I was featured in the Telegraph last weekend and something about the article riled me, though it took me a few days to figure out exactly which bit had put my nose out of joint. Turns out it was something Falcon Scott (Captain Scott's grandson) said: "It's a lot easier to do than in my grandfather's day."
And it's not just Falcon. Everyone says much the same thing. Including me, up until a week ago. It's a no-brainer, surely: in Scott's era you sailed to Antarctica in a leaky wooden ship and got scurvy en route, nowadays my buddy Patrick Woodhead will fly you and your friends there in a Gulfstream private jet, and you'll be met by a private chef when you land.
During Douglas Mawson's four-month Antarctic expedition in 1912, his two team mates died, the soles of his feet fell off (due to vitamin A poisoning from eating the livers of his dogs after they died as well), he tied the skin on again with bandages and walked alone for another four weeks before reaching his base camp (where he was welcomed with the words, "My God! Which one are you?"). They didn't sail home until the next year.
By contrast, 21st-century Antarctic explorers, if the ghost-written books and five-part documentaries are to be believed, consist largely of tearful TV celebs trailed by film crews in pick-up trucks and complaining about blisters. Clearly we've gone soft. Clearly the Golden Age is over. Adventurepreneurs? Luxpeditions? Glamping? Pass me the puke bucket.
But wait. Hold. Your. Horses. The platitudes about polar expeditions being easier nowadays make about as much sense, it strikes me, as saying that surfing is easier now than it was a century ago. Or skiing, or climbing, or sailing round Cape Horn, or driving a racing car, or any one of a million pursuits. Duke Kahanamoku surfed in Shackleton's heyday on a wooden board that weighed 52kg, and it would have taken months to travel by ship from London to Hawaii, yet it's clear that today's surfers (and skiers, climbers, sailors, racing drivers et al.) are pushing limits that would have been utterly unattainable to those of 90 years ago, and the same is true of polar expeditions – travelling solo would have been unthinkable, as would swimming across areas of open water, or hauling 180kg (the start weight of my sled in 2004 – in contrast Captain Scott's team pulled 200lbs, or 91kg each).
The polar regions are infinitely more accessible than they were a hundred years ago, but I would argue that the toughest polar expeditions are getting more challenging, not less so. To bolster my case, I'll leave you with some images and video that left me boggle-eyed with the screaming abdabs recently: Mike Horn and Børge Ousland swimming across leads in the dark (in the bloody dark!) during their unsupported winter expedition to the North Pole in 2006.
Here's to those who are still quietly chipping away at the edges of impossibility.
I was stunned to hear on the news a few minutes ago that the 21-years-old British adventurer Rob Gauntlett has been killed in an avalanche in the Alps. Rob was the youngest Briton to climb Everest (at 19), and he and James Hooper pulled off a huge expedition between the Magnetic Poles that finished a year ago. There's more on the BBC News.
I met Rob at a charity event in London late last year and was struck by how personable and self-effacing he was. His passing has come as a huge shock.
I was interested to read a PDF of advice published by the team behind the South Pole Race (a 430-nautical mile race part-way from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole scheduled to start later this year) that advocates eating every two-and-a-half hours while hauling a pulk.
I might be letting slip one of my secret weapons here, but the longest I'll go on an expedition without eating is 90 minutes. I was taking in 260 calories per hour (predominantly carbohydrate) on my North Pole speed record attempt this spring and I've never felt stronger – or travelled faster – on a polar expedition. There's some great background on this approach in Steve Born's excellent piece, Proper Caloric Intake During Endurance Exercise.
I'll post something slightly less geeky later today.
Kenton Cool and Rob Casserley, arguably two of the world's best Everest guides (Kenton summited twice in a week last year) are giving a talk on "the modern face of Mount Everest… a one-off insight into the world of professional guiding" at the Royal Geographical Society in London next Tuesday evening (October 21st).
You can book tickets through World Expeditions or pay on the door, and if you're into high-altitude tales of derring-do tempered with a level of self-effacement that verges on the absurd, you'd be daft to miss it.
Explorer's Arctic quest pole-axed
A British explorer who plans to trek to the North Pole to measure its melting ice cap has been criticised… Pen Hadow was accused by Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas of using the quest for the sake of an adventure. "Exploration of the Arctic should not be seen as a glamorous adventure but rather needs to be serious and co-ordinated scientific effort".
I find Lucas's argument baffling: the world desperately needs more field scientists, and if we're to have a hope of engaging a generation that are less in touch with nature than ever before, then I can't see how making exploration look more boring is going to help. In a world full of vapid celebrity, footballer's wives and pop stars staggering out of rehab, a glamourous and inspiring spokesperson or two is just what climate science needs right now.
The first surface crossing of Antarctica via the South Pole, the 1955–58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition was a camping trip of epic proportions, with government funding from four countries, the Queen as patron, a leader that came home to a knighthood, a ton of corporate sponsorship, and ships, planes, huskies, sno-cats, tractors and skidoos. I'd read The Crossing of Antarctica, Sir Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary's account of the expedition, but I didn't realise there was a film of the trip until I unearthed it on YouTube this morning.
[This is part one of five, the rest are here: 2, 3, 4, 5.]
The films were painstakingly digitised and uploaded by Simon Coggins, who works for the British Antarctic Survey, and first came across the original cine film reels while over-wintering at Halley Research Station.
"Halley has a great selection of old 8mm cine film reels, with the best of the bunch being a 50 minute colour documentary of the 1955-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It usually gets a few showings a year and the quality is starting to fade, so during my first winter Mark Maltby recorded it to a digital format by projecting the reel onto the darkroom wall then recording it with his digital video camera. The results were surprisingly good so I made sure I took a copy back home with me."
I had an email yesterday from Adam Munthe, just back from his Finnmark 2007 Expedition, a 1,500km dog sled journey through Arctic Finnmark (the northernmost county in Norway) from the Barents sea to the Atlantic. I hope he won't mind me reproducing a paragraph of it, but the last sentence really struck a chord with me this morning:
"Finally, it must be said the trip was astonishing and magical. We had our ups and downs, our bumps and disagreements. I broke two ribs three days out, and a finger two days later, but we survived, and felt blessed! It reminded me again that we all need to be stretched inside and out, and that pettiness (which we all indulge in) is eliminated through challenge, danger I suppose, and proximity to a palpable reality."
"My father died when I was one. I was raised by a Black woman in Harlem who had no resources except a determination to not let anything stop her from being a role model of a value system that held high respect for one’s parents and other adults. When I reflect, these where hard times, yet we never felt poor. I believe mental poverty is a self affected condition that feeds upon it self. If I have emerged as person of some merit then I am indebted to my mother who paved a very rough road to enable me to have a better journey in life."
I'm 63 years old. I'm terrified of heights. I've had a double heart bypass. This March I will be climbing the North Face of the Eiger. Why? Well, I've been an explorer for more than 25 years, but this is my challenge of a lifetime. The North Face is 6,000ft of vertical rock and ice. It's claimed the lives of 50 climbers since the first ascent in 1938 and is notorious for rockfalls, avalanches and unstable weather.
Wowser. I'm not sure how this expedition passed me by, especially as Tony and I were in Greenland that year, but it's something very special indeed: in July 2005, three young Norwegians, Niklas Norman, Trygve Nakling Kristiansen and Carl Gustav Rye Florence kite-skied from the south coast of Greenland (Narsaq) to the north (Qaanaaq) in an amazing 21 days. That's a total distance of 2,300km. Their average speed for the last nine days of the expedition was an incredible 210km/day, with their best day being a world record distance of 442.7 km in 24 hours.
The contrast with my next expedition, SOUTH, couldn't be more marked. Tony Haile and I are setting out to walk 600km further than this expedition, and we're expecting it to take us three months longer than it took these guys to cross Greenland using kites.
The video is a great example of how proficient people (Norwegians especially!) are getting at using traction kites to haul sledges over huge distances in polar conditions. A lot of people ask whey we're not using kites in Antarctica this year (SOUTH will be an entirely human-powered expedition, and if we're successful, the longest unsupported polar journey in history).
The answer is that kiting hasn't even entered our minds. The two disciplines of 'manhauling' and kite-skiing are now so far removed from each other that you might as well ask an Olympic rower why they don't windsurf, or why a marathon runner doesn't use inline skates. Walking when we could be using kites might sound foolhardy to some, and the idea of expeditions aimed at athletic rather than academic endeavour certainly seems anathema to many. I was encouraged, therefore, to read that Fridtjof Nansen described his brand of polar expedition (he was the first to pioneer small ski teams pulling lightweight sleds, more than 100 years ago) as "the sportsman's method".
That's not to say that kiting hasn't entered my mind for future expeditions, and this video has certainly set a few ideas bubbling away… Well done Niklas, Trygve and Carl Gustav!
A friend of mine, Oliver Steeds, is giving a talk at the Royal Geographical Society (in London) on Wednesday evening about a recent expedition to West Papua where he lived with one of the last remaining tribes to practice cannibalism(!) I'll be there with a few friends and if you're in London, it sounds like a fascinating evening.
The traditional hunter-gatherer way of life of the Kombai has changed little for thousands of years – tools are made from stone, families live in tree houses, men wear penis gourds and women grass skirts. Tribal conflict is on-going. Spirits infuse the world of the Kombai. When sorcery and witchcraft were suspected, the accused would be killed, then eaten. Members of the Kombai family involved took part in such revenge killings. It is just 25 years since a Dutch Missionary made first contact, and today only 4000 Kombai survive. But for how long? Their traditional way of life is severely threatened.
There's more info and a link to buy tickets online (£12) at the iNomad website. I've been assured you can also pay on the door. The talk starts at 7pm.
And it's not just Falcon. Everyone says much the same thing. Including me, up until a week ago. It's a no-brainer, surely: in Scott's era you sailed to Antarctica in a leaky wooden ship and got scurvy en route, nowadays my buddy Patrick Woodhead will fly you and your friends there in a Gulfstream private jet, and you'll be met by a private chef when you land.
