Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Sockeye taught us how to lassoo bucking steers. All his life he had entered steer-roping contests, despite losing a testicle when gored by a bull, and won whatever team event he and his eldest son entered, including at the ‘big one’, the Calgary Stampede. I went on an outing with Sockeye, towing a couple of days’ food and safety gear, to scout out the coastline to the north for a suitable vehicle training area and a bay that was at least partly ice-free. After eight hours Sockeye dropped behind and when at length I lost sight of him, I turned back. He was lying in the snow amidst blood stains from some cut to his leg and not looking at all well. He had lost a glove and the temperature was well below freezing. He spoke with a slurred edge to his consonants and I sensed hypothermia was not far off. We drank tea from a Thermos before turning about and trudging slowly back along our trail. Normally I was the old man on expeditions. It felt good to have a yet more senior citizen along too. I started calling him ‘Old Sockeye’.

  But watching Sockeye floundering in the Alaskan snow set me thinking. I was, at fifty-three, some ten years younger than he, but I knew he worked out daily in his gym and always kept himself fit. He neither smoked nor drank alcohol. And yet a mere eight hours of gentle trudging in calf-deep snow had rendered him useless for further progress. Soon the ageing process would drag at me, and I too would gasp for breath, hold up colleagues and wonder whether it was time to learn golf or bridge. I glimpsed the future and did not like what I saw. A life without the prospect of any physical challenge would be no life at all.

  For many days Arctic storms blasted Dan’s hut. Then the weather cleared up. We spent a number of days and quite a few nights working out how best to progress over deep snow and shiny ice. Whenever we met up with deep soft snow we took the wheels off one by one and replaced them with triangular tracked units weighing forty-five kilos apiece. Even with all four of these mini ‘tank tracks’ in place we often bellied deep into drifts, whereupon someone had to wade ahead, often waist height, and dig deep channels to fix fast points for the winches. We soon became slick at such drills, and during our second month in Alaska we drove right over the York Mountain range and down to Teller, the first road vehicles ever to do so in winter.

  We turned our attention in early May to the arrival of the Arctic spring and the break-up of sea-ice in some of the nearby coastal bays. There was a long spell of calm, clear weather so Mac Mackenney and I went jogging in hills where wolf, bear and wolverine prints criss-crossed those of lesser beasts, partridge and moose. Mac, who did most of our cooking and all of our sponsored food rationing, made friends with many of the Inuit and sensibly exchanged our sponsored tinned rations for fresh food and anything else that we were short of. Our New Zealander, who had strident opinions on many topics, complained in surprisingly angry tones that Mac was abusing both Inuit hospitality and the generosity of our sponsors by using barter simply to help our tight Land Rover budget to stretch further. Mac was taken aback by this verbal venom, but we avoided making an issue of the matter since our inter-team relations had been previously untroubled. But I resolved then and there to re-assess the team make-up before the main journey. After thirty years of travel with small groups, I believed I could spot a likely source of trouble fairly quickly.

  In early May I found an open bay only a mile from Dan’s house, so we towed the catamaran-shaped pontoon, sledge-like, along the coast behind a Land Rover, and on reaching the belt of rough pressure ice that formed a wall up to four metres high and 300 metres wide between land and sea, we cut open a rough lane using axes. At some point soon this zone of topsyturvy ice chunks would fracture with no warning and float out to sea, so we advanced with the pontoon pushed ahead of the vehicle until it slid down into the sea, where we moored it to two ice-anchors screwed into the seaward edge of the ice. We lowered the ramps and drove up them from ice to pontoon. There was quite a sea swell, so to watch this, our first launching rehearsal, was tense, especially for the driver.

  The vehicle was quickly clamped into the correct position atop the catamaran-shaped hull, and the power take-off spindle, a standard device for farmers in Britain, was clipped into a custom-made box unit which allowed us to transfer from mechanical to hydraulic power, which in turn rotated the twin paddle-steamer blades at the rear of the pontoon’s twin hulls. Speed and steering functions were controlled by the driver inside the Land Rover’s cab. Sockeye, Mac and I watched with pride as our three mechanics ‘swam’ the Land Rover far out to sea and dodged between ice-floes. These semi sea-ice conditions were, along with the snow flanks of the Rockies, the most severe obstacles we were likely to meet on our 21,000-mile journey. The trials had proved successful and we returned to Britain to announce that we would set out in the autumn of 1998. Two years of solid unpaid work by all the team, the design engineers and sponsors, had finally paid off.

  Our contacts at Land Rover from the very top decision-makers to the shop floor had backed us to the hilt all the way. Then, less than three months before our departure BMW’s German headquarters decided to cut various Land Rover budgets. Money was needed to launch a new model, the Freelander, so Transglobal was given the chop. So much wasted time and effort to no avail. In nearly forty years of sponsored projects, I have only suffered from last-minute sponsor-withdrawal once, so I suppose I have been lucky overall.

  I had failed in Antarctica, and now with Transglobal. I had to recognise the signs. Ginny was, as always, a sympathetic shoulder to nuzzle against. We went skiing in Courcheval, the activity and the place that we both loved best. We made plans to spend much more time together, although I had learned at least twenty years before never to promise Ginny that I would do no more expeditions.

  When I was in Antarctica she had been interviewed by Woman’s Weekly. The reporter, Sue Pilkington, reported her as saying: ‘Of course I worry, but I don’t sit here with my head in my hands because that’s very negative and doesn’t do anybody any good . . . I’ve never said, “Don’t go” and I never will. I’m supportive of everything he does.’ Any suggestion that she was being brave was dismissed. ‘It isn’t brave at all. I was brought up in a fairly strict, old-fashioned, stiff upper lip kind of way where you don’t show emotions. You don’t just sit down and weep. You have to get on with things. If I hadn’t been brought up like that, I might find it very difficult.’

  She went on to confirm my own memory of our shared Antarctic winter. ‘It was one of the happiest winters of my life . . . a crisp, dry cold not like the miserable damp we get here, and our huts were tough and warm.’ When asked if she thought I would ever retire and become a pipe-and-slippers man, she replied, ‘He wears bedroom slippers most of the time when he’s here, but I can’t see him ever retiring.’

  After twelve years on Exmoor, Ginny had taken on three local people to help run everything. Gina Rawle organised the office and the lectures, Jean Smith helped out in the house, and Pippa Wood on the farm. My accountant suggested I should ask the Inland Revenue if anyone should be treated as fully employed, so I called some tax lady in Taunton who visited the farm.

  ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘is your company called Westward Ho Adventure Holidays, although you tell me you have never run a commercial holiday?’

  ‘True,’ I agreed, ‘but when we married nearly thirty years ago we did intend to and so named the company accordingly. Now we make an income through cattle, sheep, writing books and lecturing, but why waste £100 re-registering the company name?’

  She gave no immediate response, but I could sense her bristling with suspicion. She called in two more senior Revenue officers who interrogated both of us and suggested to Ginny that she only farmed as a tax dodge. Ginny was furious and told them exactly where to get off. That started a five-year-long ‘tax investigation’ into our company and our personal affairs, going back ten years through our accounts and files. For five long years my accountant answered constant Revenue questions, for which he naturally charged us.

  Since neither the Antarctic nor the Bering Strait projects had succeeded,
my normal post-expedition income sources were not available. There was nothing to write or lecture about. At some point I would need another expedition, and it had better be a successful one, to boost the fairly meagre profits accruing from all Ginny’s hard work and perseverance with the farm. The only way I knew to stand a fair chance of expedition success was by keeping fit so, rememembering the extreme rigours of Mike Stroud’s Eco-Challenge race in Canada three years before, I rang him up. Would he enter a team for another Eco race? And might I join it? Sadly, Mike was too busy, having taken over big responsibilities at Southampton General Hospital, but David Smith, the Exeter cardiologist and good friend of us both who had been with us in Canada, did agree to put together a four-person team and enter the 1998 race which was to take place in Morocco.

  We duly arrived in Morocco that summer with a team which included Hélène Diamantides, Britain’s fastest female 100 kilometre endurance racer, Steven Seaton, an accomplished marathon-runner and the editor of Runner’s World magazine, David and me. We had trained hard together at weekends over the previous year, but we were up against the world’s best endurance racers, fifty-five teams from twenty-seven countries over a race course of 300 rugged, remote miles. There were no official overnight stops and no sleeping areas, for sleep deprivation is a major feature of Eco-Challenge racing. Lack of sleep cuts in with most racers after three days and nights. But if one of the four of us failed to turn up at the finish in eleven days, the whole team would be disqualified.

  In Morocco 220 racers on 220 camels lined up along the beach at Agadir. Mark Burnett, the ex-British Paratrooper whose idea the Eco race was, fired the start gun and pandemonium ensued. Our Hélène fell off at once when her mount’s girth rope broke. Minutes were lost fixing it but, through the luck of the draw, we had no single camel that held us back and we had made four pairs of lightweight camel stirrups back in Britain so that we could trot in comfort, whereas a stirrupless trot would quickly become too painful on the backside to keep up. So we finished that fourteen-kilometre leg in fifth place. The next seven-kilometre sector involved a fast run along the coastline in between the advancing tide and the rocky shoreline. Slower teams had ever increasing swimming stretches as the sea reached the cliffs. We all carried heavy rucksacks.

  We then reached a beach where two two-seater kayaks were awaiting each team. We launched ours through the pounding surf just as we had been taught by Royal Marines off the Cornish coast. The trouble was that the most ferocious surf back then had been two feet high, whereas in Morocco it averaged thirteen feet. Each time over the next eighty kilometres that we had to call in at an obligatory checkpoint, the surf defeated our attempts to reach the beach unscathed. Time and again both our kayaks were rolled and much of our gear was sodden.

  Next came 120 kilometres of trekking and canyoning through the Atlas Mountains, burning hot by day and cold by night. When we came to the clifftop above the Taghia Gorge, lying in nineteenth position, we found nine teams huddled about their camp cookers in a strong, cold wind. They were awaiting their turns to descend a dizzy 200-metre abseil rope to the gorge below, and a backlog of teams had developed. Most teams were using the respite for a brief sleep.

  We sat around our cooker pleased with our recent trek, having overtaken eleven teams en route.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to stop here.’ We looked up sharply at David, our team captain. I could not believe my ears: he had been going so well.

  ‘What do you mean? Stop?’ I breathed.

  ‘I have a health problem. I can’t explain, but I really cannot go further.’ He was adamant.

  Hélène, a highly competitive person, said, ‘If you drop out here, David, I will too. I see no point in carrying on if we are unable to gain a qualified place at the Finish. And teams without all four members do not qualify.’

  I looked at Steven. He shrugged. ‘I would be happy to keep going, but the safety rules forbid teams of less than three continuing.’

  I looked around and it struck me that there might be other teams with similar problems. So Steven and I went from group to group and came upon Team California. They had just suffered the withdrawal of half their number from gastroenteritis. Greg, the team leader, was small and cheerful and had recently won the international Camel Trophy Race, a vehicle-borne form of adventure race, with the US Team. He introduced us to Kim, who was very dark-skinned and six feet tall but was of Chinese American parentage. She was a karate champion in California.

  ‘I limp badly from blisters,’ Steven told them, ‘and Ran here is past his prime, but we always keep going.’

  So the four of us set off. The race computers require that each team has a specific title, and we now raced as Team California. We carried on up the Atlas, slowly gaining height, after leaving David and Hélène at the gorge. Six hours later, Kim collapsed, groaning and retching. Greg recognised the trouble at once and broke the seal on his radio beacon to summon a race helicopter.

  ‘Kim has gastro – same as our other two members,’ he sighed. ‘It was the water we drank on the third day out, from a harmless-looking pool.’

  We waited eight hours until dawn when the race helicopter arrived and removed Kim. Five hours later we reached the riding section. Each of us drew a horse, Berber-Arab cross-blood animals of the Moroccan Army. As we mounted two tall men came up. They had lost the female member of their team, thrown off her horse and badly hurt, and their fourth member, her fiancé, had decided to stay with her. Their race title was Team Germany and they asked if they could join us. Greg had no objection even when they said that we must collectively now become Team Germany or their sponsors back home would be angry. The five of us rode the next fifty kilometres fast enough, mostly in the dark, until Greg began to vomit. He too had gastroenteritis, so we left him at a checkpoint along with our horses.

  For ten hours we followed the two Germans up Mount M’Goun (4,071 metres), the second highest peak in North Africa. Here we met a team waiting to be airlifted out as one of them had severe symptoms of altitude sickness. Darkness came as we neared the summit ridge, so our German leader decided we should rest for two hours. I snuggled into my thin race-bag against the cold but, moments later it seemed, I was woken by a choking groan and horrid gurgling sounds.

  Our leader, over six feet four inches and an ex-swimming Olympian, had for warmth tied up the ties of his six-foot-long sleep-bag, but was then violently sick and started to drown or asphyxiate, unable to untie the knots above his head.

  Steven found a knife and cut the knots of the German’s bag. The second German, Soren, activated his rescue beacon and, soon after dawn, the helicopter took away our severely ill ex-leader.

  We eventually summitted M’Goun and gazed at the stupendous views of the Atlas Mountains all about us.

  ‘Steven,’ Soren announced, ‘and Ran. I should tell you in confidence that I am actually Danish and only joined Team Germany because we have no national team of our own at present.’ We laughed as we realised that we could not alter our team title. There were no Germans in Team Germany. After an exhausting, sleep-deprived, bloody (due to frequent falls) mountain bike ride of 190 kilometres, we arrived in the centre of Marrakesh, unqualified, bruised, ‘German’, but happy, for we had beaten the eleven-day deadline by twenty-four hours and seen a wild, untamed part of Africa that we could never have glimpsed as mere tourists. We finished in twenty-ninth place, but were ‘disqualified’ since we had lost two of our original team members.

  Apart from the sixteen kayak casualties, fifteen racers were treated for severe altitude sickness, many for gastroenteritis, exhaustion, hypothermia and dehydration.

  Steven agreed that we should enter the next Eco-Challenge, wherever in the world it was planned for.

  Early in 1999 I was paid a worthwhile amount as a publisher’s advance for an expedition book. An expedition I was to pay dearly for.

  14

  Falling Through

  Not long after the Bering Strait project was scuppered by BMW, I heard that pla
ns for the coming millennium year were astir in Norway to knock off the Arctic journey which most polar pundits considered the only true polar challenge that still remained. All others had been achieved during the twentieth century and 99 per cent of them by the Canadians, Russians, British and Norwegians.

  Børge Ousland, following his Antarctic crossing success, had tried crossing the Arctic Ocean solo, but had to be airlifted over an especially lethal area. However, he had managed to travel solo and unsupported to the North Pole from Siberia via sea-ice floes that drift slowly towards the Pole. Nobody had as yet completed the final polar grail of reaching the Pole solo and unsupported along the North American or direct route, which involved travel against the prevailing currents.

  Norway had at the time at least a dozen powerful cross-country skiers with polar experience, each of whom might be preparing for the solo direct route. The rumour mill favoured one Sjur Mordre but, whoever it might or might not be, it was clear that this last of the great polar challenges was about to be broached.

  I approached my literary agent Ed Victor who, despite my recent run of failures, was enthusiastic and quickly gained a good contract. So, with Ginny’s blessing, I began the search for a sponsor and struck lucky quite quickly with the giant logistics corporation, Exel. They, in turn, chose the Cancer Research Campaign as our charity and Prince Charles agreed to be patron, as he had for all my expeditions for the past twenty-two years. Mac Mackenney, the linchpin of our Bering Strait project, would be Arctic base leader in Resolute Bay, helped by Morag Howell who had become the Base Manager of First Air in Resolute Bay, the air charter company that would fly me to my Arctic start point at Ward Hunt Island. Morag had by then been involved in the polar journeys for some two decades and seen all the developments in radio communication from remote places. Of that period, she wrote: