South Pole

by Elizabeth Leane

  10 Adventurers and Extreme Tourists

  The arrival of the teams led by Amundsen and Scott at the South Pole in the summer of 1911–12 was the end point of a long-standing quest. In another sense, however, these expeditions marked a beginning: they were the first in a series of overland traverses to the Pole that now number well into the hundreds. Like the summit of Everest – the ‘third Pole’ – the South Pole retains its allure as the terminus of one of the world’s most testing physical journeys. Yet, unlike Everest’s peak, it is a destination safely and easily reached by those with sufficient funds: a well-established tour company can fly you there, feed you a fresh meal in a heated tent and put you up comfortably overnight, ‘nice and warm’ in your heavy-duty sleeping bag.1

  Where does the category of ‘explorer’ blur into ‘adventurer’ or even ‘extreme tourist’? Robert Headland, in his comprehensive list of Antarctic expeditions, points to the burgeoning in the last decade of the twentieth century of ‘unprecedented activities, such as re-enactment of selected aspects of “heroic age” expeditions, long running races, parachute jumps, ballooning, surfing, diving and kayaking contests, use of snow-boards, various endurance feats, and similar stunts’. Sniffily, but with some justification, he refuses to apply the word ‘exploration’ to such ‘contriving [of] adventures for claims of alleged record breaking and the like’.2

  Historically speaking, however, the line is not always easy to draw.3 The wealthy Lawrence Oates offered to donate £1,000 to Scott’s second expedition if he could be a member. Given that one modern researcher defines Antarctic tourism as ‘the commercial (for profit) transport (including accommodation and catering) of nongovernment travelers to and from Antarctica for the purpose of pleasure’, Oates might – at a stretch – be considered the first tourist to the South Pole.4 Scott’s expedition was not a moneymaking venture but it was a private undertaking, and Oates did effectively pay to be transported to the continent, which presumably represented various pleasures for him, although these were diminishing rapidly by the time he reached the Pole. Early twentieth-century commentators certainly saw the permeability of the border between explorer and tourist. In Wolcott Gibbs’s Antarctic exploration satire Bird Life at the Pole, a South Polar expedition finds itself forestalled at a crucial moment by a group from ‘Popular Polar Tours’.

  These days the line between expeditioner and tourist is even less clear. Most private expeditions to the Pole in the last few decades have relied on a commercial operator for logistical support. And commentators have noted that some modern definitions of tourism would class most scientists and other personnel in Antarctica as tourists simply because their stays are so short.5 In a continent where no one lives permanently, and no one can last long without outside support, everyone is, potentially, a tourist.

  Athletes and adventure tourists fly to 80 degrees south to take part in the annual Antarctic Ice Marathon.

  The confused explorers of Gibbs’s Bird Life at the Pole (1931) are forestalled by an early tourist group.

  What are the attractions of the South Pole as a travel destination, now that it is an inhabited place, with a ‘road’ joining it to McMurdo Station on the coast? For some, there is the personal challenge of making what continues to be, despite innovations in equipment and clothing, and the availability of support and rescue services, an extremely arduous and sometimes dangerous journey. The prominent adventurer Ranulph Fiennes’s reaction to reaching the Pole in late 1980 is a case in point. As part of the Transglobe Expedition (which followed one of the ‘great circles’ of longitude through both poles using surface transport only), he and two others trekked across Antarctica from the edge of Dronning Maud Land – the first transcontinental journey since the Fuchs-Hillary expedition of the 1950s. On arrival at his southernmost destination, Fiennes was ‘exhausted, relieved, and perhaps a little confused by what I found there … a set piece of prefabricated huts, oil drums, woollen socks, and bearded men sustained by a fug of central heating and obscure scientific data’. The adventurers ate in the station canteen, helping out by washing up and refilling the ice cream machine. Fiennes was himself not averse to the conveniences of modern technology: he had ridden a skidoo to the Pole, with an aircraft dropping supplies. But the bathetic conclusion to this leg of his journey in no way detracted from his reverence for the place:

  Although remote, and out of reach of most, there is something of the South Pole in the hearts of all of us. It’s that place to harbour desire and aspiration, a home for that something that calls out to us, urging the human spirit to meet the challenge and the freedom of the wilderness.6

  Personal challenge, along with a sense of deep, meditative pleasure in simply being on and travelling across the plateau, is central to the accounts of many polar journeys, whether they are made by experienced professional adventurers like Fiennes or by self-professed burnt-out urbanites, such as Catherine Hartley. But there are further attractions. For some, as Headland notes, the opportunity of a polar ‘first’ is irresistible. Hartley, along with a companion, was the first British woman to walk to the Pole. Precedence can be based on identity – gender, race, nationality, age, familial relations (parent/child or sibling teams), disability; on the means of travel – use of equipment or vehicles, degree of support, speed, ability to travel solo; and on the route travelled – whether the journey is simply to the Pole or a return journey, a continental crossing, or in combination with other ‘polar’ journeys (North Pole and Everest); and permutations of any of these. The Belgian Dixie Dansercoer, who has himself notched up quite a few firsts, worries in his guidebook for potential Arctic and Antarctic adventurers about the ‘world of polar expeditions … becoming simply a competitive sport’.7

  Conversely, there is the pleasure of repeating the achievements of others. Nostalgia, rather than precedence, here becomes the main theme, with expeditions recreating, with varying degrees of attempted authenticity, the seminal journeys of the ‘Heroic Era’. The possibility of vindicating a favoured explorer or shedding light through direct experience on a controversial historical point is an added bonus.

  Adventure skiers nearing the South Pole after travelling from the coast.

  Lastly, for those unable or unwilling to travel under their own steam, there is nonetheless kudos – as well as, no doubt, a sense of personal satisfaction – in simply being at a location that was, not much more than a century ago, out of reach of humanity, and is still, on a global scale, a very remote and unvisited place. Since 1988 it has been possible – if expensive – to pay to be transported to the Pole as a tourist. There is not a great deal to do once you arrive, but this is no real deterrent; perhaps the one thing better than being at the Pole is being able to say you have been there. Given that walking or skiing from the coast – or for any significant distance in the Antarctic conditions – is beyond the power of many of us, a commercial tourist flight is the obvious means to achieve a physical presence at 90 south. Even those working at the Pole are not immune to the pleasure of the boast of having been – even better, lived – there. They ‘are conscious of and enjoy their status at the most famous location on the continent’, but their pleasure is hampered by the fact that ‘the location itself generates the fame, more than anyone working there or anything that happens there.’8 In this sense Polies have something of the tourist about them, too.

  In the blurry continuum between South Polar exploring and adventuring, a possible transition point is the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of the late 1950s. After this time, with a scientific base established and constantly resupplied at the Pole, and various national programmes conducting scientific and exploratory activities in the continent’s interior, private expeditioners could be more accurately classed as adventurers. Since 1957 polar travellers have known that, having arrived at the Pole, they do not have to turn around and trudge back, but can always, whether by choice or due to an emergency, be evacuated by plane. This knowledge makes a big difference to the journey (not to ment
ion the load that needs to be pulled).

  However, this situation creates its own problems. The relationship between national programmes and private expeditions has never been cosy. Although the former will grudgingly provide support and rescue services if required, they do not encourage independent activity on the continent, which could potentially be a significant drain on their time and resources. A classic example of a clash between private adventurers and the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) is the ‘Footsteps of Scott’ expedition. Adventurers Roger Mear, Robert Swan and Gareth Wood followed the path of Scott’s polar party, wintering at Cape Evans in 1985 before departing for the Pole, like Scott’s team, in early November. They hauled sledges to the Pole – a distance of around 1,400 km (900 miles) – with no radio contact and no outside assistance, arriving about a week earlier than Scott had. They had arranged secretly for a pilot to pick them up from the Pole, but things went awry when their expedition ship sank off Cape Evans on the day they reached their southern target. In their account of the journey, their biggest adversary was not this misfortune or the hostile environment, but rather the USAP, which required them to be evacuated from the Pole on one of its own aircraft. While the individual workers at the Pole clapped and cheered them as they arrived, official representatives were far from welcoming: ‘I have nothing against you people personally, but you were warned. We made it clear before … There is no place in the Antarctic for adventures such as yours’.9 It remains U.S. policy that private polar travellers cannot expect to be taken in, fed or even welcomed at Amundsen-Scott Station: ‘Tourists aglow from having arrived at the South Pole are met by management with a unique official courtesy that borders on scorn, and with indifference by Pole citizens.’10

  The earliest of South Polar adventurers did not follow in the footsteps of Amundsen and Scott but rather in the contrails of Richard Byrd. The year 1965 saw the first flight over the Pole by a private plane: sponsored by the aircraft and spacecraft manufacturing company Rockwell-Standard, a Flying Tigers jet, The Pole Cat, travelled a route that also took in the North Pole. In early 1970 the Norwegians Thor Tjøntveit and Einar Pedersen flew a Cessna aeroplane from New Zealand, via McMurdo, to the South Pole, and on to Chile. At almost exactly the same time the American Max Conrad, the so-called Flying Grandfather, piloted a twin-engined plane along the same initial route. He just beat the Norwegians, gaining the record for the first civilian flight to arrive at the Pole, but not the first to return: he crashed when taking off. His plane, The White Penguin, was abandoned at the Pole, and remains there; Conrad (67 at the time) was flown out care of the USAP. Over the next couple of decades, several more American aviators flew over the South Pole as part of record-breaking journeys taking in both poles: Elgen Long, Brooke Knapp (the first woman to pilot a plane on a bi-polar journey) and Richard Norton. Flying over the Pole had the advantage of avoiding the lukewarm official reception offered to those who landed: ‘a cup of coffee represented the sum total of American generosity for the tired flyer at the South Pole’.11

  The quintessential polar journey remained, however, an overland haul – walking, skiing, in a small group or alone, perhaps with dogs, preferably with minimal support and mechanical help. It was inevitable that the ‘Footsteps of Scott’ expedition would be followed by more adventurers tracing the paths of ‘Heroic Era’ journeys. The ‘Ninety Degrees South’ expedition, led by the Norwegian glaciologist Monica Kristensen, aimed to take Amundsen’s route to the Pole. Using dog teams, they left from the Bay of Whales at about the same time that Mear and his companions were trudging over the plateau. Suffering from a late start and comparatively slow progress, the expedition was forced to turn back at around 86 degrees south; if they had achieved their goal, Kristensen would have been the first woman to reach the Pole over land. As it turned out, this first went to two members of the earliest tourist traverse, Shirley Metz and Victoria Murden, part of a group who arrived at the Pole in early 1989. Kristensen led expeditions to the South Pole several more times in the early 1990s, in search of Amundsen’s buried tent, but the quest ended in tragedy when a team member plunged to his death in a crevasse.

  If Amundsen’s and Scott’s footsteps were being retraced, then so too, naturally, were Shackleton’s. The renowned South Tyrolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner, together with the German Arved Fuchs, took on the challenge of completing a transcontinental crossing – the task that Shackleton had to abandon in 1915 when his ship, the Endurance, famously sank in the Weddell Sea. Messner and Fuchs used two airdropped resupply depots, but no dogs or motorized vehicles. Unable to leave, as planned, from the outer edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf, they started from a point 500 km (311 miles) inside the shelf in mid-November 1989, reaching the Pole on New Year’s Eve, and arriving at Ross Island the following February. At the same time another continental crossing was taking place: the highly publicized International Trans-Antarctica Expedition, made up of six men from six different countries. The route they chose was far longer than Messner’s – 6,400 km (3,975 miles), taking them through five different stations – and required multiple airdropped supplies and refreshment of the dog teams. The expedition left in the middle of the Antarctic winter and took 213 days to complete the journey.12

  Both Messner’s team and the Trans-Antarctica Expedition were keen to raise awareness about Antarctica’s endangered future, at a time when national programmes were debating the possibility of mining in the continent and environmental organizations were promoting the alternative idea of a World Park. The 1991 ‘Madrid Protocol’ introduced a range of environmental policies, including the exclusion of sledge dogs from the continent; the final dogs were removed in early 1994. One of the last private expeditions to use them inadvertently demonstrated the wisdom of the policy: when the remarkable 87-year-old Norman D. Vaughan, expert dog-driver and veteran of Byrd’s 1928–30 South Polar expedition, flew into the continent in late 1993 to climb the mountain named after him, the plane crashed and several of his dogs escaped, to unknown fates (paw prints were seen many miles away).13 He succeeded, presumably sans dogs, a year later. With the days of using dog teams at an end, a new limitation was placed on expeditions, especially those attempting to replicate the ‘Heroic’ experience.

  There were, however, many other modes of getting to the Pole, some less obvious than others. In early 1992 the Japanese adventurer Shinji Kazama reached the South Pole on a modified Yamaha motorcycle, having previously conquered the North Pole and several iconic mountains by the same means. His 24-day trip – made with support from a team on snowmobiles – set an overland speed record for a South Pole traverse (it had taken Hillary’s tractors 82 days). It was well and truly beaten, however, by a group of six-wheeled ‘Snow Bugs’ used in the Russian Millennium Expedition, and then by a modified six-wheel-drive Ford Van in 2005, which took just less than three days to make the journey. The first bio-fuelled vehicle journey to the Pole – part of a round trip – was completed in late 2010, demonstrating the capabilities of the technology. Non-motorized traverses also proliferated, with adventurers trying out parasails, kite-skis and bicycles for all or parts of the journey.

  Shinji Kazama at the South Pole.

  For some adventurers, a particular challenge was located in their own bodies. Cato Pedersen, a Norwegian Paralympic medallist who has no arms, skied to the Pole in 1994 with two companions, hauling his own load and using a prosthetic right arm to hold a ski-pole. Alan Lock, near-blind, made the journey in 2012. The paraplegic Grant Korgan used a device called a ‘sit-ski’ to traverse roughly the last degree to the Pole on the exact centenary of Scott’s arrival. In late 2013 the British royal Prince Harry joined a group of wounded servicemen and – women who walked 200 km (124 miles) to the Pole, having made a similar journey in the Arctic; a documentary of the event, Harry’s South Pole Heroes, appeared on British television shortly afterwards. Raising money or awareness for charities and causes – along with continual blogging about the adventure for the benefit of supporters – has become a com
mon component of polar endeavour in the twenty-first century.

  Of course, polar traverses – and polar tourism of any kind – are limited to the small segment of the world’s population that has the means (or the ability to raise the funds) to pay for the travel. As a result, South Polar adventurism and tourism tends to be skewed towards particular demographics, a realization that in itself generates new ‘firsts’. For example, Sibusiso Vilane, brought up in a poor rural community in Swaziland, became ‘the first black African to walk unassisted to the South Pole’ in early 2008, raising money for disadvantaged African children.14

  For another set of adventurers, the challenge lies in paring down the journey as far as possible. Expeditions are classed according to how much help the traveller receives: ‘unassisted’ means that no external source of power (such as dogs, wind or motorized vehicle) is used; ‘unsupported’ means that there are no resupplies – the traveller carries all food and equipment for the journey. The first person to make a successful unassisted and unsupported solo traverse to the South Pole was the Norwegian Erling Kagge, in 1993. The following year his compatriot Liv Arnesen became the second person (and first woman) to achieve this, writing up her experiences in a book titled (in English translation) Good Girls Do Not Ski to the South Pole. A third Norwegian, Børge Ousland, passed through the Pole on the first solo continental crossing in 1996, although he was assisted by parasail.