Trial by ICE – What it Takes to be an Arctic/ Antarctic Explorer
The Amazing Story of the First All-Women North Pole Expedition
Answering an ad in a newspaper, 20 amateur explorers attempted to ski from Arctic Canada to the top of the world
The frigid landscape of the North Pole is a stark and dangerous environment. There is no land underneath the rugged terrain on the geographic top of the world; it's all ice interspersed with frequent stretches of deadly cold water. This treacherous environment has long tempted explorers—from Robert Peary and Matthew Henson’s first trip in 1909 to Will Steger’s unsupported dog sled trip in 1986.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of the most epic but least known adventures: the first all-women relay expedition to the North Pole. ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 podcast recounts the inspirational and harrowing story of how 20 amateur women from the U.K. came together to undertake one of the most challenging expeditions on Earth.
The idea for the trip was "hatched on a whim," reporter and producer Rose Eveleth explains in the podcast. In June 1995, film financier Caroline Hamilton was chatting with her friend's boyfriend Pen Hadow, who was a polar explorer. She listened to his description of skiing to the North Pole and was inspired. "I thought, if he could do it so can I," she tells Rose.
The problem was that mounting an expedition was expensive. In Hadow's estimation the venture would cost roughly half a million dollars. So the duo came up with a plan to drum up publicity and sponsorship cash: Hamilton would organize the first all-women expedition to the North Pole. She wasn't just looking for super-elite outdoorswomen. Instead, she would open the expedition up to any woman who was fit enough to participate.
A few months later, a noticed appeared in the classified ads of The Telegraph:
"Applications are invited from women of any age, background and occupation, but they will have to prove fitness and commitment. They will have to put up with real pain and discomfort. They will wonder every ten steps what they are doing but they have the opportunity in an epic endeavor.”
That ad attracted 200 applications—and 60 those women showed up in the remote moorlands of Dartmoor National Park for two rounds of grueling tryouts. The group was whittled down to 20 amateur adventurers. Among the lot there was Ann Daniels, a former bank clerk and mother of young triplets; Sue Riches, a breast cancer survivor; Victoria Humphries, Sue Riche's daughter who joined not knowing of her mother's participation; and Matty McNair, one of two polar guides who would lead the group of amateurs to the top of the world.
The team was divided into five groups of four adventurers, each of which would tackle one leg of the 416-mile slog over the ice from Arctic Canada to the Pole, pulling their gear behind them on sledges. Facing temperatures of almost -50 degrees Fahrenheit, blasting winds and ever-changing ice, which could (and occasionally did) crumble into open water at any minute, the women carried on.
The challenges were deadly. On several occasions the plucky but inexperienced explorers came close to freezing to death. And though we won’t spoil the conclusion to the podcast, know that the trip not only challenged the minds and bodies of the women, it also reshaped the course of many their lives. Some of the participants continued on to trek to the South Pole and to relive the venture to the North Pole.
In the end, the story is a little bittersweet. It's unlikely that there will be any similar expeditions up North any time soon—if ever. In recent years, melting sea ice has made human-powered trips to the pole extremely treacherous. Every year, the ice has grown thinner and less stable. But perhaps these amazing women's sacrifices and spirit of adventure can inspire people in the fight to protect our breathtaking but delicate environment.
Trial by ice – what it takes to be an Arctic/ Antarctic Explorer
From Bank Clerk to Arctic Explorer.
The Arctic survey team is off to the north pole, for training. They face exhaustion, numbing cold – and hungry polar bears
• The Arctic team brave polar bears to monitor acid oceans
'Nothing prepares you for the cold' . . . the The Arctic Survey team last year.
Six am on a sub-zero morning in Devon. A five-mile run in the dark, ending in a couple of hill sprints. Breakfast. Circuit training in the barn; beyond any pain threshold to physical exhaustion. Lunch. Ninety minutes dragging weighted tires up and down a 1:6 hill. The only upside is that the mud has frozen over. It's mindless, repetitive, punishing effort, not improved by an ex-marine drill sargent shouting in your ear. Tea. A three-mile run, followed by more circuits. Die. It's an environment that is. unforgiving. Die!
One day of this – well, most of it. OK then, half, and I'm shattered. For Ann D., Martin H. and Charlie P., the three members of the second 'The Arctic Survey Team' into the effects of climate change, whose latest trip to the north pole was announced yesterday, it's day six of a week-long bootcamp, by NSF. I'm just thankful to have avoided the 15-mile run across Dartmoor that entailed wading waist-deep through ice-cold rivers. B-R-R-R-R-R-RR...
You can't pull a 120kg (265 lb) sled over pressure ridges for 12 hours a day for 60 days if you're not fit. And if the three weren't polar fit when they started this camp, they certainly will be by the end. Yet fitness is just a small part of the package. Anyone – even me – could probably get fit enough if we were prepared to put the hours in, but few of us would last a day out on the ice.
Daniels is one of the world's leading polar explorers, the first woman – along with teammate Caroline H. – to reach both the north and south poles as part of all-women teams, and she readily admits there are many people out there who are a great deal fitter than her – "I'm 45 now, (45 is the new 35) for God's sake." Yet when it comes to endurance and sheer willpower, she's in a league of her own.
"You can train all you like," she says, "but nothing prepares you for the cold. On a good day it can be minus 15, on a bad day minus 45; factor in the wind chill and it can feel more like minus 70. The cold penetrates your bones and never leaves. Even when you're in your tent at night there's no respite. It's with you the whole time; you just have to try and shut it out. You can't always do it, especially towards the end of an expedition when you're exhausted."
It's the cold Hartley and Paton fear most too. They are also polar veterans and know exactly what's coming. "I'd done a lot of climbing in the Himalayas and I thought I knew all about cold," says Hartley, the expedition photographer. "But I was hopelessly unprepared the first time I went to Resolute [the settlement in the north of Canada that is the start point for Arctic exploration]. My equipment was totally inadequate and I would have died if someone hadn't lent me some warmer clothes. (When working for a company we're provided with about $2,500 + worth of extreme cold weather gear.)
"The first few weeks are bearable but once you start to get frostbite, the cold can start to affect your judgment, especially when you're living in such close proximity to other people."
British polar exploration is sometimes seen as the stamping ground of the upper-class adventurer, an image perpetuated in recent years by the successes of Sir Ranulph F. and Pen H., the director of The Arctic Survey. Daniels, Hartley and Paton don't fit the stereotype.
Daniels was a teller come bank manager's assistant until 1996 when she heard a radio advert asking for ordinary women wanting to go to the north pole; Hartley spent seven years as a studio special effects photographer before going freelance; after joining some polar trips with the marines, Paton worked out that serving in Afghanistan was a great deal riskier than a melting ice-cap at the roof of the world. For all of them – Fiennes and Hardow included – it is a full-time, professional career.
"It's not the type of job you get told about at school," Hartley says. "I started by funding myself to join expeditions to the Himalayas and the Pamirs and selling the pictures. Pen H. approached me at a talk I was giving and said, 'You must come north with me one day.' I thought he was trying to pull me and invite me to his country home. Since then I've been on something like at least 22 assignments to the Arctic and Antarctic.
"You do have to be quite selfish to do this kind of work. The expedition comes first and I forget about home life and relationships for its duration. Basically, you need to be not nearly as nice as you would like to be."
Unless you're lucky enough to have the clout to attract the sponsorship money and fix up your own gigs, your average explorer has to take the jobs that are going. You might be joining a team on a new route; you might be guiding amateurs who fork out £20,000 to be airlifted 60 miles from the pole and escorted in on foot. Or you could, like the team, become scientists for the trip – something that is more controversial than it sounds.
There's a long tradition of science in the polar regions. It's the ideal environment for everything from oceanography, astrophysics, meteorology and glaciolology to all things climate change and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has been a base for scientists for more than 50 years. But the demarcation lines have always been firmly engraved in the ice. Scientists do science: explorers explore.
Hadow crossed the divide with the first The Arctic Survey last year, when his team became the first to measure ice-thickness en route to the pole – a more critical determinant than surface area of the speed at which the ice-cap is melting. Some scientists and climate change skeptics went to great lengths to rubbish their findings that the ice-cap was melting faster than previous projections had suggested, pointing to weaknesses in methodology and ridiculing equipment failures. But the survey is back again this year to continue where they left off.It sounds as if it should be a no-brainer. If you're doing science, take a scientist. It is, until you consider the conditions up north. The south pole is on a flat, frozen land mass. You can fly in directly, snuggle down in the warmth of the base and get on with your experiments. The Arctic is rather different. It is an un-mappable ocean of ice that is constantly on the move, breaking up, melting and re-forming. You can't go anywhere and expect to stay in one place. Sometimes you can only go backwards. The ice is often crushed into giant pressure ridges that take hours to cross when pulling a heavy sled and a day's hard labor can see you further away from your goal than when you started if the ice flow is against you.
It's not the sort of environment in which scientists operate. If you're measuring ice thickness and water samples, you really want to be able to go back to the same place year after year; you can't do that if the ice is constantly on the move.
"The alternative is doing nothing," says Daniels. "And that's not an option where climate change is concerned. So the expedition's goal is to take samples every day on the trek towards the pole. Charlie will be drilling through the ice to take two water samples – one at the surface and one at a depth of 10m. Some samples will be filtered for microbes, and some will be frozen to have its CO2 content analysed. It will be back-breaking work after lugging a sled for 12 hours."
Hartley will be there to record every-thing; the landscape, the water, the science. "We have a responsibility to document the Arctic ocean in summer," he says. "I've been there many times over the last few years and the ice is melting. It's a fact. It could even disappear completely in my lifetime."
The expedition comes with its own health warning. Ice floes calve, people get injured and rescue isn't always possible if a plane can't land. And then there are the polar bears.
Back at the bootcamp, two marines give us a demonstration in unarmed combat. It's all quite handy for a night out in Streatham, but not much use if a polar bear is heading your way. Even if it doesn't have a knife. So what do you do if a bear comes sneaking up on you from behind a pressure ridge?
For the first and only time, the explorers look nervous. They can see the story. Climate change explorers shoot polar bear. "Um, you would fire the gun above its head to scare it off," says Daniels eventually. And if that doesn't work? "Look," Hartley laughs. "There's no such thing as a small polar bear." Fine. So the bear gets it.
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