Husky News

What does it mean to be an explorer in a world where everything has been explored? Ben Saunders explains to Joanne Ramos why he still wants to load up his sledge and head for the North Pole.

The North Pole, the earth’s northernmost point, sits not on land but in the middle of the Arctic Ocean. To get there, you must traverse hundreds of miles across sea ice that is, in many places, jagged with pressure ridges-towering heaps of broken ice blocks—and cut by fissures in the ice that can be so long and wide you must swim across them to stay on course. Temperatures can plummet to below -60C. And, always, there is the danger of falling through thin ice into the deep, cold sea below.

Only a handful of explorers have made it to the North Pole on foot. On a balmy, autumn night I sit in a basement room in the Lloyd’s building, all stainless steel and glass, waiting for one of them to give a talk. Ben Saunders, an energetic, 30-year-old Briton, claims to be the fourth person ever to ski unsupported to the North Pole and the youngest to do so solo. He set out in 2004 with three unaffiliated explorers-strangers who agreed to split the cost of flights and other logistics. Only Saunders reached the Pole. One was rescued when he developed frostbite after falling through thin ice and another because of a broken ankle. The third, a Frenchwoman, was never found.

The room I sit in was once the library in the original Lloyd’s building, moved here panel by panel. Oil paintings of ships ploughing through the seas seas line the dark oak walls. It is a throwback to an age when the world was young, and befits tales of derring-do and adventure. Now that the world is older and known, I wonder, what are today’s young explorers exploring?

Saunders is speaking to a gathering of financiers. Giving speeches sustains him between expeditions, as it has many explorers before him. It also pays for his team (managers for public-relations and sponsorships, a training coach, an assistant). Tonight he has waived his fee in the hope that the sponsor of his next expedition is sitting in the audience.

He is introduced as a “polar explorer” and the “next Ranulph Fiennes”. Fiennes was the first man to visit both the North and South poles by land and the first to cross Antarctica on foot. A picture of Saunders is projected on a large screen, his blue eyes peering from behind an ice-encrusted balaclava.

He tells the story he recounted to me earlier in the week. But here it feels new: simpler and punchier, and much more entertaining. Saunders, too, is new. Offstage he is mild-mannered, with an easy laugh and a habit of fusing together words in his rush to follow a thought. Conversations with him are peppered by Wow! Epic! Brilliant! He is confident, but also full of questions about his life’s path.

The explorer before me, in his well-cut suit, is a showman—cocksure and smooth. He tells of how his virgin expedition, an attempt to reach the North Pole in 2001 with an experienced polar adventurer, Pen Hadow, is a failure. He develops frostbite in his toes early on; they encounter a polar bear; their food runs short (Saunders loses 30 pounds in eight weeks). He returns home after being picked up two-thirds of the way to the Pole, “feeling like a total failure”.

Source: INTELLIGENT LIFE MAGAZINE, December 2007