For lovers of Antarctica exploration tales, The Impossible First is worth reading. Struggling to muster the energy to head out into a windy Boston January to walk the dog? The author, Colin O’Brady, walked into 50-knot headwinds in -25 degree temperatures while pulling a 300 lb. sled containing supplies for a solo unsupported unresupplied coast-to-coast trip, via the South Pole, across Antarctica.
An endurance athlete, the 33-year-old O’Brady was racing against 49-year-old Louis Rudd, who also managed to finish the trip. To me that was even more inspiring.
One thing I learned from the book is that if you have enough money you can do almost anything that you want in Antarctica, including sleeping in a heated tent at the South Pole. A.L.E., the Antarctic Logistics company, will arrange everything. Climb a mountain, hassle some Emperor penguins, or just walk from the ski plane to your tent.
The author is not a gifted writer and there are a fair number of flashbacks to only loosely-related mountain climbing expeditions (including Everest, way more crowded near the top than Manhattan during coronapanic). Feel free to skim this filler if you’re more interested in Antarctica than in the author’s personal journey.
One question is how people today are able to do the coast-to-pole-and-back or coast-to-coast trip so much more easily than the original explorers, notably Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton. Today’s adventurers don’t need companions, dogs, ponies, depots, etc. Seemingly more often than not, they are actually successful in accomplishing whatever they set out to do. Is it because the modern ultramarathon athlete is way more fit than the heroes circa 1900? Is it because the routes are mapped and today’s travelers have GPS? Is it because they can travel with a thinner margin of supplies, knowing that if the weather turns against them or if equipment fails a helicopter or ski plane rescue is a Garmin inReach message away? [See Update below for the main reason; O’Brady traveled a shorter distance, starting and finishing via aircraft rather than via ship.]
The author sold clothing companies, such as Nike and Columbia, on sponsoring the project with the idea that his story would inspire kids and ordinary folks. Maybe they couldn’t climb Everest, but they could climb their Everest. With even young healthy Americans generally too afraid to leave the house, this is kind of funny to contemplate. Maybe the most that we non-athletes can take away from this is that we shouldn’t complain if we have to bundle up for a 15-minute evening dog walk.
More: Read The Impossible First.
Mindy the Crippler is never a whiner… (from this afternoon)
Update: Paul (see comments) highlighted this National Geographic article, which shows the vastly longer distance traveled by Borge Ousland in 1997. Ousland was solo, but sometimes used a kite to help move the sled.
Looking at a map of Antarctica, you might wonder how O’Brady’s 932-mile route can be considered a crossing of “the entire continent,” as he calls it, since it appears to start and end several hundred miles inland, especially compared to the much longer journeys of Ousland, Mike Horn (who completed a daring 3,169-mile solo kite-ski crossing of Antarctica in 2017), and others.
Ousland skied from water’s edge on the Ronne to water’s edge on the Ross. When he undertook his expedition two decades ago, this was considered the only way to claim a crossing of Antarctica.
“To me, Antarctica is what you see on a satellite map,” says Ousland, noting the ice shelves have been a part of Antarctica for at least 100,000 years.
But there is a continent somewhere under there, detectable with remote sensing equipment. In recent years, adventurers have begun claiming a crossing by citing this unseen “coast.” Some, in order to please sponsors and media, did this only after failing in their attempt at a full crossing. Suddenly an Antarctic “crossing” had shrunk in half.
… adventurers eager to shorten the feat quickly seized on the new abbreviated definition. An unsupported couple crossed in 2010, skiing 1,118 miles. A solo woman crossed (with two food drops) in 2012, skiing 1,084 miles. But O’Brady took the invisible coastline strategy to its extreme—his journey was nearly 200 miles shorter than these earlier trips, and the shortest route yet that anyone had claimed as a “crossing of the continent.”
Put another way, it’s not so much that no one had been able to cross Antarctica this way before, it’s that no one had defined a crossing in such achievable terms.
Maybe this is the athletic/exploration equivalent of “A good lawyer knows the law; a great lawyer knows the judge.”
Related:
There has been a bit of controversy on his accomplishment: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/2020/02/the-problem-with-colin-obrady/
Basically on a ‘road’ for the last 366 miles.
He’s also trying to be the first person to climb K2 in the winter: https://www.colinobrady.com/theimpossiblesummit.
Very easy to follow him on IG, posting a few video clips from as high are 20,000 feet (so far).
Good question, Phil. All of your reasons are valid, in addition FAR better equipment and nutrition. And are they truly ‘alone’ with inReach, SPOT, Sat Phones, etc? I’ve read lots of debates about that. Think about John Wesley Powell going down the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, not knowing what was ahead. Or the original polar explorers. Today, with all of our technology, that element has been mostly removed, at least on land.
Regardless, it’s pretty damn amazing what he has accomplished, and I am in awe.
A point of comparison is the trek by Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud that began on November 9th, 1992. They covered 1,487 statute miles in 95 days, from the Filchner ice shelf to the pole then to the Ross ice shelf. Each hauled a sled with a loaded starting weight of 485lbs.
“So much more easily” might be overstatement. Fiennes’ account, Mind Over Matter, doesn’t portray it as fun. The index’s entry for ailments lists ankle, back, crotch rot, diarrhoea, face, feet, haemorrhoids, hands, lips, midriff, shoulders and u-v burns.
From one of the indexed pages for feet: “If some modern day Gestapo had threatened me with the torture of squeezing my feet into those boots, I would have told all and sold my soul to avoid the experience. … As the textile hairs brushed against the damaged areas, I would grind my teeth together … beginning the twelve-hour ordeal during which I would have only one thing in mind: the moment of release from the boots.”
Still, if you’re physically able to face the ordeal, it’s an alternative to toiling in a cubicle farm for a decade or two, until you become too old to be employable.
> Is it because they can travel with a thinner margin of supplies,
> knowing that if the weather turns against them or if equipment fails
> a helicopter or ski plane rescue is a Garmin inReach message away?
That was more or less how the pair’s expedition ended. Exhausted, low on food, their health failing, they radioed for help and were rescued by ski plane.
A good way to get a taste of what the explorers around the 1900s had to go through is to find an old pair of telemark skis with the 75 mm bindings and old leather ski boots. For clothing only wool and other materials from that period, no Gore Tex or other modern materials. Next find a local mountain range with snow, then do not eat for about 3 days, drinking only water. Before starting out out, put all your clothes in a bucket of water before putting them on. Then see if you can make it 50 km of cross country skiing in one day without dropping dead. Extra points for pulling a 300 lb sled. This is much cheaper than going to the arctic.
After reading the National Geographic Article, why would anybody buy the book by this cheat Colin O’Brady? This person is nothing but an opportunistic piece of garbage, who takes advantage of others and exaggerates his accomplishments. He would leave you to die the first chance he would get. Anybody who has done back-country skiing knows that travelling on a plowed road is easy.
I would be much more interested in book by Aleksander Gamme, who stopped 1km before the finish and waited for four days to share the record with two others. This is true adventurism.
The age of exploration over land is long over, which ended with Edmund Hillary climbing Everest or possibly much earlier. The people climbing Everest today are nothing more than lemmings. The majority of the deep ocean is unexplored, this could be an area of exploration.
This decade could be the start of a new age of exploration starting with the Moon, Mars and beyond. Human exploration of the Moon and Mars will make going across Antarctica look like a sunny day in the park.
Pavel: I still have some of that equipment around, which should of course tell you what an old geezer I am. I’ve always been impressed at some of the first ascents I have read about around Mt. Logan and in the Alaska Range. Months slogging up rivers and through forests, and then climbing the peaks. Incredible stamina, willpower, and DNA. 😀.
“This person is nothing but an opportunistic piece of garbage, who takes advantage of others and exaggerates his accomplishments.”
That pretty much sums it up.
It would be remarkable just to set off from anywhere a boat could land & walk until Amundsen Scott station emerged, reaching the most remote location imaginable under your own 4 paws.
Philip’s travelogue remains of interest to someone like myself who has never been anywhere near that continent. However, the photo links have been deactivated (perhaps can be revived, Philip?).
https://philip.greenspun.com/travel/antarctica-ocean-diamond.html
Also recommend a 2014 sleeper film (streaming on AMZN Prime) about a research vessel with a honeymooning couple on board — a nerdy, uncharismatic scientist; and his trailing spouse smitten by the ship’s captain. If nothing else, one gets a sense of the churning waters crossing the Drake Passage. Only one actual whale sighting, but plenty of penguins.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/red_knot
Google destroyed the work of millions of people worldwide under its “don’t be evil” plan of shutting down Google+ and not bothering to keep a few servers spinning with the old content. The photos are a casualty of that decision by Google to try to extract the last dollar of profit from Internet content creators worldwide. Let me try to get the photos back up at some new URL….
until your photographs are available, the film’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKbRbIKrG-Q
About half on board “Red Knot” (the name of the vessel) were the cast & film crew, with the remainder artists and scientists, including a whale biologist who is featured in the film, along with his wife. The director wrote of the 23 day expedition: “We boarded the ship in Ushuaia, a city at the southern tip of Argentina, and set out across the unknown vastness of Antarctic convergence. We made stops at the Falkland Islands, crossed the intimidating Drake Passage, and circumvented the perils of the Weddell Sea, where Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was famously trapped, frozen, and finally crushed in an ice floe. Eventually, we found ourselves in the most beautiful, unfettered place on earth—Antarctica.”