tonyhaile.com
Last Wednesday I sat down for lunch with Rosie Stancer, a veteran of several South Pole expeditions and the ’97 North Pole relay. We had been on an expedition to Svalbard in 2002 and spent one particularly glorious night in a storm that snapped our tent poles as the temperature plummeted to –40. One newspaper described her as a cross between Tinkerbell and the Terminator. They’re not far off.
Rosie has persuaded Mars (the confectioner rather than the planet) to sponsor an attempt to become the first woman to reach the North Pole solo. It’s a tough journey. In 2004, I was one of the last people to see Dominick Arduin alive when she set out from Siberia to attempt the same journey. Others such as Ann Daniels have been hamstrung by logistics failures, while Bettina Aller was stalked by polar bears for days in 2001 getting frostbite from the revolver she had to brandish at all times.
Rosie asked me to manage the expedition for her and I’ve leapt at the chance to bring some of my old team back together again and do my best to make this an expedition to be proud of. This means I’ll be back and forth between New York, London and the Canadian High Arctic over the next few months and will do my best to up the blogging rate round here so that I can give a flavour of what it’s like preparing and running an expedition where the penalties for poor decisions can be severe. There is also lots of exciting news happening around SOUTH, so watch this space. . . .
