No Such Thing as Failure

by David Hempleman-Adams

  My first call back at the hotel from where I had left two months earlier was to Claire of course, and although it was 3.00 a.m. in England this time she answered. Once awake she said she’d missed me, and we arranged to meet in Calais for a family holiday with the girls. Then it was a blissful shower and shave, and time to start paying attention to the twenty-two calls I had waiting from media around the world. Before I left Punta Arenas for Santiago Annie Kershaw also asked me to give a talk to the same elderly American tourists who had dogged my footsteps. I didn’t feel I could refuse, and once I saw how interested they were I felt rather guilty about my previous feelings towards these sixty and seventy-year-olds. In their own way they’d done something rather special travelling to the South Pole. Everyone has to set their own challenges. Some people claim they are walking to one of the Poles but only do the last degree, and I would never want to put down those who achieve anything, but the bottom line is that you have to live with yourself and what you are setting out to do. With adventure there will always be purists, but it all comes down to you. You are doing it for yourself and must be your own policeman.

  More press calls followed in Santiago. One reason there seemed to be so much interest was that I was only the second person to climb Everest and get to the South Pole, and the first to do so with all seven summits. And only three people, two Norwegians and a Pole, had ever made it to the South Pole before solo and unsupported. Then it was a flight to Paris where my brother Mark picked me up and drove me to Calais to wait for the family. It seems like more than three months since I left, but all thoughts of being away are soon banished as I am crushed under the weight of three squealing small girls hugging me, even if Claire is less than impressed by the frostbite on my nose.

  * * *

  There was one thing I was always going to try and do again: complete a fifteen-year odyssey that started back in 1983, manage the one thing that I knew I’d always feel was a gaping hole in my or any other adventurer’s list of achievements—finally make it to the North Pole, by hook or by crook. Precious few people have walked there from solid land in the north of Canada, but as I prepared to leave home in late February 1998 I also knew that I was on the verge of something even greater. I stood to become the first person in history to attain the highest summits on all seven continents, as well as all four of the North and South Geographic and Magnetic Poles. Done correctly, in my view, heading north from the edge of solid land in the Arctic, and south in the Antarctic from the shore at the edge of the continent (the Magnetic South Pole is in fact situated over the ocean, so involved a terrifying trip by yacht from Hobart in Tasmania) I am still the only man or woman who can say I have been to all these places doing so properly, rather than simply being dropped-off and walking the last degree or so.

  After my first attempt in 1983 to become the first Briton to walk solo to the North Pole had ended in crushing failure, I’d regained a lot of my self-confidence, as well as vital experience, becoming the first person to walk solo and unsupported to the Magnetic North Pole the following year. Since then my business and family commitments had kept me away from these longer expeditions, until I’d returned to them with a vengeance in 1992 leading the first team in a desperate trek to the Geomagnetic North Pole, and in 1996 taking a further group of Arctic novices to the Magnetic North Pole. In between, earlier in 1996, I’d of course become the first Briton to walk solo and unsupported to the South Pole, and I’d made my first summit of Everest in 1993. Now I heard again the siren call of the North Pole. I felt my experience gave me a decent chance of a crack at it. However, I’d made up my mind that it wasn’t something I would set out again to do alone.

  There are intense rivalries in the British adventuring community, and although I would perhaps claim to be more easygoing than most I couldn’t for the life of me think of anyone who would put up with me for two months or, perhaps more importantly, avoid driving me round the bend. So I started to think of other possibilities. The British and Norwegian rivalry in polar exploration goes back to Scott and Amundsen, even beyond that, and frankly they have generally had more success than we have. Although other British adventurers have always seemed reluctant to seek advice from them, I’ve consistently trusted and respected their experience, equipment and seemingly greater fitness, most of which perhaps stem from their living in a country the majority of which is already covered with ice and snow for much of the year. Why not bury the hatchet and find a Norwegian for a joint national expedition?

  My first thought was my friend Borge Ousland, but he wasn’t free at the time as he was returning to Antarctica for another attempt to cross the continent, an expedition that he’d failed on at the same time as I made it to the South Pole. Who could he suggest, I asked? Borge offered me a couple of names, and when the first was unable to consider the proposition as he was returning to the Norwegian Navy, I phoned the other, a young man of twenty-six called Rune Gjeldnes. I’d been told he was a member of the Norwegian Marinejegerkommandoen, their equivalent of our Special Boat Service, and this initially made me a little reluctant to make the call—I’m often concerned that the perhaps misplaced courage of military men can be a liability somewhere as unforgiving as the Arctic. Borge had reassured me about Rune however, but when I first spoke to him he didn’t really seem very interested either. Although he offered me no real prospect of convincing him, he agreed that if I flew out to Norway we could meet for a drink to discuss it.

  We met in a bar in Bergen, one beer turned into two and two into many, and I immediately warmed to Rune and began to think he might be my perfect companion. He obviously had immense experience of polar conditions, having recently skied the entire 1,830-mile length of Greenland in eighty days, but although his reluctance appeared to be waning he was currently involved in a lecture and book tour. What seemed to worry him most was that he would be unable to devote sufficient time to planning the trip, and probably couldn’t promise to do more than turn up in Canada at the appointed time. I assured him this wasn’t a problem and I was happy to handle that side of things, with a little input from him concerning equipment. I was going to need an answer fairly soon, but agreed to give him ten days to think it over. ‘If I come,’ he said, ‘I have to do all the cooking. I don’t trust your English food.’ I was hardly going to argue, if he wanted to take on the chore I hated most. When I called as arranged Rune picked up the phone, said hello, then ‘Why not?’ We were on.

  But this was all eighteen months before Rune and I were driving to Heathrow for our departure on 28 February 1998, as we’d already had a first abortive attempt at the North Pole the year before. Although we felt we were pretty well-prepared and had the best possible equipment there were perhaps harbingers of doom from the very start of our trip in March 1997. Rune accidentally left the blue bag containing many of his most important personal possessions on the plane that dropped us off on the ice at Ward Hunt Island. As well as photos, cassettes and a Bible—somewhat incongruous for a trained killer, I felt—this also carried something even more important: ten weeks’ supply of tobacco, which for a heavy smoker such as Rune was a disaster of almost unimaginable proportions. He was deeply embarrassed and determined we must set out anyway, but I knew how important this was to him and insisted we should wait for a couple of days until the plane returned with a Dutch expedition that was setting out just after us. When dreadful blizzards set in however, those two days became eight before we finally left, even if Rune was now happily puffing away.

  I could hardly complain however, as the returning plane also carried the consignment of travellers’ cheques that I’d forgotten to sign, without which our base man Dave Spurden could pay for nothing, including any emergency medical evacuation in the worst case scenario. So by the time of our departure we were truly quits, but things were no easier once we actually got going. The ice rubble was far worse than we had expected, and very quickly we began to have problems with Rune’s sledge, which he insisted should be more heavily loaded as he knew he was stronger t
han I am. We had ordered sledges made of Kevlar, which is also used to make bulletproof jackets and about as tough as anything gets, but we soon found ours were clearly constructed from the much weaker fiberglass and they soon started to show signs of wear and tear. We had no alternative but to start relaying half loads, leaving what we had carried at a suitable clearing in the tangled maze of ice blocks, then going back to collect the rest. For every mile we were moving forward we therefore had to walk three, across the 100 miles we managed in our first forty short seven-hour Arctic days.

  We had no idea how long our sledges could last, despite the cracks in them being patched-up each night with wire, but we’d also been held back barely a week after we left by an unexpected visitor, when a terror-stricken and frostbitten young man called Alan Bywaters, a twenty-one-year-old student from London, tumbled into our tent and collapsed. We’d met him back at Resolute and knew he was planning to set out after us, which we and everyone else considered foolhardy in the extreme due to his lack of proper equipment and almost total inexperience. We’d suspected he was following in our tracks for a while, which makes sense if you see a pre-established route, but he told us that he’d fallen into a lead of open water, seen his sledge with his radio and all his equipment vanish, and knew that if he couldn’t find us he was as good as dead. We got hot soup inside him and tried to thaw him out slowly, sandwiched between our two bodies in an attempt to prevent hypothermia overcoming him. A plane managed to reach us and evacuate Alan after four days, landing at the third attempt and barely managing to lift off successfully from the short landing strip. We’d expended time and a lot more food and fuel in helping Alan, but we were in no doubt that it was the only thing we could have done.

  We were just over the 85th parallel when Rune’s sledge finally gave up the ghost. I see a trail of his equipment in the snow as he strides on ahead of me oblivious to what has happened, until I call him back. There’s no way we can fix it, what’s left is more hole than sledge, and we know that it’s the end of this expedition. It’s pretty obvious to us both that we can only radio that we need to be picked-up. We’re both devastated, but I know I will have to try again next year and my biggest concern is whether Rune will come back with me. We’ve made a perfect if slightly incongruous team, myself the slightly bumbling businessman and father of three, him seemingly laid-back but a trained killer underneath, but we’ve just gelled. I needn’t worry however, as Rune very quickly forms a pact with me to return, and we immediately start planning how we will do things differently. He also cheers up immensely at remembering that although he’d run out of tobacco the day before, he’d packed a huge Churchill cigar to smoke in celebration at the Pole, and now there is no reason to delay doing so.

  It takes a couple of days for us to be collected, by which time our plans are well advanced, and now it’s happened we’re glad to be out of there. On arriving back at Eureka we’re desperate for a proper meal, but having no ready money we seem destined to do without as there’s no way we can pay the exorbitant $60 each, until I promise to send the chef a bottle of whisky from England, which does the trick in a place where alcohol is so strictly rationed. A couple of days later we arrive back at Heathrow the day after the general election, a grinning Tony Blair entering Downing Street, and the world seems to have changed in a great many ways.

  I took a couple of months off from organizing the following year’s expedition to spend the time I’d promised I would with my family, including a visit to Rune’s farm in Norway, and I also took Claire to the opera festival in Verona and to Venice. There were many pledges to other friends I had to fulfil, a lot of wonderful but rather expensive meals that needed to be bought, but every one a debt that had to be repaid. The Royal Humane Society announced they were giving us bravery awards for our rescue of Alan Bywaters and, prouder still for me, in October I travelled up to Glasgow to be awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Livingston Medal. The roll-call of former recipients reads like a list of all my polar heroes: Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, but also explorers such as Sir Edmund Hillary, Sir Francis Chichester and Neil Armstrong.

  In early August preparations started in earnest. We’d sketched out a critical path in terms of planning and this year Rune was able to be much more involved, mostly gathering equipment whilst I chased sponsors, the great majority of whom decided to stick with us. Money would be even more important this year, as we were planning to have two resupplies with a third potential one as an emergency reserve. The first would be after fifteen days at 84.1 degrees, meaning our new and definitely Kevlar sledges would be much lighter over the hardest ice rubble of the first 65 miles. The next twenty days should be easier going, so we would be able to carry more weight faster over a greater distance before our second resupply at 86.3 degrees, the point beyond which the cost of a flight doubles. We hoped to be fit and strong by the final section, which we planned should take twenty-five days but carrying food for thirty.

  This year we had more preparation time, but we also had a very clear idea of what we needed. Apart from different sledges we got a smaller and lighter tent and shorter skies, both of which we knew would be an improvement. We pretty much saw eye to eye concerning food, which Rune would handle once again, and clothing where we both generally approved of that based on Norwegian models. I made sure all our sponsorship badges were sewn on our clothing and equipment, which the previous year we’d done late at night in Resolute at the last minute, depriving ourselves of sleep. I was also determined to be fitter this year before departure. I’ve never been a great fan of training in advance, preferring to acclimatize myself gradually on the ice itself, starting out slowly when it is very cold and the days are short but building up my strength and fitness for when it is a bit warmer and the hours of sunlight longer. That has always been my excuse anyway, although I have to admit I just don’t like the effort of training very much, but it had been a bit frustrating for Rune who was incredibly fit when we set off. So it was back to dragging tyres mile after mile again, the only parts I really enjoyed being when my daughters were sitting on them. I also had to deal with the necessity of putting on an additional two stones in weight. I could tell Claire I was off training when I was actually just going down the pub to drink as much beer as I could, which always does the trick.

  By the end of January 1998 everything was in place. There’d been less daydreaming this time about what lay ahead of us, because I think we were both entirely focused on what we had to do and confident we would do it. Very often it seems that almost the moment you return home from an expedition you forget about how unpleasant and often downright painful so much of it has been. Perhaps that’s an inevitable and essential part of being able to do so again, just as women often say they forget the pain of childbirth. This time we felt we’d thought every point through, knew exactly what it would be like throughout. We were ready for anything the Arctic could throw at us. In mid-February we held a press conference, which I never really like doing in advance of an expedition but is a necessity for raising sponsorship, and then it was the always agonizing process of saying goodbye to my family, made even worse by the fact that my youngest daughter Amelia was due to go into hospital for a minor exploratory operation.

  Claire is normally pretty stoic when I go, but this time she was in tears. I felt an utter bastard leaving her to cope alone yet again and even asked if I should call the whole thing off, but she’d have none of it. Even so, I was feeling pretty guilty as we drove out of our gates and headed for the motorway and Heathrow. This had to be the last time I left home for such a critical expedition. Not only was I getting older, at forty-one I could hardly put my body through this much longer, but also as my daughters grew older they were bound to worry more. I just wasn’t sure how I could continue to justify this and simply had to make it. I had a lot going through my mind, as I fingered my ‘Z’ stone on its piece of dental floss that held it around my neck.

  At Heathrow we met the third member of our team, John Perrins, a ret
ired policeman who was to be our base-camp manager, as well as TV news crews from the BBC and ITN and a newspaper photographer, all of whom would be accompanying us north. After ridiculous confusion about how we should check our shotgun in with the other baggage I finally just make it to my seat on the plane for the long flight to Calgary. Having been upgraded to business class this time I eat and drink too much, since I know it will be a long time before I see champagne and lobster again. In those days you could still get permission to visit the aircraft flight-deck, so I do that and the Captain kindly prints me out a weather report for Resolute. It makes grim reading, the 40 knot wind meaning a wind-chill factor of –72°C.

  From Calgary it is a short hop to Edmonton, where we repeat my regular ritual of spending the night at the Nisku Inn, a hotel surreally built with a fake tropical garden at its heart, as well as sinking some pints in the appropriately named Last Chance Saloon. This will be our last alcohol for several months, apart from our celebratory shots of brandy. We enjoy a large breakfast the next morning, and I’ve managed to increase my weight to 15½ stone by now, which extra bulk will hopefully give me additional stores of energy. It’s about 2½ stone more than my normal weight, but when I returned from the South Pole I’d dropped to only 11. We then board the plane for the long flight to Resolute, having been warned we may not even be able to land there due to thick fog enveloping the airport.

  The plane lands at Yellowknife, a former gold and diamond prospecting town, where we see the last trees that we’ll encounter before our return, and then again at Cambridge Bay, inside the Arctic Circle and where the ground is covered in permafrost. A short period of daylight has recently returned here, but ahead of us on the ice-cap it will still be permanently dark and even colder. We finally reach Resolute in late afternoon, lucky to land, and the brutal –30°C cold slaps me in the face in the brief time it takes us to reach the tiny terminal building. I feel my eyelashes and the hairs inside my nose freeze, and the tip of my nose throbs. Each renewed encounter with such temperatures takes my breath away, and is always something that at first you wonder if you will ever become used to. People joke about Resolute, ‘it is not quite the edge of the world, but you can see it from here,’ and as the vast majority of all supplies have to come by air the arrival of a plane is a major social event. Everyone turns up to see those foolhardy enough to venture north towards the Pole, one of the few reasons that this hugely expensively sustained hamlet of a few hundred Inuit hunters survives since the US and Canadian military air bases departed with the end of the Cold War.