Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  The trouble with the narrowness of the polar windows of opportunity is that competing expeditionaries do not have much choice but to turn up at the same time in the same place. There’s no sidling unnoticed in to Antarctica when you all have to collect in Punta Arenas and await the vagaries of the weather for a flight south to Patriot Hills. I had hoped to set out as early as possible, ideally by 1 November. But blizzards kept me and my rivals champing at the bit throughout October 1996 and well into November. At least it gave Morag and me a chance to eye up the opposition. Incongruously, we did this at a drinks party given by Annie Kershaw who would be responsible for flying all expeditions to their various Antarctic starting-points.

  Børge Ousland was tall and well built, with a stern and guarded manner. I was impressed by his professionalism and focused dedication, as well as his youth – he was eighteen years my junior – and obvious physical power. I sensed that our competitive status, or maybe the memory of our row in the Norwegian press in 1990, made him reserved and that, in other circumstances, he would have been friendly enough. Marek Kaminski was thirty-three years old and, in 1995, had travelled by ski to both the South and North Poles, the first person ever to do so in a single year. He was a friendly giant of whom both Morag and I grew quickly fond.

  We had all succumbed to Antarctica’s magnetic pull. We each wanted to implant at least a part of it in our memories, whatever other personal quests we sought. For a while I had been the only person to cross the continent twice and, on both journeys, had met not a single other human being (apart from at the Pole Station) in a country bigger than China and India joined together. But now there were regular tourist flights in to Antarctica, as well as visiting cruise ships, with around 15,000 people a year visiting the continent. These included groups of the wonderfully named sphenisciphiles or penguin lovers.

  A third party, going for the same end goal as us, was Heo Young-ho from South Korea. In fact there were six Heos, each with an identical sledge. All were wreathed in smiles and all professed earnestly to be ‘going solo but as a group’. Collectively Morag dubbed them the So-Hos. Small, stocky and bright-eyed like so many Jack Russells, they were in some ways even more impressive than Ousland and Kaminski.

  Three members of a team led by Lloyd Scott, an Englishman with leukaemia raising funds by walking to the Pole, arrived when the weather had held us in Punta for two frustrating weeks. One of them, Clive Johnson, was using a para-wing similar to that used by Ousland and Kaminski the previous year, and he showed me how it worked in the nearest flat field, but it was too late for me to beg or borrow one of these state-of-the art models. We left at last on the seven-hour flight by Hercules to Antarctica, three weeks behind our intended start date.

  The Hercules landed gently this time and Chilean skidoo drivers ferried our cargo to a nearby Twin Otter ski-plane. Within three hours we were climbing above the Ellsworth Mountains and heading north towards the seaward edge of Berkner Island. I had wanted to reconnoitre the ice-shelf five miles out from Berkner’s eastern coast, but the pilot said this would be highly expensive in both fuel and extra dollars. I had to abandon my favoured route and go for a more westerly approach from the edge of the Antarctic ice for the 250-mile haul to the true edge of the continent. Both Ousland and Kaminski had used this western route when, with far lighter loads, they had hauled to the Pole the previous year.

  Group by group the rival teams were dropped off at appointed spots along the Antarctic coastline in high winds and thick fog. I waved goodbye to Morag and Terry Lloyd, hitched the sledge’s dog harness around my chest, shoulders and waist, set my compass for due south and took the strain of my 495-pound load, enough fuel and food to last me for 110 days.

  A fifty-knot wind from the east slammed at me, blasting my goggles. I could see nothing about me and marvelled at the skill of the recently departed ski-plane pilot. Somewhere to my right lay the western flank of Berkner Island, perhaps half a mile away. I must keep clear of its crevasse fields which had caused Mike and me so much trouble. So I allowed myself to veer left in the white-out. After eight hours’ stumbling progress the wind speed shown on my hand anemometer was gusting to eighty knots in the howling polar ‘night’ and I was falling asleep on the move. Erecting my tiny tent took thirty minutes. Later, on the high polar plateau, I knew this job would have to be done in just three or four minutes, with a wind chill factor of –90°C, to avoid hypothermia.

  The next day the wind lessened and blew miraculously from the north-north-west, a rare event in that area. So I unfurled my kite and, to my great delight, felt my skis surge forward, hauling me and my 495-pound sledge-load in the approximate direction of the South Pole. Several times gusts slammed the sledge into my legs and I collapsed in a welter of skis, sticks and tangled ropes. One high-speed crash gave me a painful ankle and smashed ski-tip – I bandaged both with industrial tape. This was the learning process. Necessity is the mother of invention and for the first time I began to develop the knack. To my enormous delight, I learned to catch the wind and hold it. But only in the direction which the wind dictated. A GPS check showed that all my wonderful sailing had taken me east of my destination. So I was forced to return to the grind of manhauling: the difference between Formula One racing and carthorse riding. Everything in my tent was wet that night. Both lips wept pus from burns like cold sores which cracked and bled when I ate chocolate.

  On 18 November I made weak contact with Morag in her tent at Patriot Hills, more than 300 miles away. She told me that over two days I had gained nearly thirty miles to Ousland’s twenty-one. The following day, however, saw the arrival of a steady east wind, enabling Børge to use his para-wing and cover a staggering ninety-nine miles in two days.

  Throughout 21–22 November there was no wind, only white-out, and both Ousland and I manhauled due south along our separate routes. He managed nineteen miles; I completed 19.3, despite my 100-pound extra load. Not exactly catching him up, but a good sign for the 500-mile plateau ahead, where manhauling would come into its own. The So-Hos, Morag said, were progressing extremely slowly and were having sledge problems. And Marek Kaminski had been lucky to escape with his life after an accident soon after starting out.

  In a high wind and thick fog he had been trying to adjust his sledge harness when a sudden gust knocked him over and concussed him. He came to some time later to find that he had been dragged by his para-wing for an unknown distance but unattached to his sledge and its life-supporting contents. He would die within hours if unable to find his tent and stove. Noticing a small bloodstain, he took a compass bearing on it, since he must have arrived from that direction. After many minutes of desperately retracing his route, with no help from tracks due to blowing snow, he felt overwhelming relief when a dark shape materialised up ahead. His head ached but he was alive! He shrugged and carried on, the Polish flag affixed to his jacket.

  My heels developed blisters, so I strapped on foam snippets cut from my bedmat and tried to ignore them. My chin, windburned, became poisoned and swollen, so I lanced it with a scalpel until the swelling subsided. My eyes lost their long-distance focus after a week staring at the glare through goggles. As usual, the lids puffed up with liquid. My eyes became mere slits. I resembled a rabbit with advanced myxomatosis. Every evening I attended to my developing crutch-rot with Canestan powder and applied lengths of industrial sticky tape to raw areas. My back and hips were sore, but not as painful as on previous journeys because my Dyson harness-designers had developed an effective new padding system. For the first time, life was truly bearable, almost enjoyable, on a heavy polar manhaul journey.

  The sun provided no relief. It burst through the white-out one day and almost instantly I was hot. I went on dressed just in my underwear. Any bare strip of skin quickly burned purple; the ozone hole was at its worst at that time of year. I fashioned a head cover from a rationbag which covered my neck and shoulders like the flap of a kepi. A day later the white-out returned but I still managed eleven hours of non-stop manhauling.
This despite long tiring stretches of pie-crust snow, known to glaciologists as firn or névé, which is fallen snow that is granular but still has aerated cells. Its effect is to hold your footfall for a second prior to collapsing and allowing your foot to sink. This can cause the alarming sensation of a crevasse fall and can sound like a snowquake or mini explosion.

  One improvement to my manhaul gear of previous years was in the ski skins department and the superior adhesive mix which glued them to my skis. No longer did they come adrift on uneven ice, so I avoided the frozen fingers caused by repeatedly having to reattach them.

  A rare north wind and conditions of good visibility allowed me to try my luck at kiting again. Without stopping for chocolate and taking quick gulps of energy orange from my Thermos, I kited 117 miles in one day. I now thought I was almost certain to succeed in the entire crossing. That evening I was only able to eat my day’s 5,600 calorie ration by stuffing myself. I did not need more than half the ration for I had not exerted myself, merely steered the kite, braced my legs against occasional rough bumps and slid at speed along Berkner Island’s rim. So easy. The exact opposite to manhauling which would use up 8,000 calories in a typical ten-hour day. That night I unloaded and buried eight full days of rations weighing twenty pounds, due to the extra mileage covered.

  Before leaving Punta Arenas, Marek Kaminski and I had discussed possible routes from Berkner Island up to the inland plateau. Glaciers often serve as the most sensible corridors to inner Antarctica, but only if you know the nature of the glacier in question. Not all of them move gently. Galloping glaciers, those that advance more than five centimetres a day, can surge with huge power, ice streams shatter, a wave of ice bulges to the front or snout, the surface buckles noisily and becomes no place to travel over. The Columbia Glacier in Alaska was measured advancing at thirty-five metres a day, and the Kutiah Glacier in the Himalaya surged twelve kilometres in just three months, burying forests and villages.

  I did not favour the idea of trying to climb on to the plateau south of Berkner Island by way of any unknown glacier, for I remembered the troubles we had had during the Transglobe Expedition on the Scott Glacier. So I had been happy when Marek had shown me a photograph of the mountains with an arrow marking the whereabouts of the Frost Spur, the best route, he reckoned, to climb from Berkner Island’s surrounding ice-shelf up to the high polar plateau. I had a mental picture of a hard climb. I was not to be proved wrong. About six hours away from the escarpment three days of poor visibility ended and brilliant sunshine revealed the Frost Spur dead ahead.

  I came to an abrupt halt, overcome by disbelief and apprehension. Then I remembered a chance remark by Børge Ousland about Erling Kagge, his fellow Norwegian who had manhauled to the South Pole in 1993. ‘I can’t understand how Kagge took his gear up the spur without crampons.’

  I had no crampons and I had never travelled alone before over a known crevassed zone. My ice-axe had fallen off my sledge during the wild kiting ride, leaving me with only a twelve-inch hammer screw. Ahead lay a crevassed and seemingly impassable barrier, a dark ice-sheathed blue wall rising to an abrupt horizon of blue sky, the rim of the polar plateau. I carried two ice-screws with foot loops and a small ice-hammer in a waistbag. In theory I might be able to rescue myself and perhaps even my sledge after falling into a reasonably shallow crevasse, but crevasses have been measured as deep as forty-five metres.

  I am no climber and would not have relished the ascent with a day rucksack on my back, let alone a sledge-load still weighing about 470 pounds. Black clouds promised further bad weather. I began to haul myself up the icy incline, but repeatedly slid backwards. Exhausted, I pitched the tent and decided to split my sledge-load into four. If I could make my first ascent while sunlight still bathed the wall of the spur, showing me the best route, I could descend again, eat and sleep, and complete three more climbs the next day.

  My hands were cold, and the ice-wall was about to switch from brilliant sunlight to deep shadow when I was seized by vertigo. Shaking my head to break its mesmeric spell, I gingerly retrieved my ice-hammer from its sledge bag and, using its pick end, started to grope my way up the frozen face of the spur. It was four hours before I could find an even vaguely prominent place to leave my first load. Here, in a wide expanse of nothing, I cached the rations and marked the pile of bags with a single ski.

  The journey back down to the tent took just forty minutes and, with relief, I cooked my rehydrated spaghetti bolognese and drank two pints of tea. Ten minutes after I had fallen asleep, a series of katabatic wind-blasts struck the tent. Katabatic winds in Antarctica, the highest, driest, coldest continent on earth, can blow at 190 mph and arrive with just a few minutes warning. I was alarmed, but I waited for an hour before I realised I must move or the tent would be damaged. In a quarter of a century of travel, I had not encountered winds of such ferocious aggression. Sleep was out of the question. Timing the brief lulls between each fresh blast, I dismantled the tent in seconds and tied all my gear together, lashed to a fixed ice-screw. I climbed the spur again, though the wind blew me several times from my fragile holds. Once I slipped thirty feet or more, desperately trying to dig the hammer’s pick into the face. Gulping air, I rested, shivering against the ice until I could resume my snail-like ascent.

  The third ascent was the worst because I took a wrong route in poor visibility, heading too far to the right. That meant I had to climb twice as high to reach the rock-lined upper rim of the spur. With the clouds to the east now obscuring the escarpment, I immediately made a fourth ascent, but was too tired to manage the last two twenty-five-pound ration bags. That meant I had to descend a fifth time to retrieve them. The final climb, with the fifty-pound load over my shoulders, was easier. However, the storm clouds from the east reached the top of the spur before I did. Light snow began to fall and I could find no trace of my equipment cache. I grew cold as the day’s sweat cooled my skin. I knew that twenty days of bagged rations over my shoulders would do me little good if I had lost all the rest of my gear.

  I prayed hard and an hour later I stumbled on the dump. Such moments of relief and joy almost make these journeys worthwhile. Hearing the news of winning a lottery jackpot could not even approach the sheer happiness of the instant I found my tent above the Frost Spur.

  I could not actually see the Antarctic plateau – in fact, I could see no feature at all in any direction – but I knew I had reached the true gateway to the Pole. The dangers of the ice-shelf and the escarpment were behind me. For the next seventy miles there would be crevasses and wicked moraines, the masses of ice debris that formed difficult barriers. But after that there was nothing but the vast open plain of the polar plateau. Somewhere in this great white land, perhaps halfway between the Pole of Inaccessibility and the isolated Russian base of Vostock, lay the Pole of Cold where winter temperatures can drop to –100°C. I ate an extra bar of chocolate and thought again of Børge Ousland’s comment to the Chilean film crew: ‘Fiennes’s competitors are much, much stronger than him.’ I might yet prove him wrong. I had caught up more than seventy of the miles he had gained by sailing the east winds. Both Marek Kaminski and the tough little Korean man-haulers were well over a hundred miles behind me after only seventeen days of travel.

  I felt elated. To hell with being too old. It’s all in the mind. At this stage of our 1993 Antarctic crossing, Mike Stroud and I had already been in a state of semi-starvation and severe physical decline. Yet this time I was still feeling on top form, no more hungry than after a day’s training on Exmoor. I was accustomed to the raw skin, poisoned blisters and screaming ligaments which returned on every manhaul trip. The pain in my ankle from the sailing crash was better now, as were the ulcerating blisters on my heels. Life was good and my competitive urge bubbled up as I set out the next morning, the sledge dragging through the soft new snow.

  If only the east winds stay absent all the way to the Pole, I would beat Børge, I thought. The harder the manhauling the quicker I will catch him. Then,
on the far side of the Pole, the winds will be behind us and my newfound kite skills will cope with his para-wing expertise. After all, in a single day on Berkner Island, my 117 miles were greater even than Ousland’s best day’s sail. Such were my thoughts.

  Only twelve hours later I made radio contact with Morag and my optimism was dashed. Ousland had used his wonderful skill at para-wing control to travel 134 miles in only four days. Ahead of me stretched the Jaberg Glacier and the heavily crevassed snow-fields. This was one of the most wild and beautiful places in Antarctica and, in parts, one of the most dangerous.

  On 2 December Morag told me through whining static that our charity, Breakthrough’s Expedition Appeal, had already raised over £1 million towards the £3 million needed to fund a London breast cancer research centre. The further I progressed, the more money we would raise. I found this a big help when the going was especially hard. The new snow continued to grip my sledge runners, making every step a battle. For long periods my skis disappeared and often snagged one another, tripping me up. My speed dropped to a mile an hour, sometimes even less. The constant rub and strain reblistered my heels and snapped one of the steel ski bindings. The leather upper halves of my ski boots came away from the plastic foot shells and needed four hours of restitching.

  On the twentieth day of my journey, I was already ten days ahead of my previous Antarctic crossing. Not because of faster manhauling, but entirely due to the single day of southerly kiting. I had no major health troubles but various sores. Crutch-rot was an old problem I knew well, caused by trouser-rub. I had treated it as usual with Canestan powder and strips of industrial sticky tape over the raw areas. Sometimes the tape would come unstuck and tear at the sores with each step. Now my morale dipped as the bandages on my privates came unstuck and the new skin on my inner thighs tore with each step. When the sun was out, sweat poured down my face. My forehead and the back of my neck were sun-seared. The ultraviolet light pouring through the ozone hole was far more noticeable than on my 1993 journey with Mike. On previous occasions in Antarctica I had seen mirages of mountains and many strange tricks that rays of light play with ice and vapour, such as moondogs, parahelia and fogbows. But this time the light was mostly too intense, too dazzling, despite my ski goggles, to gaze about at all.