My Polar Dream

by Jade Hameister

  We had made it.

  It’s tradition to touch a rock on the coast when you arrive, so I detached from my sled, took off my skis, headed for the biggest boulder I could see and climbed up on top. When I turned to face the others, I threw my hands in the air and started laughing. We all hugged and celebrated. Eric called the pilot of the helicopter to make sure it was on its way. The pilot told us he’d be about 90 minutes.

  We had a mini debrief while waiting. Eric was now assured we were going to be fine in Antarctica – that I would lap it up, love it and nail it.

  I hoped so too, although it felt strange to already be talking about Antarctica when we’d only just finished Greenland.

  We walked up to the little wooden Isortoq Hut and took some photos, including one with our family’s Australian flag, which is a tradition on all our family adventures.

  We soon heard the approaching roar of a helicopter. It was quite little and red and, when its blades finally stopped, Tim, the pilot, climbed out. He took one look at the sleds and told us there was no way we’d fit everything in the chopper. What?! We spent an hour or so trying to solve the puzzle, but the pilot’s assessment was right.

  In the end, all the sleds had to stay behind with Eric and Heath to wait for a bigger helicopter, while Dad, myself and Fred took a small portion of our personal gear and flew out to Tasiilaq for our scheduled interviews for the Nat Geo documentary with local Inuit people the day after. A lot of work had gone into setting up this unique opportunity to listen to their perspective on global warming and I didn’t want to miss it.

  Nevertheless, it was really weird being separated from the rest of the team – for the last four weeks, we had only had each other. Now the transition back to the real world had begun.

  10

  THE BLUR BETWEEN

  It definitely wasn’t the sixteenth birthday I’d imagined. Back in Tasiilaq, we stayed in the only lodge in town. A shower was the best thing ever and it was a treat to have my own tiny bedroom and not to have to sleep in a tent with Dad for the first time in 27 days.

  In the morning, we raided the common kitchen at the lodge. All we could find was some stale cereal and warm milk. That was breakfast. Afterwards, Dad gave me some birthday cards from family back home and a little gift-wrapped present from him of a Coco Pops-flavoured lip balm, which he’d carried all the way across Greenland for my birthday.

  Thankfully, we were back in time to be able to finish this trip the way I’d hoped: with the time to interview some of the local Inuit people about their perspectives on climate change for the documentary being made for National Geographic. I felt very privileged to have these conversations.

  They told me that warmer weather is impacting on their traditional way of life as hunters – this part of their culture is slowly disappearing along with the ice – but in a lot of other ways it might be a positive (I wasn’t convinced they were feeling very positive about it, though). Warmer temperatures in Greenland mean the ice is retreating, revealing a wealth of underground resources that could be mined, and crops would be easier to grow. Mining and agriculture would also mean jobs for many of the locals who don’t have them currently.

  Later that day, Dad and I flew out to Reykjavik in Iceland, where we were planning to celebrate my birthday properly. Villa, who I had met on my trek to Everest Base Camp and who had inspired my polar journeys, was living in Reykjavik at the time and she’d just returned from summitting Everest. We met up with her at the Blue Lagoon, a man-made lagoon in a lava field. We had dinner at the restaurant there, then swam in the geothermal spas until about midnight, when the sun set. It was incredible, and Villa gave me a really beautiful necklace to wear and keep me safe on my South Pole expedition at the end of the year. It was barely six months away, and just a couple days after finishing Greenland, I was already eager to get started on our preparation.

  We arrived back in Melbourne and hit the ground running, despite jetlag. I had four days of media commitments before we were back on a plane to Washington DC for my second Nat Geo Explorers Festival.

  It was a huge couple of days at Nat Geo headquarters, where I networked with many people from Nat Geo and heard researchers and scientists speak about their recent discoveries and future projects. The theme of that year’s conference was Red Planet vs Blue Planet, and the discussion was focused on whether humans should be investing so much into trying to colonise other planets, like Mars, or whether we should be exploring Earth’s largely unexplored oceans. One speaker said the total budget for exploring Earth’s oceans each year is equivalent to the cost of just a one-way trip for one astronaut into outer space. I was amazed to hear that we know more about the moon’s surface than we do about the deepest parts of Earth’s oceans.

  For me, the highlight of the program was attending a session featuring the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic and a deep-sea explorer himself. From opposing sides, they discussed taking exploration in completely different directions – into space or into the oceans – to accommodate our exploding population growth.

  Another inspiring speaker we heard from was Bob Ballard, a retired US Navy officer, National Geographic Explorer and the person who found the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. He spends five months of the year exploring the oceans’ deepest points. His solution to saving the environment is one I’m also very passionate about: empowering women. He’s an advocate of microloans to women in third world countries, so they can create small businesses and offer something to their communities.

  I also took special interest in the discussion about Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, which is mostly covered by frozen fresh water. It also contains an underground ocean. Many believe it is our best chance of finding another habitable world in our solar system and by all means, there could be life there already. But the only way to find out for sure would be to send a spacecraft there. Enceladus’s surface temperature sits at around –200ºC, which is next level.

  By the time I returned to Melbourne, I had been away for almost two months, and Antarctica was already looming.

  Eric had told me he thought I was ready to take on this massive expedition, but I didn’t want to develop a big head and take the pressure off myself. We only had five months to go and I knew I still had a lot of work to do. Training for this trip would be similar to the previous two, however this trip would be a lot longer in distance and time, so we planned on doing some more longer-distance, endurance training sessions, such as dragging car tyres behind us (wearing our polar harnesses) on sandy beaches for hours without rest.

  It was to be the finale of the Polar Hat-Trick and my polar journey.

  THE

  SOUTH

  POLE

  EXPEDITION 3

  Destination: The South Pole

  Distance: 600 kilometres

  Duration: 37 days, December 2017-January 2018

  Goal: To ski a new route from the coast (Ross Ice Shelf) to the South Pole. To be the youngest person in history (male or female) to ski from the coast to the South Pole unsupported and unassisted

  Team: Me, Dad, Eric, cameraman Ming D’Arcy, Heath

  Big challenges: Some of the toughest weather conditions in Antarctica in many years, uncertainty of exploring a new route to the Pole, sastrugi, crevasse fields

  Everyday challenges: Spotify failing after the first week (over 300 hours of skiing without music), temperatures as low as –50°C with windchill, pain

  11

  PREPPING IN PUNTA

  It was December 2017, and we had arrived in Punta Arenas, in the southernmost region of Chile, to organise last-minute preparations for my biggest expedition yet. It had been a long time travelling from Melbourne to Punta Arenas – about 17 hours in all. Unfortunately, even though Antarctica is so close to Melbourne direct, the only way to enter mainland Antarctica by plane for expeditions is via Chile, halfway around the world. Now, we had a few days to recover from jetlag and get ourselves organi
sed. Our team – Eric, Dad, Heath, myself and Ming D’Arcy (our new Nat Geo cameraman for this expedition) – spent a couple of days working in a big warehouse getting ready for 40 days in Antarctica.

  Everything was checked over to make sure it was in good working order (we didn’t want to discover a stove wasn’t working out on the ice), then checked off again before it was packed. Our gear list was huge, despite the efforts for minimal weight.

  We had everything required plus some extras as contingency plans. We needed stoves to make dinner in the tent at night, but we also needed a stove repair kit. We packed extra skis and ski poles, just in case any got lost or broken. Even simple things, like matches – forget those and your journey is over before it even starts. If you can’t light your stoves while you’re out on the ice, you won’t survive.

  Eric had sent a gear list to Dad and me in Melbourne months earlier, and in the lead-up to this trip, we’d been sorting out our gear and piling it up on the floor at home. The final gear list was similar to the one we followed in Greenland. It had been comparatively warm there and most of the layers were never even used. But over the coming weeks, we were going to be enduring some of the coldest winds on the planet. I expected to be wearing every layer I had with me.

  In a quiet moment in the Punta warehouse, Dad dobbed me in. ‘Jade may have brought a few things that aren’t on the list,’ he said, always looking for a chance to stir the pot. He then revealed to Eric that I’d packed 20 pairs of underpants. It really didn’t sound at all excessive to me for a trip that was going to last 40 days, but the gear list specified three and Eric was only taking two! Two pairs of undies for almost six weeks is plain gross! It didn’t get any better. Dad confessed to bringing just four pairs, and I was sharing a tent with him. Apparently, Eric wears them inside out and back to front, so he reckons he’s got four pairs in one. I’m not even sure he’s done the maths right on this.

  ‘You throw them out at the end though, right?’ I asked.

  Eric looked at me as if I’d just suggested he wear them on his head. ‘No. They’re perfectly fine after you give them a wash.’

  Then he threatened to trade some of my chocolate in for every extra pair of undies I had in my bag. It wasn’t going to happen. I was taking those knickers, and no one gets between me and my chocolate.

  Again, our expedition was unsupported and unassisted, which meant we had to take everything we needed on our sleds. There would be no resupplies by air, which is now the most common approach for full-distance coast-to-Pole expeditions. We weren’t able to use motorised transport, kites or dogs to make life easier, and we weren’t permitted to follow any sort of road or track that had been made by a vehicle. This should give you some idea of why checking off the gear list is so important . . .

  And while we couldn’t afford to leave anything behind, at the same time we didn’t want to take anything superfluous, not only because there are weight limits on the flights from Punta Arenas to the start point, but because we were going to have to pull those sleds for 40 days up a glacier then across the Antarctic Plateau to the South Pole. The heavier the sleds, the slower we would go, and there was definitely a finite amount of time in which to complete the whole expedition. The sleds were already going to be heavy enough. On our first trip, to the North Pole, my sled weighed about 60 kilograms at the start. It started off at about 75 kilograms when we crossed Greenland, but this time around my sled would be around 100 kilograms at the beginning. This was heavy. Because we were attempting a new route through the Transantarctic Mountains, just as Amundsen and Scott had done 106 years earlier, we needed equipment that an expedition following the traditional route from Hercules Inlet would not need, such as crampons, long ropes, carabiners, harnesses and crevasse rescue equipment.

  In addition, I was carrying a few extra kilos myself. In preparation for this trip, Dad had encouraged me to gain some extra weight, as he assured me I would lose plenty from the hard work of dragging the heavy sled and my body simply trying to keep itself warm. I normally weigh around 58 kilograms, but as I stood there in Punta, I was 64.5 kilos! I had eaten a lot of ice-cream to get to that point – when I sat down I had to undo the top button on my jeans.

  It was the perfect example of why young women need to shift their focus from how they appear to the possibilities of what they can do: I needed to build a body that was strong, and carrying extra weight was the best way to do that.

  Just before I left home I did a fashion shoot and interview for Vogue magazine that appeared in the March 2018 issue. I was pretty sure I would be the only person in that issue with a double chin.

  During this expedition, we would be attempting the first-ever ascent of the Kansas Glacier, which I imagined would be so surreal. For me, doing these expeditions was never about records; what really excited me was the adventure and, now, true exploration. Fewer than 1 per cent of people who ski from the coast to the South Pole follow a new route, so this was going to be an incredible privilege.

  The difference between the North Pole and the South is that here we were guaranteed to be moving over and between crevasses.

  I started competing in triathlons when I was seven years old. I was terrified of swimming in the open ocean and, for many years, I would swim with my eyes closed. But now, falling into a bottomless crevasse was my biggest fear. As opposed to the traditional route to the Pole, where all crevasse dangers are marked with GPS coordinates, all we had was an old map and aerial photographs from the 1960s. As we’d be the first people to move through this area on the ground, we would have to feel our way and take precautions when unsure. But I had to block my fears out of my mind and focus on the job at hand. I knew I could get myself out of a crevasse if I had to – I’d done it in New Zealand. But I really hoped I wasn’t tested like that.

  One of my biggest tasks pre-Antarctica was to organise the food. After two polar expeditions, I felt like I knew what I was doing. We were thankfully taking Eric’s breakfast bomb with us once again. Like my mum always said: breakfast is the most important meal of the day; out on the ice this was especially the case. Eric’s mix was packed with so much we needed – oats, milk powder, protein powder, desiccated coconut and pecans – to get the day started and fill us up until we took our first snack break.

  There were so many zip-lock bags to be filled – one for every day of the expedition. Into each one I packaged a nut mix (I often saved mine for near the end of the day because it filled me up and gave me a final boost), five crackers, two muesli bars, 50 grams each of cheese, salami and butter, dehydrated noodles with either organic chicken or beef broth, and one whole block of chocolate – the chocolate was my favourite part of the food bag by a long shot. Before I put all the items into the bags, I removed the external packaging and wrappers so that we didn’t create any extra rubbish that we’d have to carry with us to the Pole.

  Our dinners, which were freeze-dried, were packed separately. There was a good range of flavours, like chicken masala and spaghetti bolognese. Each meal packet served two, so there was always some discussion between Dad and I about what meal we would have at the end of each day.

  It might seem like an intense amount of food, but we really had to ensure we were consuming enough calories for our bodies to be able to cope with the extreme activity and temperatures. One of the worst things that could happen was running out of rations. There’s no coming back from that – we would have to be evacuated. The only way I could see us running out of food was if we were snowed in for a long time. And even if that happened we could cut our rations to eke out an extra few days.

  All up, there was one kilogram of food per person each day, so for each of us that was more than 40 kilograms of food alone we were dragging on our sleds. The upside was that each day the sled got a kilo lighter. Added to that weight was the fuel we had to carry for the stove. Much of the weight in our sleds was just about basic survival requirements – food and water.

  While we were preparing, Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions
(ALE), the company that manages all logistics and flights internally in Antarctica, posted on their Instagram that the driest continent on Earth was dropping some uncharacteristically wet, heavy snow on Union Glacier. It sounded a lot like the wet storm that had hit us while we were in Greenland. Perhaps it’s something we’ll see more of as climate change becomes more pronounced. We still had a few days to go before we flew out, and even though we hadn’t had much luck with the starts to our previous expeditions, we hoped that conditions would soon clear.

  We assembled for a briefing at ALE’s offices in Punta with everyone else who would be on our flight. They gave us an indication of the weather in Antarctica and how likely it was that we’d actually leave the next day, 4 December, as planned. The weather can change very quickly in Antarctica, and it’s not safe for planes to land on the blue ice runway when conditions are bad. Sometimes they boomerang – that is, they get to the landing area, decide it’s too windy, and turn around and go back. Luckily, there is excellent forecasting these days, so once our plane had taken off from Punta Arenas there was a better likelihood it would be able to land in Antarctica.

  At the briefing, ALE director Mike Sharp told us the Russian Ilyushin aircraft we would be flying on was already being loaded and the weather was looking promising for our departure the following day. The company had some other groups heading off – 10 people were going to see the emperor penguins, and another group was driving six-wheel Toyota Hiluxes from the coast to the Pole along an ice road. On our flight were also three glaciologists from Valdivia, who were investigating a lake that had formed three kilometres below the ice, some people skiing the last degree and a number of ALE staff. One of them was Daniel, ALE’s meteorologist who specialises in Antarctica. I asked him lots of questions about climate change. He told me many people don’t realise Antarctica actually drives most of the world’s climates – the melting ice on the fringes of the continent pushes all of the world’s ocean currents around and they have a big effect on the climate everywhere.