Expedition leader Matty McNair had just reached the other size of a lead, a crack in the ice, that had frozen over.

"I had got across and by the time I came back to help the water had opened up," she recalled.

"Once the pressure was released what had been solid five minutes before suddenly was loose pieces of ice floating around."

Three people wearing skis, harnessed to sleds carrying their gear were suddenly swimming for their lives in the frigid Arctic Ocean water. The travellers managed to scramble to safety. Amazingly, none suffered frostbite or hypothermia.

That night McNair returned to the crack, built ice bridges, and retrieved all of the equipment left in the water, except for three ski poles.

It was the most frightening episode of the 74-day journey from the northern tip of Ellesmere Island to the geographic North Pole, some 416 nautical miles.

The women reached their goal May 26, Denise Martin's birthday. Martin assisted McNair on the trip, helping to guide four teams of British women who did the journey in relays.

Both women are residents of Iqaluit. McNair and her husband operate Northwinds Arctic Adventures, which helped organize the trip.

Martin now stands as the first, and only, Canadian woman to ski to the pole. (Though a long-time resident of the North, McNair still holds U.S. citizenship.)

"That was the beginning of a whole nightmare time of being on ice that was constantly shifting and churning," said McNair of the sudden opening of the lead.

"We would start to go across a lead and I would check to make sure it was OK, and somebody would say, 'Look it's moving!' and I would dash off the lead, and sure enough, car-sized chunks of ice would be moving and it would suddenly become a moving river of ice.

"We'd be halfway across a pressure ridge and it would start moving and groaning. It sounded like freight trains slamming into each other."

Even when the ice seemed as stable as tundra it was moving. Much of the effort in the journey was cancelled out by the drift of the polar cap.

"One night, after nine hours of hauling and working very hard, it was very disheartening to see we had actually set up camp further south and east than we had the night before," said McNair.

At the end of the journey there was no landmark, no mark on the bleak arctic landscape that their quest had ended.

The team had to rely on their GPS to determine they had reached their goal.

"We got there at 10:45 at night," said McNair. "We had been going for 12 hours, so we almost forgot to be excited about it."

Nature had the last word. The team was left to get by on half rations, then quarter rations, when bad weather kept them waiting for a week, on top of the planet, for the plane that would take them south, the only direction there is to go from there.