Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  * * *

  On day thirty-five, a powerful blizzard whipped up, and I was forced to hunker down in my tent. That same night, the ice floe I was camping on began to drift. The next morning, I discovered that in the time it had taken to get a little sleep, I had lost twelve and a half miles without taking a single step. And I was still pinned down by the blizzard. Another twenty-four hours went by, and the ice cap began to crack loudly all around me, shattering into a jigsaw of unstable sheets of ice. This was beginning to look dangerous. I was unsure whether I should wait for the weather to clear up or push on in spite of it. The latter option would be riskier and inefficient, but at least I would stop losing ground.

  I did a quick reckoning. I had spent two days in the tent and had lost twelve and a half miles—distance that I would still have to cover again—and five days worth of food subtracted from my supplies. But I still had enough food to trek all the way from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.

  I decided to wait.

  Forty-eight hours later, there was no break in the weather, and the cracks in the ice were getting dangerously close. Suddenly, a crack yawned open almost directly under my tent, and my sled was hanging precariously over the edge of the ice.

  That mishap rang an alarm bell. I called Børge and explained how things stood. I wanted to ask him if he had ever found himself drifting south at this stage of an expedition to the North Pole.

  “Never!” he replied. Still, even after I told him that I was still drifting south, he recommended that I wait out the blizzard.

  “But the ice is breaking up! I can’t stay here.”

  “Well, it’s your call,” Børge replied. “You’re the only one who can make that decision. You’ve made it this far; trust your own judgment.”

  * * *

  The blizzard was showing no signs of letting up. The ice was cracking all around me. Since I had to make a quick choice, I decided to move out. And fast. I folded up my tent, hooked up the sled to my harness, and set out. I marched north, heading into the wind, but I was drifting south the whole time. The storm was howling into my face, burning my skin, freezing my lips and the tip of my nose … I wasn’t doing that badly, considering everything that I had going against me. And then I noticed the loose bootlace.

  Under normal conditions, an untied bootlace is a tiny problem; retying it takes a few seconds. But for me, in these conditions, it was a full-fledged disaster. Every morning I would spend twenty minutes getting my boots on. I could only do it inside the tent, because I had to take my gloves off to tie the laces. It was an iron-clad rule that I could never remove my gloves outdoors. Especially when it was more than twenty degrees below zero. Well, that day the ice storm had caused the mercury to drop to seventy-six degrees below zero!

  It is impossible to keep trekking with a lace untied. Just as with a pair of cross-country skis, my boots were fastened to the snowshoes only at the toe, and the heel would lift with each step. My foot would pull out of the shoe with the first step I took. That would slow me down and bring on a fatal case of hypothermia.

  My only option was to attempt to tie my bootlace without removing my gloves. That’s just about impossible to do under normal conditions, but at seventy-six degrees below zero, with a blizzard whipping my exposed flesh and howling in my ears … well, you can only imagine.

  While I was struggling futilely with the bootlace, I began to notice the first warning signs of hypothermia: shivering, blue nose and lips … I was never going to get this done. Okay, it was time for drastic measures: I pulled off my gloves and wedged them under my arms in an attempt to preserve even a little body heat. But the gloves slipped out and fell to the ground, where the wind filled them with snow.

  Before I was done tying the bootlace, my fingers were half frozen. I pulled my gloves back on: they were frozen, too. And my hands were unlikely to warm them up. I jammed my gloved hands under my arms, but it was doing no good. Now I could feel my entire body beginning to freeze. There was only one thing to do—get moving—since my frozen hands would keep me from setting up my tent. For six hours straight, I plunged forward into the blizzard like a madman. It warmed me up a bit, but my hands remained lifeless. I tapped the tips of my fingers on my ski poles. Nothing, no sensation. Now I was screwed. I took off one glove to assess the damage. The razor-sharp shards of ice had cut through veins and nerves while slowly freezing my hands; my thumb had split wide open like meat in a freezer set too low. The cold flesh was translucent all the way to the bone.

  I stopped to set up my tent, using my teeth to help, as I had lost virtually all control of my fingers and was working with a pair of useless stumps. It took me two hours to set up camp, instead of the usual ten to twenty minutes. The simplest tasks had become impossible: undoing the Velcro on the tarp that covered the sled, lifting the tarp to pull out the camp stove, turning the fuel valve to light the stove so that I could melt a little snow in a cook pot. It was impossible to turn the flame-adjuster wheel with my frozen thumbs. I tried to work it with my teeth, but my tongue froze to the metal, and I ripped it half off to pull it free. My breath had coated the wheel with a film of ice, which made it even harder to turn. I finally managed to turn it with my teeth, but now I needed to pump up the fuel pressure. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t manage to work the little pump handle with my teeth, so I finally gave up and opened the fuel tank. Flammable liquid spread all over the place.

  At these temperatures, a lighter is useless. The liquid gas inside is frozen solid. Only matches work in this cold. But try extracting a match from the box and striking it without using your fingers—it’s virtually impossible! I tried to strike a match with my mouth, but the matches broke one after the other, without lighting.

  For half an hour, I made futile attempts to catch the fuel on fire. I wasted a vast number of matches. This was serious. In order to lighten my load as much as possible, to shave ounces off the total weight, I made all sorts of sacrifices. Among other things, I cut off half the handle of my toothbrush, snipped the labels off all my clothing, and rationed myself to two matches daily.

  I had an idea: I put my lighter in my mouth to thaw out the liquid fuel inside. After fifteen minutes, I figured the fuel had thawed. The problem was that, since I couldn’t grip it with my fingers, I couldn’t use the lighter at all. I finally wound up wedging it between both hands, and running the wheel against the floor of the tent, where it was soaked with fuel. Finally, I managed to produce a spark and the fuel burst into flame. But I had slopped so much fuel out of the camp stove that I set off a genuine conflagration in my tent! Now it looked like I might go from being frozen solid to charbroiled in a few seconds. I hastily put out the flames with my sleeping bag, at the same time trying to avoid putting out the camp stove, which had finally lit, thanks to the flames that had leaped up its side.

  At first, the heat of the camp stove allowed me to regain some use of my hands. I could now bend my fingers. At first, I thrust my fingers directly into the flame, in order to try to thaw them out as fast as possible—if it wasn’t too late already. Bad idea—the nerves were numb from the cold, and I felt no pain at all, but a stench of burning flesh soon filled the tent. I would need to take this gradually. The partial mobility that I had regained in my extremities made it possible for me to heat a little water. I soaked my hands in the water, but I couldn’t tell if the liquid was getting hotter. And so I tested it regularly, just as if it were a baby’s formula, until the water reached a temperature of ninety-seven or ninety-eight degrees to judge from the tip of my tongue. I sat there for two or three hours soaking my hands before feeling the first tinglings in my fingertips. Or seven fingertips, anyway. My right thumb, index, and ring fingers were no longer responding.

  My first reaction was one of despair at the idea that I might lose my fingers when I had done everything I could to keep that from happening. Then, determination took over, and I told myself that with luck, I shouldn’t have to lose more than three partial finger joints, maybe even just the
pads of the fingertips. It could have been much worse: all ten fingers, or the toes … Let’s admit it, I knew from the beginning that something like this was going to happen to me. Just like I had known perfectly well that sooner or later I would wind up in the water. The only thing I didn’t know was when. I had no suicidal tendencies. I just had a well-controlled sense of fatalism, a full awareness that without testing me to my limits, the Arctic wouldn’t really be the Arctic.

  The next morning, I didn’t even poke my head out of the tent. I spent the whole day soaking my fingers in lukewarm water. I smeared my fingers with Betadine and I swallowed large amounts of aspirin to thin my blood, so that it could flow more easily to my fingertips. The ice that had formed inside of my flesh was beginning to thaw. I drove the blade of my knife into the frostbitten portion of my three injured fingers in order to determine the exact point where I could still feel the pain. In the end, I discovered that the dead portion was very small. If that’s all that they would have to cut off, well … I’d survive. After all, I have lived without the last joint of my right middle finger for many years now; it was crushed in the breech of a machine gun in Angola back when I was serving in the South African Army in the war against the Cubans. That finger was more or less always frozen, and I managed to survive just fine with it.

  * * *

  These first thirty-six days had been horribly difficult. And yet, I was getting close to eighty-five degrees north latitude, while all the other expeditions had long since given up and gone home. My fuel and food supplies were dangerously low, and I was continuing to drift on my little fragment of the larger ice field. But I was still in good shape, and I felt as if I would be able to catch up on my schedule—which would make up for my supply shortages. I’d already done the hard part. Right now, there was a broad avenue stretching out before me. I had only one handicap slowing me down: my fingers. Each evening, I stopped two hours early to disinfect them and soak them in warm water. In order to prevent them from freezing again on contact with the air when I took them out of their “bath”—since even inside the tent it was thirty or forty degrees below zero—I developed an elaborate routine. I would extinguish my camp stove, carry the water, which was already starting to get cold, over to my sleeping bag, and then I would slide into the sleeping bag, quickly pull my hands out of the water, zip up my sleeping bag, and wedge my hands between my legs to keep them warm. And that’s when the real ordeal would begin: it felt as if my fingers were being clamped to an anvil and slammed repeatedly with a blacksmith’s sledgehammer. And it lasted all night! Actually, I should have rejoiced because this pain meant that my fingers were thawing. But it was so painful that I would almost have preferred amputation.

  In the morning, as soon as I had broken camp, stowed all my equipment, slipped on my mittens, and resumed my trek, my fingers began to freeze again, despite all my best efforts. The veins that had been cut by the ice crystals were now preventing the blood from flowing to the last joints of my fingers.

  Then Cathy’s voice over the satellite phone made the ice field plunge beneath my feet: “Franziska is dead.”

  Our friend, who was also an accomplished mountain climber, had just been killed during an ascent in the Alps. A ledge had given way and taken her with it as it fell. The shocking news made me forget my injuries, my pain, the terrible cold that was burning my flesh …

  “Franziska is dead.”

  * * *

  I called up Philippe Rochat on my satellite phone. I’d developed the habit of calling him every so often, as I did all the men and women who had lent me their support. This time, of course, it was different. I was speaking to a man who was shattered, destroyed, and I spoke words of comfort and reassurance to him, words whose emptiness, whose uselessness, I could sense even as I spoke them. All the same, Philippe seemed pleased to hear from me, and the irony of the situation struck me. I, whose injuries had almost rendered me helpless, I, who was surviving under hellish conditions, I, who needed all the help that I could get, found myself providing moral support to a man who, without ever having ventured away from his own home, was going through an ordeal far worse than mine.

  * * *

  A couple of days later, a number of large, swollen blisters appeared beneath the skin of my frozen thumb, index finger, and ring finger on my right hand, as well as on the thumb of my left hand. I knew perfectly well that they were warning signs of gangrene.

  This time I picked up my satellite phone to call Cathy. I hadn’t told her about what had happened to my fingers. I wanted to keep her from worrying needlessly, and I figured that this was my problem, so it was up to me and no one else to solve it. In the least alarmist manner imaginable, I described my symptoms to her and asked her to talk to a specialist about it for me. She put me in touch with a doctor, a woman who specializes in hands.

  “Have your fingers changed color?” the doctor asked me.

  Yes, and there was even worse news: my two thumbs, my right index finger, and my right ring finger had all erupted like cauliflowers, taking on the ugly appearance of frozen tripe.

  “How long ago did your fingers get frostbitten?” she asked.

  “Three or four days.”

  In response to a question, I gave as detailed a description as I could of the blisters and the open sores. She asked me if there was any smell. It wasn’t a smell, it was a stench! Every time I pulled my fingers out of the warm water, a veritable wave of rot would rush into my nostrils.

  “Turn back immediately,” the specialist ordered me, “if you want us to have even the slimmest chance of saving your hands.”

  I wasn’t turning back! It was pretty obvious that she hadn’t spent more than thirty-five days hiking across an ice field, this so-called specialist, hauling a four-hundred-plus-pound sled harnessed to her kidneys! What did she know about my situation? What right did she have to tell me to drop everything and abandon my goal?

  I hung up abruptly after blurting out, “Thanks. I’ll call you if I have any other questions.”

  I described this conversation to Cathy, who got in touch with one of my sponsors, Groupama Assistance. In turn, they got in touch with a man who is widely considered to be one of the leading specialists worldwide in cold-related pathologies, Dr. Emmanuel Cauchy, in his office in Chamonix. In his field this French doctor is a sort of guru, and his opinion is held in the highest regard.

  Over the telephone, Dr. Cauchy began by asking me roughly the same questions as his fellow doctor, and he urged me above all else not to burst the blisters. I explained to him that I had regained a bit of feeling in the tips of my fingers. He agreed that this was encouraging, but he also argued in favor of a diagnosis that I had sustained level-four lesions. “Beyond that level,” he said sharply, “there will be no alternative to amputation. And that will become inevitable if you continue to expose your hands to the cold because the condition of your fingers will continue to deteriorate.”

  I was furious and disappointed. I needed supporters, people who would pat me on the back and give me encouragement, not vultures who would urge me to throw in the towel.

  While I obstinately refused to give in to the siren song of defeat, the news of my misadventures spread over the Internet, and then in the media. Back home in Switzerland, the television trumpeted the “Mike Horn affair,” and from all sides, people were calling Cathy to go on the air, live, to defend her reckless husband, who was irresponsibly refusing to listen to the voice of reason. My wife bravely replied that I didn’t need her to defend me. “He’s the captain of his own ship; he makes his own decisions. I don’t defend him; I help him and I support him, whatever choices he may make.” She refused to give the media the names of the two doctors whom I consulted over the phone, but the journalists tracked them down on their own and invited them to appear on a talk show on the subject of frostbite and the other risks run by reckless fools like me. What is going to happen to Mike if he refuses to return? That question lay at the heart of the discussion.

  In my
mind, the question never even arose. These were my own fingers, my own life, my own decisions … and no one else’s.

  I continued to push on, and by this point I’d even stopped soaking my fingers in hot water. That method might be effective in a hospital setting or in a temperate climate. But here, at temperatures of thirty to forty degrees below zero, all that happened was that they were freezing a little more deeply each time I took them out of the water or whenever I used them to pitch my tent, attach a snap hook, tie my bootlaces, or get dinner ready … and with each step that I took on the ice field. Bandages were what were needed. I even learned to function without using my hands, at least not in the usual way that hands are used. I used my teeth and the palms of my hands pressed together to seize an object if it wasn’t too small.

  To make up for the hours it took me to perform the simplest tasks, I hiked for shorter periods each day. The result was that I was moving forward more slowly than at the beginning of the expedition, but I was still keeping up a good average—more than nine miles per day—and I had every reason to be optimistic. One reason in particular was that despite all of my misadventures, I had reached the same point, after the same number of days, as four French legionnaires who attempted the same expedition the previous year.

  But the warning from the doctor in Chamonix continued to haunt me. The days that still separated me from the North Pole were very likely going to cost me my fingers, not just the fingers that were already damaged, but perhaps the others as well. That would make me a cripple and would put an end to my career once and for all. I’d reach the North Pole … sure, I could definitely get there. I had struggled and fought to achieve that. But once I was there, I would find myself on a little piece of drifting ice field at the top of the world. Was this one expedition really more important than being able to keep going for years to come, living this life of adventure as long as possible, this life that I had chosen for myself and which I would not give up for anything on earth?