goggles and face masks (always claustrophobic and joyless) and just to up the misery factor, the surface today was fresh snow that offered more in the way of glue than glide. The sleds seemed as heavy as they were two weeks ago, and we strained at crazy angles into our harnesses.

The sun reappeared after a couple of hours and seemed to burn away most of the cloud, the wind died down and we found ourselves sweating as we clawed our way over the sticky surface, undoing our jackets and swapping full-on balaclavas for skimpy windproof headbands. The wind wheeled idly around for the rest of the day, puffing at us from every point of the compass but never giving us much bother, and it's been snowing all day, like fine dust.

Other than the weather, there's not a great deal to report. We saw no scenery at all to speak of, and other than both being grumpy at the weather and our recalcitrant heavy sleds, Tarka and I are both fine.

Tarka does have one question to ask the world though, which is why our noses run so much in the cold. They've been dripping like broken taps since we got here. Any ideas?