We went from Morse Code, which we used extensively in the beginning, to the most highly advanced technical communications system ever used in any polar environment anywhere. And we succeeded. On my last trip with Terry Lloyd we made communications history by sending the first ever same day news report complete with video from Antarctica to ITN in London. Despite extreme conditions. This was the first ever Inmarsat B data transmission used to send our reports . . . We worked with many journalists and film crews over the years, and most were difficult to look after or very demanding. Or they just found the remoteness, the inaccessibility combined with the cold, just miserable. But our Terry [Lloyd] was great. Very demanding. Extremely difficult at times, and he really didn’t enjoy the cold, but in all this he was a laugh! His stories, his humour and his resolve were quite unique and a perfect fit for our team.
Flo Howell dealt with all the communications planning. He is separated from Morag now, and they remain on good terms.
Mike Stroud who, as previously, planned special ration packs for me, was interviewed by the Daily Express and explained: ‘When we walked across the Antarctic continent together, we both ended up losing more than three stone, despite eating 5,500 calories daily. Ran will start out this time eating 4,000 calories daily and slowly increase to 6,000 calories daily as his hunger mounts. We were burning 11,500 calories on many days. The question is: will he be strong enough in the last month or two to get there?’ Mike himself gave me only a 20 per cent chance of success.
I had two amphibious sledges made by Roger Daynes of Snowsled, Europe’s top sledge-maker, and began an ambitious fitness schedule in mid-1999, seven months before my Arctic start date. This went alongside a diet of half a pound of complex carbohydrates on top of my normal daily intake, usually pasta, brown rice or potatoes.
I ran over the moors for two hours every second day and entered numerous races. I aimed to do the 1999 London Marathon in 3 hours 30 minutes, and only missed out on this by 29 seconds. This was nonetheless an hour faster than my previous best. Then, with Steven Seaton, I paddled the 125-mile non-stop Devizes to Westminster canoe race in under twenty-six hours. In December Steven and I joined Britain’s top male and female adventure racers, Pete James and Sarah Odell, for the 300-mile Eco-Challenge race in Patagonia. At fifty-six, I was the oldest competitor among the fifty-five international teams and was twenty-three years older than my three team-mates. Steven, as was his wont, constantly referred to me as ‘the old man’. He still does. I got my own back every now and again, including during the seventy-eight-kilometre Swiss Alpine Marathon that year, which took us nine hours. His subsequent report on that race was disapproving:
We did the first downhill 30 kilometres in three hours. Then we started climbing. Ran isn’t great on climbs and struggled a bit, so I waited for him at the top of each climb. The final ascent topped out at 9,500 feet twelve kilometres from the finish and all downhill. Ran took off from the top and I didn’t see him again until I finished fifteen minutes behind him and a touch cheesed off that I’d waited for him on so many climbs, only to be run out on the final downhill stretch.
Nonetheless, we continued to team up for many races in various parts of Britain and around the world for many subsequent years.
Pete James, our leader on the 300-mile Patagonian Race, wrote for Trail magazine:
The race venue was the Nahuel Huapi National Park, snow-capped peaks, crystal clear lakes, deciduous forests, bamboo groves and dry pampas grassland. The race started with a 90 kilometre canoe paddle. Then horseback across land once owned by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, then two days of trekking with hours of climbing and traversing fixed rope. We slept as little as possible, perhaps two hours a night. We (Sarah, Steven, Ran and I) had spent months testing and acquiring the best equipment possible, training for at least five different activities (running, horse-riding, sea kayaking, white water canoeing and mountaineering), competing together in shorter races and safe, quick team movement.
One irony of such races is that you pass through the most incredible scenery whilst in a constant hurry, and sometimes in considerable pain and discomfort. We emerged from the bamboo on the morning of our seventh day in 14th place. A good result against a top class field.
I developed big blisters on the balls of both feet. By day five I could only hobble. But by New Year 2000 I felt quite fit. Despite various media innuendoes about my age, I had no qualms, having kept up with world-class athletes in their prime for eight days and nights.
Ginny drove me to Heathrow. A reporter from Woman and Home magazine that week asked the same old questions. ‘When he’s away,’ Ginny said, ‘I consciously stop if I catch myself worrying . . . I think of Ran as my very closest, dearest friend as well as my husband. It’s hell when he’s away and he’s a wonderful person to be with.’
Each time we parted for such journeys, I hated myself and knew I was guilty of hurting the person I loved most in the world. I was like some smoker, alkie or drug addict who knows he is doing wrong but is too addicted to stop.
Mac and I arrived at Resolute Bay on 5 February, not long after the sun had reappeared there for the first time in five months. Morag met us off the plane and assured us that she had a ski-plane booked to fly me the 600 miles north to uninhabited Ward Hunt Island, the last land before the Pole, from where Mike Stroud and I had made our first foray north in 1986. Meanwhile she had fixed us up with a warm hut with plenty of space to prepare the sledge gear. She drove us through driving snow at –42°C to meet my old friend, Karl Z’berg, the legendary Swiss bush pilot I had first met here some thirty years before. We drank thick Arctic coffee in a canteen where grizzled polar buffs had their own language. ‘Jafas with snotsicles’, for example, was a suitably derogatory term for the scientific denizen of such a place, jafa standing for Just Another Fucking Academic. A snotsicle, as you might more easily work out, is a long frozen thread of mucus suspended from its owner’s nose.
Karl clearly thought I should not set out until early March when the sun would first rise at the latitude of Ward Hunt Island. By my own reasoning that would be too late for me. There are two modes of Arctic Ocean manhauling: very fast or very slow. The Norwegians are the chief proponents of the Speedy Gonzales approach, with light equipment, medium-range calorific intake, superb fitness and, above all, the brilliant skiing technique that comes from cross-country ski-racing since childhood. Such technique becomes useless when towing very heavy sledge-loads, so they keep their loads manageable. At fifty-five I could not hope to reach the Pole in less than the fifty days, which is the sort of time Norwegians aim at. I would take at least eighty-five days and for safety would need ninety days of food. This alone would weigh 230 pounds, with fuel to melt ice to rehydrate it coming to another sixty pounds.
All additional gear – tent, sleep-bag, mat, cook kit, rope, axe, shovel, spare ski, spare clothes, repair kit, medical kit, camera, radio, lithium batteries, fluorescent marker poles, paddle, etc – would add up to another 160 pounds, too much for a single sledge travelling in Arctic rubble ice, so I had to use two sledges. When walking back along my trail to collect the second sledge, I would need a gun, and in the past had had a .45 magnum pistol on my belt. However, thanks to recent Canadian legislation hand guns were forbidden, so I now would have to lug a heavy shotgun back and forth. Altogether I would need to haul 510 pounds and relay two loads which meant every mile gained to the north would involve three travelled on the ground, with the additional hazard of white-outs. In such conditions the need to relay sledges involves a potentially lethal risk – once you have parked the first sledge and set off for your second load, you may never find it. At some point you will decide, because of the cold, to return to the first sledge. But it, too, may be impossible to find. You will then die from the cold.
I had no option but to take two sledges, so my schedule took the extra mileage into account. If I could travel north for ten hours every day for eighty days, with no rest day for injuries, bad weather or watery obstacle
s, my best progress would be 500 yards a day for the first three days, 1.4 miles daily for the next thirty days, 4.5 miles daily until day fifty-eight and then, with a single sledge only, eleven miles daily to the Pole.
Many unsupported treks towards the Pole have been scuppered by stretches of open water blocking the way north without temperatures low enough to refreeze the sea-water. To avoid such delays I had two buoyancy tubes designed by Snowsled that fastened to either side of my bigger sledge, making it buoyant even when fully laden with me sitting atop its load wielding a paddle. At Resolute Bay I spent a week testing equipment and hauling the sledges over ice-blocks on the sea-ice a mile from the self-catering hut Mac and I rented.
On 14 February we flew through an ever-darkening sky to the most northerly of Canada’s meteorological stations at Eureka, where musk oxen and wolves roam the hills around the airstrip. After refuelling Karl took the plane 300 miles north of Eureka to the edge of the Arctic Ocean and the conical hill at the north end of Ward Hunt Island, starting-point of most North Pole attempts. I threw a 1.4 million watt illuminating flare out of the window, giving Karl four minutes of light in which to spot and land on a flat 400 yards of drift-free snow. With lurching bumps we were down. It sounds simple, but very few pilots in the world could have managed it.
As the door opened I felt the cold of Latitude 84° North in winter. The sun would not show its face here for another three weeks, and then only for thirty minutes on its first twenty-four-hour appearance. Terry Lloyd and cameraman Rob Bowles, friends of so many expeditions, helped Mac unload my gear to the light of three moons. The two false moons, known as moon dogs, were the result of the true and central moon’s light being reflected by ice crystals. I shook hands with Karl and the others, gave Mac a note to send Ginny and watched as Karl applied full power. The Twin Otter lurched away in a storm of snow and ice crystals which would remain here as a local dense fog for many hours. I tugged on my dog harness, attached it to the sledge ropes and started to lug the first sledge northwards, not yet on sea-ice, but, for the first few miles over Ward Hunt ice-shelf, land-attached ice jutting out into the Arctic Ocean.
The Twin Otter’s lights disappeared, as did the drone of its engines. Silence but for my breath and the sound of my own heartbeat. On my hand compass I set a bearing to geographical north. The compass needle pointed to magnetic north 300 miles west of Resolute Bay and 600 miles south of my position. I had to set a magnetic lay-off of 98°, then wait a minute for the needle to settle in the less than normal viscosity of its alcohol-filled housing. I could not use the North Star as a marker because it was almost directly overhead. Nor, pulling a sledge, could I use my GPS position-finder for direction.
The clothing policy I had evolved over twenty-eight years of polar expeditions was based on non-stop movement and light, breathable clothes. Any halt, however brief, led quickly to hypothermia. Once my metabolism was up and running, pumping blood furiously to my extremities, I took off my duckdown duvet and stuffed it in the sledge next to my Thermos and 12-bore pump shotgun. Now I was wearing only a thin wickaway vest and long johns under a black jacket and trousers made of 100 per cent ventile cotton. Cotton is not windproof so body heat is not sealed in. Alas, no modern clothing is completely breathable so cotton is still in my opinion the best compromise for polar heavy manhaul travel.
My schedule allowed two days to descend the soft snowfields of Ward Hunt Island’s ice-shelf to the edge of the sea. But I kept going without a rest and established both sledges at the coastline within seven hours. This boded well, for the sledges were running easily despite their full loads, the low temperature and soft, deep snow.
Geoff Somers, an experienced polar man, had advised me to include a cantilever design in the sledge moulds. Snowsled had done so, and the result was good. After seven hours of hard man-hauling, I was cold and tired. I erected the tent in six minutes and started the cooker in four. These two acts, which I had practised thousands of times, are the key to survival, and with two usable hands can be performed easily in extreme temperatures, high winds and blizzards. I got into my sleeping bag, drank energy drink, ate chocolate and set my alarm watch for three hours. The weather was clear when I woke and the sea-ice quiet to the north, a sign that the ice-floes were not on the move.
The moon had vanished behind the hills so I would not be able to differentiate clearly between solid ice and thinly skinned zones, so the overall silence was a bonus. I re-stowed the big sledge, moving rapidly to keep my body core temperature up. I decided to take the smaller sledge first. Its load was 210 pounds, a third less than the eight-foot sledge. The ice-floes that are blown south against this northern coastline of the Canadian Archipelago often shatter against the ice-shelf, and blocks up to thirty-five feet high tumble over one another, often forming huge ramparts that run east-west for miles. Behind them a scene of utter chaos can meet the despairing manhauler, slab upon slab of fractured ice-block as far as the weary eye can see.
Travelling over the past twenty-five years our group had four times broken the current world record for unsupported travel towards the North Pole. Each time the ice conditions north of Ward Hunt Island were invariably bad to horrible. To my joy I saw that, this year, the previous condition of wall-to-wall ice blocks was broken down by a series of crazily laid out but negotiable lanes. The ice ‘defences’ were split everywhere by recent breakage. In many places, like the cauldrons of witches, thick black fog swirled above new cracks and pools as the ‘warmer’ water gave up its comparative heat to the supercool air above. This phenomenon is known as frost-smoke or sea-smoke. New ice-floes of twilight grey zigzagged through the stark black outlines of ice obstacles wherever I looked, a fragile highway to the North. My schedule of 500 yards a day for the first three miles from the start began to look pessimistic.
I pressed on over the fissure dividing land from sea and into a broad belt of rubble. One sledge at a time. I took my skis off. For a few hundred yards I would have to haul each sledge over a vista similar to that of post-war Berlin. Between each ice slab soft, deep snow covered the fissures. I often fell into traps, sinking waist-deep into pools of nilas slurry, that thin elastic ice crust, a dull grey in colour, which forms on calm sea-water and is easily bent by a wave or mere swell.
I came to a wall of slabs fifteen feet high and, to help haul the sledge over it, I decided to test the simple pulley system devised by Mac. I attached it to the big sledge, which I had hauled first to the wall, and tugged it jerkily up the forty-five-degree slope. With the 300-pound sledge at the top of the wall, I detached the tiny grapnel hook and rolled up the pulley line. Too late I heard movement, and leaped towards the sledge, which quickly gathered momentum in its slide over the edge of the wall. I managed to grab the rear end, but my 200-pound body weight was not enough. The far side of the wall was a sheer fifteen-foot drop on to sharp ice-blocks. I landed hard and was winded but unhurt.
At first the sledge appeared to be undamaged, but closer inspection revealed a thin tear under the bow, presumably where the sharp edge of the ice-block had made contact with the 300-pound falling sledge. I tried pulling the sledge, but snow lodged in the damaged section and dragging it became difficult. Also, the sledge’s hull, designed to be 100 per cent watertight, was compromised. There was no course but to head back to the hut on Ward Hunt Island and find suitable materials to effect a repair. In the mid-1980s we had erected a canvas cover over the steel skeleton of a hut long abandoned by scientists and installed a couple of wind-powered generators to provide electricity. With minimal safety gear in a bag, I skied for two hours back up my trail and via the Twin Otter’s landing strip about a mile east of the huts. The camp looked ghostly, unchanged over the twelve years since my last visit. After an hour spent digging out the door of our old hut, I gained entry. There were a few tools and canvas materials, so I decided to bring the sledge back to make it watertight and capable of being towed in all conditions. I skied back to the sledges and loaded minimal camping gear on to the smaller one. T
hen I lashed the damaged sledge on top. Uphill through soft snow was slow going, some several hours back to the hut.
I put my tent up inside the canvas-skinned hut. The temperature had fallen to –49°C and a bitter breeze caressed the frozen canvas. With the cooker on, a hot drink inside me and fully clothed, I began the repairs. Some hours later I was back at the ice edge, happy that my work had made the sledge easy to tow, even in soft snow, and pretty much watertight again.
I found my previous trail easily. I camped on thin ice and woke to hear all manner of noises: cracking and rumbling, then silence. Then a frightening roar that galvanised me into movement from the depths of my four-layer sleeping bag. The moon was full, the scenery startlingly beautiful. Moonshadows played about the upended ice-blocks and the ice shapes took on an uncanny resemblance to animals, castles or giant mushrooms. Fearful of imminent upheaval due to the tidal influence of the full moon, I pressed on northwards. I dared not take either sledge too far because the surface between the rubble fields consisted of very thin ice, through which my probing ski stick sometimes passed with ease into the dark waters below. After eight hours I had moved both sledges more than a mile to the north. My morale was high, for the sledges ran well whatever the surface, far better than any previous design. My mental arithmetic raced ahead and I estimated a Pole arrival in only seventy days.
I kept an eye open for a good campsite. Sea-ice grows at a rate of two to three feet a year. Ice-floes that survive intact for more than two years are easy to identify, for the broken blocks that litter their surfaces will be rounded off by two or more years of summer melt. Floes in this condition are known as multi-year floes. The wind and snow abraid them into hummocks. Such floes can be at least eight feet thick and are more likely to withstand great pressure from neighbouring floes. They can provide good landing strips for ski-planes. Above all, the surface snow will have had most of its original salt content leached away by the sun and so will provide good drinking water. Unfortunately, time passed without the appearance of any floe older than a few months. Indeed, the area began to show increasing signs of recent open water only partially refrozen. My ski stick frequently sank through the surface skin, forcing me to detour to safer ice.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 23