Northward Bound
Early April 2004, nearly 2,000 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, en route to the geographic North Pole. I’d already spent two hours that morning trying to cross a 100-metre-wide lead (a crack in the ice covering the Arctic Ocean). It was half frozen, with open water at the very centre and varying thicknesses of ice leading away from its sides. Swimming across it in my drysuit would have been almost impossible, so I decided to head east and look for a more suitable crossing. There were a couple of spots where the ice seemed thicker and I skied out to take a look. But in both instances, it proved to be just a little too thin, and I had to retreat nervously over the wobbling surface.Finally, I spotted a few floating ‘islands’ with thicker ice between them. I started to cross. At the centre was an open channel, about two metres wide and slowly getting wider. The water was black. My skis weren’t long enough to span the gap and the thought of jumping and landing short filled me with fear. But I had to get across. I glanced back at my sledge and, for a second, imagined it wagging its tail like a daft Labrador. Grinning, I pushed it into the lead. It fitted beautifully, bobbing gently in the water (it was designed to float). I crawled over on hands and knees and then celebrated my epic crossing American-style with lots of whooping and arm pumping before skiing off. Improvise, adapt, overcome.This wasn’t the first time I’d pressed bits of kit into service in unusual roles. On an earlier expedition, Pen Hadow and I used ski poles as our HF radio antenna, and our single-layer tent was held up by four skis. More recently, I’ve used the tip of a knife – heated red-hot on my stove – to solder a vital piece of electronics; I’ve sewn gloves up with dental floss; and I’ve used strips of metal hacksawed from a stove base to reinforce a broken ski boot. When it comes to the stresses that are placed on kit, skiing solo to the North Pole is probably up there as one of the toughest challenges on the planet.
Pulling your pulk
Alongside polar bear deterrents, perhaps the most important – and by far the most expensive – bit of kit for such an undertaking is a sledge, or ‘pulk’. The best modern-day expedition pulks are hand-made masterpieces of carbon fibre and Kevlar that will rarely leave you change from £4,000. Unlike pulks designed for Antarctica or Greenland, which are pulled using fixed alloy bars, North Pole sledges employ rope ‘traces’ to connect your harness to the sledge. I use a homemade bungy-cord shock absorber at the back of my harness, then a single nine-millimetre dry-treated rope running back to the sledge, about five metres in all, with several figure-of-eight loops in the rope so that I can vary the length of the trace to suit the conditions. The knots also make great handholds when hauling the recalcitrant sledge up pressure ridges.The next bit to figure out is the crucial boot/binding/ski combination, the source of much woe for expeditions throughout history. Boots and bindings can be loosely grouped into three categories: mukluks, telemark, and New Nordic Norm (NNN).Genuine mukluks, or kamiks, are sealskin boots made and worn by native Arctic people. Modern-day boots of the same name are high, loose-fitting and bear a striking resemblance to 1970s moon boots. They work with plastic ‘Berwin’ and Rotefella’s NATO 120 military bindings. The boots are warm, but the bindings tend to be fiddly, can be prone to failure and aren’t terribly conducive to good skiing technique. The new Flexi bindings, designed by Eric Philips at IceTrek, are a more robust alternative.The next option is a telemark boot with a traditional three-pin binding. The old favourite is the Norwegian Alfa boot. They’re pretty similar to the boots Amundsen and Nansen used and come with comically oversized felt liners. That said, they’re toasty and great for skiing. The only downside is that the soles can be prone to cracking. However, I tried a pair on a 200-kilometre Arctic trek in 2003 and, at the end, they still looked like new. I would recommend using a three-pin binding with a heel cable. I would still be using these nowadays if it weren’t for boots that use NNN (or Salomon’s SNS) bindings. Designed by the Belgian polar superstars Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer for their epic Antarctic crossing, each pair is handmade. There are two systems on the market; Meindl makes a boot that uses a Rottefella binding, and there’s a custom-made boot from Hubert that uses a Salomon SNS binding. Both systems are foolproof, but I prefer the latter as the binding seems stronger.I use relatively long backcountry touring skis with steel edges and full-length synthetic skins. I’d recommend screwing the skins in. As conditions improve and the pulk gets lighter, you can lop off the back few inches of the skins to reduce friction. Ski poles should be as beefy as you can find and slightly shorter than normal so that your hands are below your heart when you’re skiing, which improves circulation.
Gimme shelter
When it’s –40°C, you don’t want to be hanging around outside for too long. If you aren’t skiing, you should be eating, cooking or sleeping. Synthetic is the only choice for sleeping bag insulation on the Arctic Ocean. Early in the spring, everything becomes damp and then icy, with the result that natural down insulation stops working. A couple of companies make suitably beefy synthetic bags, and you should use a vapour-barrier liner for at least the first couple of weeks of the expedition. A top tip is to sew a few pockets above your chest on the inside of the bag for storing precious items. I stick two ridged closed-cell foam mats under my sleeping bag.Your tent should be simple, light, strong and easy to pitch: tents with inners and outers that go up simultaneously are best, and you’ll need snow valances sewn onto the fly. Make sure there’s room for you to squat in the porch: –45°C is no weather for a poo with a view. Add huge string toggles to all of the zips so that you can use them with mitts on. And a big ‘washing line’ inside the tent is enormously useful. When it comes to cooking, a tried and tested multi-fuel stove is the only way to go. Make sure that you’re comfortable stripping it down, servicing it and putting it back together again before you leave, because you’ll probably end up doing it in the dark while wearing gloves. Several times. You should also be happy doing everything they tell you not to do in the Scouts: namely lighting your stove in a tent with the door closed and boiling water over a blue flame while you’re lying inches away in a synthetic sleeping bag.
Phone home
Logistics operators will insist that you have the means to make a satellite telephone call. Iridium is the only network that works at both poles. You’ll also have to take an ARGOS locator/distress beacon. These can be rented from a French company called Collecte Localisation Satellites. GPS is essential; I favour getting a bog-standard unit with as few functions as possible. Take a spare one as well. And I would recommend making sure that all of your tech gear uses the same size batteries. Solar power isn’t hugely reliable in the high Arctic, thanks to the snow and thick cloud, so your best bet is to take loads of lithium AA batteries. Music is a godsend. I bought three little MP3 players that took one AA battery each, and they probably saved me from going bonkers. I’ll never do an expedition without music again.On the clothing front, I tend to buck the trend. The system I use is based largely on what I learnt from Pen Hadow on my first North Pole expedition. Instead of a traditional layering system capped with a waterproof and breathable jacket, I wear salopettes and a jacket made from wind- and snowproof Pertex and thick fibre-pile. I also use a set of merino wool undergarments, and I pack a fat down jacket for tea breaks in the wind. To finish off the ensemble, you might want some fur for your jacket’s hood. It makes a genuine difference in the cold. The downside is that it will invariably moult, and you’ll be extracting hairs from your porridge after a few weeks.If you’re planning on using a drysuit to swim leads, Helly Hansen is the de facto choice. Get in touch with their ‘Spesialprodukter’ department in Norway. Sliding into the black water for the first time is likely to be the scariest thing you’ll ever do, but the suits work brilliantly.Decent sunglasses are vital, and ones with interchangeable lenses are worth trying; yellow lenses make all the difference on a dreary day of whiteout. Goggles are worth taking, but unlike in Antarctica, they’re not essential.
And the rest…
Finally, there are a few miscellaneous gadgets I’d recommend. A snow shovel with an alloy blade, for starters. For cooking and eating, titanium pots are great – get a big one with a lid for snow melting. You’ll need two one-litre vacuum flasks for hot drinks during the day (cover the metal with duct tape so your fingers don’t stick to the flask in the cold). A 500-millilitre Nalgene bottle with a thermal liner makes a nice reserve (and a great hot water bottle). You’ll also need a pee bottle for the tent. All of your gear will fall apart, so pack a comprehensive repair kit for bodging it back together again.Sir Wally Herbert once wrote that “even a man with the perfect circulation and the best clothing combination designed by man will suffer terribly under the worst Arctic conditions”. He has a point, so perhaps my most important bit of kit was a secret morale booster, given to me by a friend: Courage from Piglet should be on every expedition packing list.
With a little help from my friends
Much like Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway, on a solo expedition there will come a time, sooner or later, when items of your equipment start taking on human qualities. Pen Hadow famously confided in Mavis the tent brush. Although I never named it, my sledge started displaying a curious propensity for mood swings after the first week or so of my 2004 expedition. Some days, he (it was definitely a ‘he’) would skip along merrily behind me; others he would jam against bits of ice, fall into the water and seemingly double in weight. I tried both carrot and stick, but neither ski pole thrashings nor the offer of bits of chocolate would make him change his ways.
Obsessing about your weight?
Much like serious mountaineers, people who go on expeditions to either of the poles tend to become obsessive about reducing the weight of their gear. Up to a point it makes sense, as the weight of the pulk dictates your speed over the ice, but some (myself included) have taken weight-saving measures to ludicrous extremes. On my last major expedition, I removed metal tabs from zips and replaced them with loops of Kevlar cord (a weight saving of a gram per zip), cut the handle off my toothbrush and filed down the plastic frame of my headtorch. I realised I’d gone far enough when I took the photos of my family and loved ones that I kept in the back of my expedition diary, cut around the faces, and threw away the scenery to save a fraction of a gram.
Pulling your pulk
Alongside polar bear deterrents, perhaps the most important – and by far the most expensive – bit of kit for such an undertaking is a sledge, or ‘pulk’. The best modern-day expedition pulks are hand-made masterpieces of carbon fibre and Kevlar that will rarely leave you change from £4,000. Unlike pulks designed for Antarctica or Greenland, which are pulled using fixed alloy bars, North Pole sledges employ rope ‘traces’ to connect your harness to the sledge. I use a homemade bungy-cord shock absorber at the back of my harness, then a single nine-millimetre dry-treated rope running back to the sledge, about five metres in all, with several figure-of-eight loops in the rope so that I can vary the length of the trace to suit the conditions. The knots also make great handholds when hauling the recalcitrant sledge up pressure ridges.The next bit to figure out is the crucial boot/binding/ski combination, the source of much woe for expeditions throughout history. Boots and bindings can be loosely grouped into three categories: mukluks, telemark, and New Nordic Norm (NNN).Genuine mukluks, or kamiks, are sealskin boots made and worn by native Arctic people. Modern-day boots of the same name are high, loose-fitting and bear a striking resemblance to 1970s moon boots. They work with plastic ‘Berwin’ and Rotefella’s NATO 120 military bindings. The boots are warm, but the bindings tend to be fiddly, can be prone to failure and aren’t terribly conducive to good skiing technique. The new Flexi bindings, designed by Eric Philips at IceTrek, are a more robust alternative.The next option is a telemark boot with a traditional three-pin binding. The old favourite is the Norwegian Alfa boot. They’re pretty similar to the boots Amundsen and Nansen used and come with comically oversized felt liners. That said, they’re toasty and great for skiing. The only downside is that the soles can be prone to cracking. However, I tried a pair on a 200-kilometre Arctic trek in 2003 and, at the end, they still looked like new. I would recommend using a three-pin binding with a heel cable. I would still be using these nowadays if it weren’t for boots that use NNN (or Salomon’s SNS) bindings. Designed by the Belgian polar superstars Alain Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer for their epic Antarctic crossing, each pair is handmade. There are two systems on the market; Meindl makes a boot that uses a Rottefella binding, and there’s a custom-made boot from Hubert that uses a Salomon SNS binding. Both systems are foolproof, but I prefer the latter as the binding seems stronger.I use relatively long backcountry touring skis with steel edges and full-length synthetic skins. I’d recommend screwing the skins in. As conditions improve and the pulk gets lighter, you can lop off the back few inches of the skins to reduce friction. Ski poles should be as beefy as you can find and slightly shorter than normal so that your hands are below your heart when you’re skiing, which improves circulation.
Gimme shelter
When it’s –40°C, you don’t want to be hanging around outside for too long. If you aren’t skiing, you should be eating, cooking or sleeping. Synthetic is the only choice for sleeping bag insulation on the Arctic Ocean. Early in the spring, everything becomes damp and then icy, with the result that natural down insulation stops working. A couple of companies make suitably beefy synthetic bags, and you should use a vapour-barrier liner for at least the first couple of weeks of the expedition. A top tip is to sew a few pockets above your chest on the inside of the bag for storing precious items. I stick two ridged closed-cell foam mats under my sleeping bag.Your tent should be simple, light, strong and easy to pitch: tents with inners and outers that go up simultaneously are best, and you’ll need snow valances sewn onto the fly. Make sure there’s room for you to squat in the porch: –45°C is no weather for a poo with a view. Add huge string toggles to all of the zips so that you can use them with mitts on. And a big ‘washing line’ inside the tent is enormously useful. When it comes to cooking, a tried and tested multi-fuel stove is the only way to go. Make sure that you’re comfortable stripping it down, servicing it and putting it back together again before you leave, because you’ll probably end up doing it in the dark while wearing gloves. Several times. You should also be happy doing everything they tell you not to do in the Scouts: namely lighting your stove in a tent with the door closed and boiling water over a blue flame while you’re lying inches away in a synthetic sleeping bag.
Phone home
Logistics operators will insist that you have the means to make a satellite telephone call. Iridium is the only network that works at both poles. You’ll also have to take an ARGOS locator/distress beacon. These can be rented from a French company called Collecte Localisation Satellites. GPS is essential; I favour getting a bog-standard unit with as few functions as possible. Take a spare one as well. And I would recommend making sure that all of your tech gear uses the same size batteries. Solar power isn’t hugely reliable in the high Arctic, thanks to the snow and thick cloud, so your best bet is to take loads of lithium AA batteries. Music is a godsend. I bought three little MP3 players that took one AA battery each, and they probably saved me from going bonkers. I’ll never do an expedition without music again.On the clothing front, I tend to buck the trend. The system I use is based largely on what I learnt from Pen Hadow on my first North Pole expedition. Instead of a traditional layering system capped with a waterproof and breathable jacket, I wear salopettes and a jacket made from wind- and snowproof Pertex and thick fibre-pile. I also use a set of merino wool undergarments, and I pack a fat down jacket for tea breaks in the wind. To finish off the ensemble, you might want some fur for your jacket’s hood. It makes a genuine difference in the cold. The downside is that it will invariably moult, and you’ll be extracting hairs from your porridge after a few weeks.If you’re planning on using a drysuit to swim leads, Helly Hansen is the de facto choice. Get in touch with their ‘Spesialprodukter’ department in Norway. Sliding into the black water for the first time is likely to be the scariest thing you’ll ever do, but the suits work brilliantly.Decent sunglasses are vital, and ones with interchangeable lenses are worth trying; yellow lenses make all the difference on a dreary day of whiteout. Goggles are worth taking, but unlike in Antarctica, they’re not essential.
And the rest…
Finally, there are a few miscellaneous gadgets I’d recommend. A snow shovel with an alloy blade, for starters. For cooking and eating, titanium pots are great – get a big one with a lid for snow melting. You’ll need two one-litre vacuum flasks for hot drinks during the day (cover the metal with duct tape so your fingers don’t stick to the flask in the cold). A 500-millilitre Nalgene bottle with a thermal liner makes a nice reserve (and a great hot water bottle). You’ll also need a pee bottle for the tent. All of your gear will fall apart, so pack a comprehensive repair kit for bodging it back together again.Sir Wally Herbert once wrote that “even a man with the perfect circulation and the best clothing combination designed by man will suffer terribly under the worst Arctic conditions”. He has a point, so perhaps my most important bit of kit was a secret morale booster, given to me by a friend: Courage from Piglet should be on every expedition packing list.
With a little help from my friends
Much like Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway, on a solo expedition there will come a time, sooner or later, when items of your equipment start taking on human qualities. Pen Hadow famously confided in Mavis the tent brush. Although I never named it, my sledge started displaying a curious propensity for mood swings after the first week or so of my 2004 expedition. Some days, he (it was definitely a ‘he’) would skip along merrily behind me; others he would jam against bits of ice, fall into the water and seemingly double in weight. I tried both carrot and stick, but neither ski pole thrashings nor the offer of bits of chocolate would make him change his ways.
Obsessing about your weight?
Much like serious mountaineers, people who go on expeditions to either of the poles tend to become obsessive about reducing the weight of their gear. Up to a point it makes sense, as the weight of the pulk dictates your speed over the ice, but some (myself included) have taken weight-saving measures to ludicrous extremes. On my last major expedition, I removed metal tabs from zips and replaced them with loops of Kevlar cord (a weight saving of a gram per zip), cut the handle off my toothbrush and filed down the plastic frame of my headtorch. I realised I’d gone far enough when I took the photos of my family and loved ones that I kept in the back of my expedition diary, cut around the faces, and threw away the scenery to save a fraction of a gram.
