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Outside Magazine September 2002

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Let's All Chill (Cont.)

I'D ENVISIONED SKIING to the North Pole as a long race over a bumpy course. But it was more like backpacking on snowshoes. The hardest part wasn't the moment-to-moment cardiovascular challenge, but the cumulative effect of exerting yourself in such extreme temperatures. That and doing everything and anything wearing several layers of thick mittens. And while Børge was relentlessly organized, I was... Well, I was not.

The first night we made camp, I unzipped the plastic cover of my sled. Børge looked inside and flinched. "What has happened here?" he demanded.

My sled looked like a teenager's closet floor, with junk just thrown in at random. "What are these?" he asked, picking up a bag.

"Hand warmers. Lots of them." He stared at them like they were shrunken heads. "Do they work?" he asked.

"Hell, yes, they work. Here." I handed him one from my pocket. He took his mitten off and held it.

"It's warm," he marveled, smiling. Then he handed it back quickly. "This is dangerous. If I got used to hand warmers, it's one more thing I'd have to carry.

"This sled," he decreed, "is a disaster." So were my hands. No matter how many gloves I put on, or what kind, they would not stay warm. By the second night on the ice, my fingers had started to blister.

"How did this happen?" I asked Børge, staring at them.

"You are in the Arctic," he shrugged.

"Børge," I sighed. "I think I'm going to kill you."

"Ahhh, mutiny on the ice! But Børge has gun. Børge trained killer." He laughed, reaching into his medical kit for tape.

"You think this will be a problem?"

"Only if you need your hands," he said. "If we have to amputate, we can always tie a fork to your stump, like they did on the Greely expedition." He was referring to the 1881 American expedition to Ellesmere Island led by Adolphus Greely, a famous Arctic disaster in which only seven of the 25 explorers survived a long winter on the ice. " 'We are dying like men!' " Børge cried, recounting their words when they were finally rescued.

Within a few days, we all began to show the red blotches of minor frostbite on our faces, but it was remarkable how well everyone held up. No one complained, ever, and I was the only one with a serious problem. At first my fingers just hurt. Then each fingertip swelled up with a mushy blister. Then the blisters popped and skin started peeling off. I ended up with second- and third-degree frostbite on both hands, and spent two weeks back in New York walking around with mummy-wrapped mitts.

My hands made me eager to reach the pole quickly, but our progress seemed unalterably slow. Every night in the tent, Børge would take us through a little ceremony of checking our position on the GPS. First he would move the stove—"the little glow of happiness," he called it—from the cooking vestibule of the tent to inside. Then he'd pull out a small yellow GPS and rub it vigorously between his hands, finally announcing how much ground we'd covered that day.

"Sixteen kilometers," he'd say. Or 10, or 22. Never more. These announcements filled me with disbelief. We skied all day and only traveled 16 k? I fantasized about dropping the sleds and making a mad dash for the pole.

"It's only 36 kilometers farther," I said to Børge on our fourth night. "We could do that in one long day without sleds."

Børge perked up at the notion, as if I'd described some delicious meal. "Four k an hour—we could do that easy," he agreed. "I think the French are at the pole now. We could meet them."

A French team had constructed a wacky "drift station" that looked like the Apollo 13 capsule. A French polar explorer named Jean Louis Etienne was planning to get inside it and drift on the ice for three months. We'd run into this group at Barneo, and when Børge had asked how well the capsule floated, one of the French scientists had shrugged and said, "We're not sure." Børge just nodded, but I think I saw him biting his lip not to laugh.

"If the French are there, they'll have heated tents," I smiled.

Børge agreed. "And wine. And real food."

We both thought about it a moment. "But without your sled," Børge finally said, "you have no security."

"I'd take my chances on the French."

"That they would put on your grave," Børge said, rolling over to sleep. " 'He took his chances on the French.' "

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