Husky News

Explorers have long captured the human imagination. During the “heroic age” of exploration in the early 20th century, Western countries competed to send the first man to the Poles. The competition between Robert Falcon Scott, a Briton, and Amundsen to reach the South Pole in the early 1900s was a public spectacle. When news of Scott’s death reached Britain—he arrived at the Pole in 1912 only to discover Amundsen had just beaten him there, before dying from cold and hunger miles from base camp—he became a national hero, his diary a bestseller. Schools and streets were named after him. Other celebrated explorers include Sir Edmund Hillary after he and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to reach the summit of Everest, and Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.

Today, exploration has become democratised. Cheap airfares, GPS devices, satellite phones and the emergence of adventure outfits that, for a price, will take you out on the ice, up a mountain or even into space have made it easier and safer for ordinary folks to give it a go. From 2000 to 2006, 4,866 people attempted to climb Everest, according to Explorersweb.com, a third of them on commercial expeditions. Even Antarctica, one of the most remote places in the world, has been flung open to adventurers. Next November, around a dozen teams will compete in the South Pole Race, touted by its organisers as the “first race to the South Pole since Scott and Amundsen’s…nearly 100 years ago”. This one, however, will be televised and participants will have full air and ground support and resupplies of food and fuel.

To the chagrin of purists, many such adventurers set themselves up as explorers. Squabbles frequently erupt over what constitutes an authentic “first”—including Saunders’s 2004 expedition (warm weather meant there was much thin ice and open water from the Russian side of the Artic, where Saunders set out for the Pole. He chose to have an aircraft deposit him where the ice was solid. Purists believe only a start on land is legitimate. Saunders retorts that this is increasingly impossible because of global warming). In any case, Saunders would rather talk about his charity work than get involved in arguments.

Shane Winser thinks charity work or other good causes are only part of the reason people like Saunders do such things. As Geography Outdoors manager at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS) in London, she has been helping plan expeditions for more than 30 years. “Many adventurers have side programmes-a philanthropy or education,” says Winser, a pleasant-faced woman with a bookish air. We are having lunch in a sunny room in the grandiose, 19th century building that houses the RGS, just opposite Hyde Park. “In my more cynical moments, I think this is just a way to get a paid holiday. At other times, I think: a journey unshared is unlikely to have an impact.”

Saunders and Winser go back awhile—as Saunders remembers it, when he visited the RGS to get advice on an expedition at the age of 19 and was, in his words, “brash and rather ego-centric”. His plan was audacious: to ski to both Poles and climb Everest in one year. “I was laughed out of there-understandably,” Saunders recalls good-naturedly. (Winser does not recall this meeting, although she says that given Saunders’s lack of experience and funding at the time, she would have been “sceptical”. She and Saunders are now friends.)

Winser acknowledges that adventurers can play an important role in drawing attention to such issues as the environment. But she seems jaded by the parade of self-styled explorers marching through her doors. “Exploration must add to the existing body of knowledge,” she says, adding that technology—satellite imaging, underwater submersibles—has made this more possible.

Source: INTELLIGENT LIFE MAGAZINE, December 2007