by Jason Wilson
Scott also spent three years, from 1901 to 1904, probing the edges of the Antarctic. Afterward he wrote an adventure classic, The Voyage of the Discovery, a man-against-nature tale that became a critical and financial success. And yet, regarding polar travel, Scott’s national prejudices led him to conclude just the opposite of Amundsen: he insisted on the nobility of man-hauling sledges versus the efficiency of dogsledding, was convinced postholing on foot worked better than gliding on skis, and refused to believe that fresh meat prevented scurvy.
At the time the South Pole was the last great prize for explorers. English captain James Cook had been the first to sail across the Antarctic circle, in 1773; his countryman Edward Bransfield the first to set foot on the continent, in 1820; and another English captain, James Ross, the first to chart some of its coast. Ernest Shackleton, who had been with Scott in the Antarctic onboard the Discovery in 1901–1904, led his own ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, getting within 97 miles in January 1909 before turning back and almost dying of starvation during his retreat.
Later, in the summer of 1909, the American Frederick Cook, thought to be dead, suddenly emerged from the Arctic, claiming to have reached the North Pole in April 1908. Two weeks after that, American Robert Peary claimed to have done the same in April 1909. Newspapers were abuzz for months.
Today it’s generally accepted that both Peary and Cook were lying, but at the time their claims changed the game completely. Scott and Amundsen, archrivals, immediately set their sights on the South Pole. The race was on.
At 845,595 acres, Hardangervidda National Park is the second largest wilderness area in Europe. When the Amundsens tried to traverse it, they winter camped, spending only one night in a hut called Sandhaug. Today, thanks to the Norwegian Trekking Association, there are two dozen huts on the treeless, wind-scoured plateau.
Using Amundsen’s description of his ski trek and a topo of the Hardangervidda, Steve and I plotted a roughly 100-mile route from southeast to northwest, passing by eight huts. Two were staffed and served meals; the other six were self-service dwellings stocked with food, fuel, and blankets. Which meant that we could conceivably do a very light ski tour—no tent, no sleeping bags, no stove, no cookware, no food.
“But what if we get lost in a whiteout?” Steve asked. “Or get hurt, or move slow, or for whatever reason don’t make it to the next hut? We’ll freeze to death.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Three weeks before we left, four Germans skiing hut to hut on another trail in Norway were found dead. Swallowed by a snowstorm, they froze within a mile of shelter. Four years earlier, two Scottish skiers attempting to cross the Hardangervidda hut to hut had been caught in a storm and died of exposure right on the marked ski track.
In the end, we each brought a foam pad and a paper-thin bivy sack, plus one shovel—just enough to dig in and survive a night out if necessary. Throughout the winter leading up to our trip, Steve, a headhunter in Denver and a former high school cross-country ski racer, hit the NordicTrack each morning at four; I skate-skied every day in Wyoming. Knowing that we had to be swift and smooth—or else—we toured together some weekends, through the worst conditions we could find, continuously testing and refining our gear choices.
Steve was expecting calamity and prepared for it. The Hardangervidda traverse didn’t strike me as any more difficult or dangerous than some of my other trips—skiing across the heart of Greenland with a Norwegian and Swedish expedition, circumnavigating Yellowstone for a month on skis—so I arrogantly expected an easy eight-day tour.
The first five minutes on the Hardangervidda disabused me of this. The wind was so fierce, it had stripped much of the snow off the tundra. What snow remained was ice, and we were obliged to immediately stretch on our skins to avoid being blown straight backward.
“What’d I tell you!” Steve screamed, grinning ear to ear.
The first hut, Helberghytta, was empty and cold when we arrived. The cabin is named after Norway’s most famous World War II resistance fighter, Claus Helberg, and its walls were lined with photographs from the secret mission he’d been part of to destroy a Nazi plant near Telemark that produced heavy water, an essential ingredient in the production of nuclear weapons. We fired up the woodstove, boiled canned reindeer meatballs we’d found in the pantry, burrowed under five layers of woolen blankets like kids in a fort, and felt deeply grateful not to be camping.
The next day the headwind was preposterous. We were repeatedly knocked off our feet, as if we were being slugged by an invisible boxer. At lunch we had to sit on our packs, backs hunched against the wind, lest they be blown away.
“Can’t imagine having more fun,” Steve shouted through his hood.
It took us more than eight hours to cover 14 miles to the Kalhovd hut. There we found sixteen Norwegians huddled around the woodstove, drinking tea and waiting out the storm. When our faces thawed enough for us to speak, they were shocked.
“Americans! Why woot you come here to Norvay?”
I mentioned my obsession with Amundsen, and Steve explained that our mother’s maiden name was Smebakken—“smith on a hill.” They nodded but still looked confused, clearly wondering why two people from the land of obesity would choose to ski through a storm in long, lean Norway.
The next day the wind remained ridiculous. The Norwegians altered their plans and ended their trip, going downhill with the wind. Steve and I did the opposite, skiing due west across Kalhovdfjorden, directly into the gale, not speaking and stopping only once to wolf sandwiches and energy bars while hiding behind a boulder.
It took us seven hours to go 14 miles. Without skins, despite the fact that the terrain was flat, it would have been hard to reach the next hut, Stordalsbu.
“Amundsen would be proud,” Steve shouted as we arrived at the snug, clean, well-built Norwegian cottage. I made a fire while he cooked. My brother was lighthearted and talkative, unfazed by the unbelievable weather; I was both exhilarated and exhausted.
The next morning we crossed a pass in the first couple hours and began sliding downhill into a roaring opaqueness. When the terrain leveled out, we guessed we were somewhere near Lake Vråsjåen but needed bearings. As I was holding the orienteering compass over the topo and trying to triangulate, the wind ripped both map and compass from my hands. They disappeared in the maelstrom. Only partially unnerved, Steve pulled out an extra compass and spare maps and we huddled together.
“We’re off course!” I yelled.
He looked worried. He knew that if we were really lost, we probably wouldn’t survive a night out.
Following a hunch, we made a 90-degree turn to the south. We’d skied half a mile when the clouds cleared just long enough for us to get our bearings, locate the trail again, and identify our next pass. I laughed with relief, and Steve spanked his ski poles over his head.
We ascended the pass slowly, cowering behind rock outcrops where we could. Dropping down the other side was lovely at first. We telemarked over icy meadows and along a wiggling creek. But soon the topography tipped and we found ourselves in a steep defile. For hours we carefully downclimbed frozen waterfalls, zigzagged through birch trees, plowed into snow up to our waists, and cursed the Norse gods.
We reached the Mogen hut deeply grateful not to have broken a leg but well aware that the remaining trip would be both dangerous and challenging. Though there was a trail on the map, there wasn’t one on the landscape: almost every day we were out, we had to navigate with map and compass through a howling white wilderness.
Amundsen and Scott arrived in the Antarctic in January of 1911, and each team knew that a historic contest was under way. Hundreds of miles apart, both teams built elaborate base camps on the Ross Ice Shelf and prepared to winter over. A single push to the South Pole—1,400-plus miles round-trip, with a dangerous haul over high passes through the Transantarctic Mountains—was impossible, so each team spent the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn ferrying supplies to depots along their respective routes. When winter set
in—June through August—darkness descended, and temperatures dropped to 50 below.
Amundsen’s men, working in well-crafted snow caves, were urgently industrious through the dark season. They tested and altered their ski boots three times, each man cobbling his own boots to conform precisely to his feet to prevent frostbite and blisters. Their fur clothing was repeatedly evaluated on trial runs and then retailored by each member to fit perfectly, eliminating chafing. The men used a lightweight wind cloth to make tents that were nearly half the weight of canvas ones, then dyed them black with shoe polish and ink powder, for three reasons: to make it easier to find the tents in a whiteout; to provide rest for weary, snow-seared eyes; and to soak up warmth from solar radiation. In the snow-walled woodshop, the team’s craftsman, Olav Bjaaland, redesigned their dog sleds, cutting the weight from 150 pounds each to 50. Bjaaland, a champion skier, fashioned custom skis for each team member.
Scott was satisfied with his wool-and-cotton clothing and confident in his ponies’ ability to plow through snow pulling heavy sleds. The English expedition did not refine its systems. Scott believed courage trumped adversity and that character, not craft, would carry the day. In their base camp at McMurdo Sound, he and his men squandered the winter on esoteric academic lectures, amateur theater, soccer, and letter writing.
For Amundsen, nothing had been left to chance. Pemmican was weighed down to the gram, biscuits (more than 40,000) were counted individually, seal meat was laid in depot larders, sled compasses calibrated, dogs fattened. He had learned from the Inuit that deliberately courting danger was immature, if not immoral.
Scott was a big-picture man with visions of grandeur, and he left the details to others. Besides, for the first 400 miles he would literally be following in Shackleton’s footsteps. To set his farthest-south record, Shackleton and three companions had plodded on foot, man-hauling massive sleds. Scott intended to do the same after using ponies and dogs for part of the route.
From the start, Amundsen moved quickly and smoothly. He could barely control the exuberance of his dogs, and the men could sometimes ride on the sleds rather than ski. His teams typically covered 12 miles in five or six hours, then set up camp, devoting the rest of the day to rest and recuperation. If the weather was nasty they built igloos. In the fall they had marked their depots with wide lines of flags in case they veered off course, so that even in storms they easily found their resupplies of food and fuel. For the Norwegians, all of whom were excellent cross-country skiers, it was a grand jaunt. A big ski tour.
Scott’s two prototype snowmobiles (a third fell through the ice while unloading) had not been properly tested during the winter, and few spare parts had been cached, so they broke down and were abandoned after five days. The ponies, sweating all over their bodies, suffered grotesquely, Huntford wrote, their backs and flanks often plated in ice. Naturally, their sharp hooves punched holes in the snow. They were often wading up to their trembling knees, sometimes up to their freezing, huffing chests. Halfway to the pole, their fodder gone, the ponies were shot. From that point on, man-hauling began.
It was a given on both expeditions that some of the draft animals would be killed en route. Amundsen put down any of the sled dogs that came into heat, wouldn’t pull, or became too belligerent, feeding them to the remaining dogs, his team, and himself. At one point, after slogging over the Transantarctic Mountains—a massive east-west chain with peaks of up to 15,000 feet—Amundsen slaughtered half his remaining dogs to supply both men and animals with enough meat to survive the final push to the pole and the return trip. The journey back, when men and beasts were mentally, physically, and spiritually fatigued, was even more crucial than the push out.
Having determined on previous polar journeys the precise daily nutritional needs of both man and dog, Amundsen had ten times the reserves of food at each depot as Scott. By skiing only half a day, Amundsen’s team retained strength, vigor, and morale. Scott drove his team like he drove the ponies, his men pulling in harnesses twelve hours a day. They inevitably became weak, emaciated, and demoralized.
At Mogen, Wøllo and Martinsen fed us so well—and regaled us with so many remarkable stories about the pleasures of Norwegian life—that we might have given up our traverse right there. Thanks to a wealth of oil and natural gas, the government has accumulated the second largest rainy-day fund on earth, more than $500 billion. Every citizen has guaranteed government health care for life and a full pension. Unemployment is low, and there’s essentially no poverty.
“I think I could live here,” Steve said dreamily as we were falling asleep in our bunks. Alas, the next day we had to ski away.
The wind had at last abated, replaced by below-zero temperatures. We pushed back up onto the central plateau, stopping only for lunch and swigs of hot cloudberry tea. The snow was brittle and the landscape bewilderingly featureless—in all directions, there were snow-clad hills of identical height and shape. We set a map bearing and followed it precisely, deviating only to avoid steep ascents or descents.
When we reached the Lågaros hut, in midafternoon, it was so buried we had to dig it out to get in the door. We assumed we would have it to ourselves, but soon we heard shouting. Peeking out the frosted windows, we couldn’t believe what we saw: three kite-skiers literally sailing in from nowhere. They dropped their packs beside the hut and then continued to kite-ski just for the fun of it, jumping and carving, sweeping in vast loops across the landscape.
When they finally came inside, they were jubilant. They were Norwegian, of course: two brothers and a woman. They’d skied 28 miles that day and still had energy enough to play. We’d come just 11 miles and were whipped. One was a soldier who had just returned from a year in Afghanistan; the other two were medical students. This was their third attempt to cross the Hardangervidda.
“The other times, the wind didn’t cooperate and we had to trudge along on skis,” one said with a knowing grin.
They’d spent three years testing different skis and kites and knew exactly what they were doing. They were also going with the prevailing winds rather than against them, as we were.
“Total traverse of the Hardangervidda will take us about three days,” the woman offered, almost ashamed to admit the efficiency of their trip to a couple of cross-country masochists who would ski for eight days to cover the same distance.
They slept in the next morning, knowing they could fly another 20 to 25 miles in a matter of hours. Meanwhile, Steve and I slogged on.
The snow was rough and the landscape burning white. It was like skiing across a desert of sand dunes. With the wind down and navigation unnecessary, we knocked off the 16 miles to Sandhaug, the next hut, in a few hours.
One hundred and fifteen years ago, the Amundsen brothers had spent a night in this very hut. Arriving early in the afternoon, we had time to catch up on our journals, sketch out our route on the maps, hoover an extra meal or two, and toast our toes over the stove.
“I’m not sure life gets much better than this,” Steve said before dozing off.
That night another storm blew in, and it began building drifts around the cabin. Just as we were turning in, five middle-aged, not particularly fit Norwegians burst through the door.
“Vat are you doing here?” one of them asked snootily. But they were more than happy to suck down all the snow we had melted and dry their soaked socks over the well-stoked stove.
The next day we were gone before they got up. It was snowing and blowing miserably. Within the first hour of skiing, visibility dropped until the sky and the earth fused into a single miasmic substance. At one point, looking down, I spotted two black dots far below me. Staring through depthlessness, I couldn’t tell how far away they were. Five yards? Five hundred? I backed away from the gaping abyss only to realize that the distant dots were the tips of my skis.
Without depth perception, it became difficult to balance and impossible to move in a straight line. We were blindfolded by the whiteout 10 miles from our next hut. We had to
stop.
“Have gone complately blind all day,” Amundsen recorded in his journal on December 5, 1911. “Thick snowfall more like home.” He and his team still skied 12.5 miles. The next day was no different, but Amundsen’s team made their standard distance no matter what.
Scott, materially and mentally unprepared for such conditions, either didn’t move on bad days or trudged moderate distances that required unconscionable suffering, his men straining to man-haul their monstrous sledges.
As Amundsen closed in on the pole, Scott was hundreds of miles behind. Neither knew of the other’s position, which caused Scott enormous anxiety. He pushed himself and his men sadistically. There were days when both Scott and Amundsen made the same mileage but Amundsen did it in half the time, economizing on effort and riding the sleds when possible. Scott all but killed himself and his men.
On December 14, 1911, Amundsen and his four teammates made it to the South Pole. “And so at last we reached our destination and planted our flag on the geographical South Pole . . . Thank God!” he wrote in his journal. His focus on his men, he stated that his teammates displayed the qualities he most admired: “courage and dauntlessness, without boasting or big words.” He and his skiers had been in the Antarctic almost a year and had been skiing toward the pole for more than fifty days, covering some 700 miles. Aware of the need for proof, the Norwegians spent three days mapping twenty-four sextant readings to make absolutely certain they were precisely at the bottom of the earth. They left a sled, a tent, and a cheeky note of welcome to Scott, then headed home.
Scott and four men (all the others having been sent back along the way, fortuitously) arrived at the South Pole more than a month later, cadaverous, malnourished, tired, and weak. They found Amundsen’s tent and his note. Wrote Scott: “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”