Book Excerpts
Prologue
Sue
To have been privileged enough to take part in the first All Women’s Expedition to the North Pole was something that I am still benefiting from. Victoria and I started off not really understanding the Arctic, or even what we would achieve from the expedition, and now, a decade plus on, we are still learning from our experiences there.
We approached the expedition from very different angles. I had just recovered from breast cancer – I was lucky and had a full recovery, and so for me the expedition was a reaffirmation of life and a new beginning. I would like to inspire those who are suffering from breast cancer and show how cancer helped me to find a goal, which may at the time have been seen as unachievable. However, with enthusiasm and work these goals can become possible. For me, positive thought helped, as I knew, deep down, that I would get better. However, I am aware that positive thought is not necessarily the way forward for everyone. Not everyone has the luck that I had, but I do believe that our expedition helped in my healing process….
Without doubt our lives changed. Who could come back from this kind of expedition without feeling a huge sense of achievement? To suddenly realise that by going out and talking about our experiences to other people we could perhaps inspire and encourage them to push themselves a tiny bit further, and to take on some project which had been lurking in their minds for some time.
Victoria
When we were first asked to write the story of our expedition, over a decade ago now, my life was very different to how it is now. I was young, free and single, living in Oxford and training to be a Primary school teacher. Being a part of the first all women’s expedition to the North Pole had given me an inner confidence, a self-belief, the courage to give up my career in London and pursue a dream to work with children.
Since then my life has seen many more changes; I am now married, living near Bath, have a five year old son and a new career in educational publishing. However, where I am today has, again, been totally shaped by my experiences in the Arctic. If I’ve faced a challenge during the last decade, and have, many times, I have been safe in the knowledge that I can work around a problem and that I do have the necessary willpower. While in the Arctic we were tested to our limits and beyond, yet somehow we found an inner strength that we didn’t know we had and carried on.
Over the past few years I have faced challenges that have ranged from the mundane to the heartbreaking but with the tools learned from our expedition my ever-growing inner self-belief has kept me going. At times our mantra “anything is possible“ has got in the way, and I have had to learn the very difficult lesson that sometimes anything is not possible and I’ve had to let go. I have come to appreciate that saying “no” is not necessarily failure or indeed a sign of weakness but rather another strength. Shackleton is my all time hero and I think about him a lot when I’m making tough decisions. He was determined to take an expedition to the South Pole but they had a horrendous time and due to conditions beyond his control they had to abandon their ship. Rather than persevere with his original dream of reaching the Pole, he recognised that it was acceptable to change the goalposts and concentrated instead on getting every member of his crew back home safely. In my eyes that made him more of a hero than if he had reached the South Pole. To accept defeat but rethink your strategy and to then carry on and reach your new goal takes guts.
People often say to us, “You are amazing” or, ”I couldn’t do what you did”. The last thing we want to be seen as are super heroes, or people doing something impossible. Whenever we give a talk we always say that you don’t have to take part in an expedition to the North Pole in order to achieve something special. It could be as simple as learning to swim, or it could be raising money for charity by doing the London-Brighton bike ride, or it could be an amazing, epic adventure. It doesn’t matter what you do. If, as a result of succeeding, you can walk tall, hold your head up high and feel proud, then that is your North Pole. We hope that by reading this book you will be inspired to find your North Pole, whatever or wherever it is.
*****************
Stepping Out
Saturday 12th April 1997
Sue
Soon we left the northern shores and hit some clouds, then came out and saw the pressure ridges. It had been hard to visualise them before. Then we saw open leads – terrifying. The pilots are highly skilled and can land in the most inhospitable areas. When we found the landing strip, the weather having become misty meant we had to circle round and round and round, over leads, and large masses of snow and ice; quite ‘white knuckle’! It was a thrilling moment, seeing Penguin Bravo’s blue and yellow tent looming out of the mist, with all the dancing red figures.
Each time we went past I thought we won’t land, we’ll go back to Eureka. But land we did, having spent half an hour circling round, eventually coming down on a runway marked by two pulks at each end. It seemed a bumpy landing, but later we realised this was excellent, as Arctic landings are not quite like Heathrow. We skidded to a halt in front of Bravo’s tent, and here we were on the ice, a strange, slightly unworldly feeling: anticipation, but no real idea of what we were going to be faced with. We rushed around, feeling rather shell-shocked, trying to help and sort out the gear we were keeping, a sort of organised chaos. We were also slightly dopey having been travelling for over twelve hours, with no sleep or food (having missed supper). But suddenly all was sorted; Matty and Denise had changed their clothes in the aeroplane, the toy penguin (mascot and relay baton) had been entrusted to us, and the dreaded moment had come, the loneliest moment you can imagine.
The plane takes off, you see it disappearing into the distance, the engine getting quieter and quieter. And there you are, one hundred and fifty miles from land, twelve hours from help, two and a half miles above the ocean bed, floating on large islands of ice. We could only rely on ourselves, what we have in the sledges and our own mental resources; no living off the land, because this isn’t land, it’s the ocean. Self-reliance had suddenly become very important. For the first time in our lives we were truly responsible for ourselves and our team, and without the team there would be no survival. Mental strength is almost more important than physical. During our training we decided that it was probably 60:40, but I’m not sure that it is not more like 70% mental and only 30% physical.
By the time everyone had left, we agreed that at 4.45am it would be better to pitch camp and have a short sleep before getting going again, as we had not had any sleep for nearly twenty-four hours. I think we needed time to realise that we were actually here on the ice. We had been thinking of little else for well over a year, and to be suddenly in the middle of what had been a dream up until now was very hard to accept. I think that for all of us the reality of where we were was one of the most difficult issues to face up to.
We were up at 12.45pm and off at 3.30pm. Matty and Denise spent a lot of time going through all their papers. We were warned by the others that they would be bit monosyllabic on changeover day. Home seemed a long way away, and they had to get to know a new team.
We walked six-and-a-half hours on our first day, all navigation being by sun or GPS (a state of the art pinpoint navigation system, as used during the Gulf Conflict) as the magnetic variation was a massive 91°, so compasses did not work very efficiently. Matty carried a gun on the top of her pulk at all times, in case of polar bears. At night it lived outside – if it was brought in, condensation would have formed, which would then have frozen, causing the gun to jam. Her sledge was right by the door, ready for instant access. Polar bears were not the sort of wildlife we wanted to meet!
There were some amazing sights. We went across our first semi frozen lead, it was like jelly or rubber, a bit nerve wracking; the darker the blue the thinner the ice. Some huge blocks of ice were just thrown up, a strange blue colour shining through like electric light. You could feel the bitter cold coming off and because we were quite tired it seemed to penetrate our bodies. The blue was almost ethereal in colour, and as the sun had disappeared and the sky was slightly misty, the light seemed more intense. The wonderful limitless space gave a feeling that we were in a newly-created world, totally unspoilt, and the ocean seemed to go on forever.
The last hour was very hard. I felt exhausted, partly I think because the time was all wrong. I am certainly a morning person, and to be walking really quite late in the evening was difficult. We did not set up camp till 10.30pm, then there were three hours during which we cooked and boiled our water. Because the sun is up the whole day and night, time has no real meaning and this helps to make you feel rather disorientated.
Victoria
Before we knew what was happening we were on a tiny plane flying low over the stunning mountain range that makes up Ellesmere Island. We were flying directly into the midnight sun and were heading for a place where very few men and women have ever walked before.
The plane suddenly started to bank and coming through the clouds. We could see a vast expanse of whiteness that was to be our home for the next three or four weeks. The approach to the ‘runway’ started. A runway is half a mile by a quarter of a mile of ‘flat’ ice. The plane prepared to land, we braced ourselves, but the wheels touched and then we took off again. Our hearts sank. What was wrong? We were now twelve hours from Resolute Bay so surely we would not have to turn back. The pilot told us that he had to check that the ice could hold the weight of the plane so he would touch down a few times before actually landing. Great comfort! Four nervous ‘explorers’ were now terrified. What on earth were we doing here? Our stomachs were somewhere near our feet.
After an eternity, probably half an hour, the plane finally landed. Considering the plane was landing on hard packed ice and snow the pilot managed an incredibly comfortable landing. We only bumped off our seats a couple of times. An hour later, having unloaded all our gear and had a brief catch up with the previous team, we were ready to set off. The plane doors shut and the engines started. It took off and disappeared into the distance, and we were alone on the top of a giant ice cap in the middle of nowhere; eight hundred miles from Resolute Bay, fifteen hours away from the nearest help. I did not know what to feel. A range of emotions went though my mind: I want to go home. I am so lucky to be here. I am so proud to be British. What am I doing? I cannot give up as all my friends, family and the press will think I am a wimp. Help!! There was no time to think as we had to keep moving, or else frostbite would set in. Ahead of us was three weeks of just heading north....
However it was not ‘just heading north’. This place which I was so lucky to be in was without a doubt the most beautiful place on Earth. Imagine a landscape with every shade of blue, white and black. The scenery changes every day, literally, as the ice moves apart and crunches together. The Arctic must be the noisiest place on Earth. The ice makes a rumbling noise – like a tube train coming out of a tunnel – as it crashes together and the snow/ice crunching under your feet sounds like the first bite of an apple, or the sound of an aeroplane coming out from the clouds. The ice formations would be a geologist’s dream. Every type of icicle imaginable, and all in this beautiful shade of electric blue. Thousands of massive ice chunks that have just been thrown in the air and left as they landed, all higgledy piggledy but still in some kind of Arctic order. The whole scene is just impossible to describe without doing it an injustice.
It was a very strange experience, meeting our guides, Matty and Denise, for the first time when we landed. We were all nervous and excited, and they were very introspective, having just received letters from home, and knowing that the previous team were on their way home to a hot bath, while they still had another two months to go. It must have been very difficult for them.
We decided to set up the tent immediately, as it was 4.00am and we had been up for twenty-two hours. The next morning we got up and walked for six-and-a-half hours. It was a good first day, great for confidence building. The weather was not brilliant, cloudy and windy, and we were all relieved that we had finally done the resupply, as the forecast was for worse weather still. Meeting my first lead was both exciting and an anti-climax. Having heard all these horror stories I was slightly disappointed by this one foot wide stretch of rubbery ice. Little did I know then that it was not typical, as most leads would require a great deal of effort to negotiate.
Sue
To have been privileged enough to take part in the first All Women’s Expedition to the North Pole was something that I am still benefiting from. Victoria and I started off not really understanding the Arctic, or even what we would achieve from the expedition, and now, a decade plus on, we are still learning from our experiences there.
We approached the expedition from very different angles. I had just recovered from breast cancer – I was lucky and had a full recovery, and so for me the expedition was a reaffirmation of life and a new beginning. I would like to inspire those who are suffering from breast cancer and show how cancer helped me to find a goal, which may at the time have been seen as unachievable. However, with enthusiasm and work these goals can become possible. For me, positive thought helped, as I knew, deep down, that I would get better. However, I am aware that positive thought is not necessarily the way forward for everyone. Not everyone has the luck that I had, but I do believe that our expedition helped in my healing process….
Without doubt our lives changed. Who could come back from this kind of expedition without feeling a huge sense of achievement? To suddenly realise that by going out and talking about our experiences to other people we could perhaps inspire and encourage them to push themselves a tiny bit further, and to take on some project which had been lurking in their minds for some time.
Victoria
When we were first asked to write the story of our expedition, over a decade ago now, my life was very different to how it is now. I was young, free and single, living in Oxford and training to be a Primary school teacher. Being a part of the first all women’s expedition to the North Pole had given me an inner confidence, a self-belief, the courage to give up my career in London and pursue a dream to work with children.
Since then my life has seen many more changes; I am now married, living near Bath, have a five year old son and a new career in educational publishing. However, where I am today has, again, been totally shaped by my experiences in the Arctic. If I’ve faced a challenge during the last decade, and have, many times, I have been safe in the knowledge that I can work around a problem and that I do have the necessary willpower. While in the Arctic we were tested to our limits and beyond, yet somehow we found an inner strength that we didn’t know we had and carried on.
Over the past few years I have faced challenges that have ranged from the mundane to the heartbreaking but with the tools learned from our expedition my ever-growing inner self-belief has kept me going. At times our mantra “anything is possible“ has got in the way, and I have had to learn the very difficult lesson that sometimes anything is not possible and I’ve had to let go. I have come to appreciate that saying “no” is not necessarily failure or indeed a sign of weakness but rather another strength. Shackleton is my all time hero and I think about him a lot when I’m making tough decisions. He was determined to take an expedition to the South Pole but they had a horrendous time and due to conditions beyond his control they had to abandon their ship. Rather than persevere with his original dream of reaching the Pole, he recognised that it was acceptable to change the goalposts and concentrated instead on getting every member of his crew back home safely. In my eyes that made him more of a hero than if he had reached the South Pole. To accept defeat but rethink your strategy and to then carry on and reach your new goal takes guts.
People often say to us, “You are amazing” or, ”I couldn’t do what you did”. The last thing we want to be seen as are super heroes, or people doing something impossible. Whenever we give a talk we always say that you don’t have to take part in an expedition to the North Pole in order to achieve something special. It could be as simple as learning to swim, or it could be raising money for charity by doing the London-Brighton bike ride, or it could be an amazing, epic adventure. It doesn’t matter what you do. If, as a result of succeeding, you can walk tall, hold your head up high and feel proud, then that is your North Pole. We hope that by reading this book you will be inspired to find your North Pole, whatever or wherever it is.
*****************
Stepping Out
Saturday 12th April 1997
Sue
Soon we left the northern shores and hit some clouds, then came out and saw the pressure ridges. It had been hard to visualise them before. Then we saw open leads – terrifying. The pilots are highly skilled and can land in the most inhospitable areas. When we found the landing strip, the weather having become misty meant we had to circle round and round and round, over leads, and large masses of snow and ice; quite ‘white knuckle’! It was a thrilling moment, seeing Penguin Bravo’s blue and yellow tent looming out of the mist, with all the dancing red figures.
Each time we went past I thought we won’t land, we’ll go back to Eureka. But land we did, having spent half an hour circling round, eventually coming down on a runway marked by two pulks at each end. It seemed a bumpy landing, but later we realised this was excellent, as Arctic landings are not quite like Heathrow. We skidded to a halt in front of Bravo’s tent, and here we were on the ice, a strange, slightly unworldly feeling: anticipation, but no real idea of what we were going to be faced with. We rushed around, feeling rather shell-shocked, trying to help and sort out the gear we were keeping, a sort of organised chaos. We were also slightly dopey having been travelling for over twelve hours, with no sleep or food (having missed supper). But suddenly all was sorted; Matty and Denise had changed their clothes in the aeroplane, the toy penguin (mascot and relay baton) had been entrusted to us, and the dreaded moment had come, the loneliest moment you can imagine.
The plane takes off, you see it disappearing into the distance, the engine getting quieter and quieter. And there you are, one hundred and fifty miles from land, twelve hours from help, two and a half miles above the ocean bed, floating on large islands of ice. We could only rely on ourselves, what we have in the sledges and our own mental resources; no living off the land, because this isn’t land, it’s the ocean. Self-reliance had suddenly become very important. For the first time in our lives we were truly responsible for ourselves and our team, and without the team there would be no survival. Mental strength is almost more important than physical. During our training we decided that it was probably 60:40, but I’m not sure that it is not more like 70% mental and only 30% physical.
By the time everyone had left, we agreed that at 4.45am it would be better to pitch camp and have a short sleep before getting going again, as we had not had any sleep for nearly twenty-four hours. I think we needed time to realise that we were actually here on the ice. We had been thinking of little else for well over a year, and to be suddenly in the middle of what had been a dream up until now was very hard to accept. I think that for all of us the reality of where we were was one of the most difficult issues to face up to.
We were up at 12.45pm and off at 3.30pm. Matty and Denise spent a lot of time going through all their papers. We were warned by the others that they would be bit monosyllabic on changeover day. Home seemed a long way away, and they had to get to know a new team.
We walked six-and-a-half hours on our first day, all navigation being by sun or GPS (a state of the art pinpoint navigation system, as used during the Gulf Conflict) as the magnetic variation was a massive 91°, so compasses did not work very efficiently. Matty carried a gun on the top of her pulk at all times, in case of polar bears. At night it lived outside – if it was brought in, condensation would have formed, which would then have frozen, causing the gun to jam. Her sledge was right by the door, ready for instant access. Polar bears were not the sort of wildlife we wanted to meet!
There were some amazing sights. We went across our first semi frozen lead, it was like jelly or rubber, a bit nerve wracking; the darker the blue the thinner the ice. Some huge blocks of ice were just thrown up, a strange blue colour shining through like electric light. You could feel the bitter cold coming off and because we were quite tired it seemed to penetrate our bodies. The blue was almost ethereal in colour, and as the sun had disappeared and the sky was slightly misty, the light seemed more intense. The wonderful limitless space gave a feeling that we were in a newly-created world, totally unspoilt, and the ocean seemed to go on forever.
The last hour was very hard. I felt exhausted, partly I think because the time was all wrong. I am certainly a morning person, and to be walking really quite late in the evening was difficult. We did not set up camp till 10.30pm, then there were three hours during which we cooked and boiled our water. Because the sun is up the whole day and night, time has no real meaning and this helps to make you feel rather disorientated.
Victoria
Before we knew what was happening we were on a tiny plane flying low over the stunning mountain range that makes up Ellesmere Island. We were flying directly into the midnight sun and were heading for a place where very few men and women have ever walked before.
The plane suddenly started to bank and coming through the clouds. We could see a vast expanse of whiteness that was to be our home for the next three or four weeks. The approach to the ‘runway’ started. A runway is half a mile by a quarter of a mile of ‘flat’ ice. The plane prepared to land, we braced ourselves, but the wheels touched and then we took off again. Our hearts sank. What was wrong? We were now twelve hours from Resolute Bay so surely we would not have to turn back. The pilot told us that he had to check that the ice could hold the weight of the plane so he would touch down a few times before actually landing. Great comfort! Four nervous ‘explorers’ were now terrified. What on earth were we doing here? Our stomachs were somewhere near our feet.
After an eternity, probably half an hour, the plane finally landed. Considering the plane was landing on hard packed ice and snow the pilot managed an incredibly comfortable landing. We only bumped off our seats a couple of times. An hour later, having unloaded all our gear and had a brief catch up with the previous team, we were ready to set off. The plane doors shut and the engines started. It took off and disappeared into the distance, and we were alone on the top of a giant ice cap in the middle of nowhere; eight hundred miles from Resolute Bay, fifteen hours away from the nearest help. I did not know what to feel. A range of emotions went though my mind: I want to go home. I am so lucky to be here. I am so proud to be British. What am I doing? I cannot give up as all my friends, family and the press will think I am a wimp. Help!! There was no time to think as we had to keep moving, or else frostbite would set in. Ahead of us was three weeks of just heading north....
However it was not ‘just heading north’. This place which I was so lucky to be in was without a doubt the most beautiful place on Earth. Imagine a landscape with every shade of blue, white and black. The scenery changes every day, literally, as the ice moves apart and crunches together. The Arctic must be the noisiest place on Earth. The ice makes a rumbling noise – like a tube train coming out of a tunnel – as it crashes together and the snow/ice crunching under your feet sounds like the first bite of an apple, or the sound of an aeroplane coming out from the clouds. The ice formations would be a geologist’s dream. Every type of icicle imaginable, and all in this beautiful shade of electric blue. Thousands of massive ice chunks that have just been thrown in the air and left as they landed, all higgledy piggledy but still in some kind of Arctic order. The whole scene is just impossible to describe without doing it an injustice.
It was a very strange experience, meeting our guides, Matty and Denise, for the first time when we landed. We were all nervous and excited, and they were very introspective, having just received letters from home, and knowing that the previous team were on their way home to a hot bath, while they still had another two months to go. It must have been very difficult for them.
We decided to set up the tent immediately, as it was 4.00am and we had been up for twenty-two hours. The next morning we got up and walked for six-and-a-half hours. It was a good first day, great for confidence building. The weather was not brilliant, cloudy and windy, and we were all relieved that we had finally done the resupply, as the forecast was for worse weather still. Meeting my first lead was both exciting and an anti-climax. Having heard all these horror stories I was slightly disappointed by this one foot wide stretch of rubbery ice. Little did I know then that it was not typical, as most leads would require a great deal of effort to negotiate.