“White Tunnel:” My Experience in Antarctica

In the early afternoon as the sun dances in between clouds I’m perching atop a wooden platform tucked in the Magallanes National Reserve that sits above Punta Arenas, the coastal Chilean town I’ve been staying in.  Beyond all the lichen and moss is a murky ocean full of seals and penguins.  Its cold, salty breeze is choked out by the smell of pine before it reaches me, but as I gaze down upon the sea I’m picturing what lies beyond.  

Beyond the waves where whaling ships used to roam, beyond the tumultuous and threatening Drake Passage, deep behind that horizon line is a frozen plateau that sits atop continental ice some 4 kilometers thick.  It’s a land that has tested the will of most of my heroes throughout the last 100 years, some of which in their pursuit of greatness were consumed by the cold, apathetic landscape.  Her name means “The land without bears,” but most of us know her as Antarctica.

A Love for Adventure + Early Expedition Work

I have been drawn to adventure for as long as I can remember. I spent a great deal of my childhood in Appalachia climbing trees up to the canopy and feeling the wind cut through the pines as it swayed me many stories above the forest floor.  In Sapphire, NC, it wasn’t uncommon to climb atop and dive off of many of the hundreds of waterfalls that encompassed the area.  Having the guts to throw yourself off the cliffs was a right of passage for a boy to become a young man.  I was separated from everyone else as I was a few years younger than my brother’s friends but still too old to hang out with those in my younger sister’s grade.  I was always a bit stubborn in my need to prove myself to the older guys, and so I was probably eleven or twelve when I first threw myself off the 35-footer by Rainbow Falls.  Despite my age and incredibly small frame, or maybe as a result of it, I needed to make sure everyone knew I could hang.  Afterwards I moved onto the narrow needle-pool of Courthouse Falls where being two-feet off your target in any direction would result in clipping the mossy slick rock and crashing down into the cold, springfed water with a broken leg, that’s if you were still conscious at all after dollragging.  I found that even when I looked off the cliff edge and my vision narrowed against the landing below and my knees started quaking, when my head got light and my mind ran with images of getting swept under rocks or fallen trees and drowning, which did happen every year, I was still capable of taking the leap.

I ran the same route for an entire Summer once.  I may have missed a day or two, but certainly no more than that.  After breakfast I’d walk out my parent’s front door, cut through the woods and over the creek to a road, follow the road into a SAR-only forest access road that eventually dropped me down at Turtleback Falls.  First I’d scramble down onto the long boulder that adjoined the Horsepasture River and jump as far out as I could, usually cutting a front flip for style points.   After landing in the water I would swim directly into the current and wait for it to grab hold of me and start funneling me downstream towards the much larger, deadlier Rainbow Falls, where I would instinctively catch the dangling rope tied to a rhododendron and climb it up onto Turtleback.  There’s a little hole carved into the side of the majestic cascade that you can slide into, effectively turning the waterfall into the shell of a turtle and yourself the head that peeks in and out of the flooded bedrock.  Tourists would see me tucked inside the hole and the name would finally make sense, then I would climb out and surf down the waterfall on my feet for spectacle.  That’s really what most of this was; a spectacle.  The tourists marveled at this nearly-naked barefoot mountain kid skipping across rocks and ledges like it was his calling, and for me, who struggled often in the Summers without any friends and little consistency, well, I enjoyed the attention. From Turtleback I’d make my way down to Rainbow Falls, the aforementioned “testing cliff” where I had proven myself to my brother’s friends years earlier, but nowadays instead of scrambling through the brush and descending on ropes to the cliff before jumping I found out I could scale the rock face itself.  With wet hands I’d jam my fist into a split in the rock and pull myself out of the water onto a small shard I could plant my toes against.  One route cut right along stunning rock that was polished from repeated lightning strikes, but more often I’d cut left and traverse the slick face where a misstep would lead to me falling some twenty feet and hitting the deck before dumping me into the pool below.  The danger of it was always exciting.  From the overlook above tourists would hold up their phones and cheer for me after coming off my toes and fingertips onto the cliff landing where I would then throw myself back down into the water below, never with any form that would’ve impressed real divers, but with just enough feral flair to pop back out of the water to a round of applause.  It was probably the best Summer of my life.

Years later after finishing the Fall Semester living out of University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s parking garage I left college in search of some much-needed direction.  I knew I wasn’t living as the kind of man I could be, and without much discipline or guidance I took to the mountains again.  Eventually this led me to Montana, because of course it would, and while sitting atop a windy ridge with Yellowstone burning in the distance I had finished a book by one of my great inspirations and now-mentor, Louis Rudd.  He had completed an other-worldly feat of endurance by skiing across Antarctica completely alone and tethered to a sled full of all the survival equipment and food necessary for the journey.  I wondered if I’d be able to get myself to the point of taking on the grueling Antarctic environment myself, and by nature of my own stubbornness it was inevitable that I set a goal of skiing alone to the South Pole.

With some nudging from a very good friend I took this goal head-on and began training with a ton of intensity.  Weight lifting and running 5-6 days a week, multiple stacked days in the mountains covering a marathon or greater distance with a backpack on, two 100-mile races in the Northern Rockies, I was maniacal about preparing.  The training brought me across the United States, to the Yukon Arctic between Canada and Alaska, and even as far away as the glaciers of Norway where I took a polar training course and performed well enough to become a polar guiding apprentice under the same outfit that originally trained me.  I familiarized myself with all the equipment, oftentimes crouching up to my neck in the river during Winter and then practicing setting up my tent with my numbed hands struggling to cooperate before crawling inside and waiting in my sleeping bag until my body had returned to a regulated temperature.  I would run to work.  Often the journey would take about an hour, and then after getting off a double-shift I would catch a ride back home then tether myself to a tire and drag it through the snow up a local mountain and back to my cabin before bed.  

In order to get the expedition off the ground I needed to secure sponsorship to help fund the endeavor, and in total the three-year effort resulted in over $140,000 in sponsorship, money from my savings, and loans.  This funded a 300-mile Winter training race in Canada, a month-long solo expedition in Norway, all my gear, logistics fees, travel to and from Antarctica, and much more.  Were I given the choice, I’d rather train for twice as long in temperatures twice as cold than go through the stress of fundraising again, and after talking to many other expeditioners I seem to be in the vast majority with this opinion.

This brings me back to where we were, with me perched atop a wooden platform on the Chilean Coast.

Basecamp

After two weeks in Punta Arenas and watching unseasonably aggressive storms delay all the expeditions as well as the basecamp staff’s entry onto the continent (this was blamed solely on the storms, though issues between the operation and the Chilean airport we deployed from were unspoken contributing factors) I loaded onto a plane headed South.  The port of Punta Arenas disappeared behind the wing of the plane and was replaced by a series of oceanic ice flows, some bergs, and eventually the Transantarctic Mountains.

From this perspective the land wasn’t something unfamiliar to me.  Jagged black rock sat adjacent to sweeping granite and sandstone cliffs which were poised perfectly between wide open spaces caked with snow.  Excitement grew as the plane dropped onto an extended runway comprised entirely of ice, and all the expedition parties unloaded to take in their first breath among the frozen desert.  The years of effort were now culminating into the start of a journey I knew would define the rest of my life, and in those first few moments I felt at peace, comfortable in this kind of environment I’d trained so hard to sustain myself in.

We were ushered into transport trucks outfitted to drive across the frozen landscape and taken about a half-hour away to Union Glacier Camp where we would all eventually deploy out of.  Due to all the delays camp hadn’t been built yet and throughout our welcome tour snowmobiles and transport vehicles hauling tents and equipment all over the area were trying to get their seasonal Antarctic town ready before more clients came through.  In an open field of compacted ice between the guest tents and the staff tents we were given free range to pitch our expedition tents anywhere we like.  In a land of 24-hour daylight it made sense for everyone to meet at the mess hall for dinner before pitching tents around 21:00.

The parties who had arrived included myself, two other soloists, a self-guided duo, a guided duo, and a group of three all aiming for similar ski-to-pole objectives from two possible starting points.  We were assigned a pre-exped schedule that involved visiting the medical team for kit analysis and suggestions, a comms team charged with tracking us and keeping an eye on our reported conditions as the journeys beat down on us, a field store with our cooking gas, and a few other key departments and figures they wanted us to be familiar with.  With all the running around and organizing our kit the day went pretty quickly, and by day’s end half the parties were ready to go into the field.

We watched the weather carefully as the early season had been quite tumultuous, but there didn’t seem to be any bad weather coming through for the rest of the week.  Two parties flew out to begin their journey after one full day at camp, but I and the trio wanted two so that we could do some final organizing and take some time to breathe in what it took for all of us to get this far.

Into the Field

I received my final weather check at breakfast on Wednesday, November 22.  We were all cleared to go and I was given one hour to have my bags, spare clothes, and other kit I was leaving at camp packed up and ready to go into storage along with my pulk sorted before loading it on the plane.

I dragged my pulk over to the field store’s scale before loading it on the plane and it read 114 kilograms or 251 pounds.  This was significantly above what I had planned for, and the extra weight could be attributed to redundancy on too many items as well as too heavy of choices in food for my grazing bags.  Nonetheless, the weight of the pulk didn’t feel like something that would impede my ability to move on the ice, and with the plane taking off minutes later I wouldn’t have been able to change my kit anyways.

I stepped up onto the Twin Otter, now remounted with skis instead of wheels, and watched in quiet excitement alongside the three-man Finnish team as we were lifted into the sky above the mountains.  On one side of the plane I could see the range full of black, spiny mountains that rose out of the ice like a serpent frozen forever in place.  This was contrasted with the endless, monotonous expanse of white desert that lie out the opposite window.  Though I’d see some of the range in my first week of skiing, that expanse was where I was headed.

We landed in the Hercules Inlet, and without wasting time I took my satellite phone out and called in my location to base. “My coordinates are South 79° 49.596. My West is 079°48.636.” They read these figures back to me, wished me luck, and I was on my way South.  It’s important to note that much of Antarctica consists of a 360 flat-white horizon that is featureless, at least in the macro, and so navigation can be a bit tricky sometimes.  Compasses are oriented toward not the literal North and South Poles but wherever Earth’s greatest Northern and Southern magnetic poles lie, and these move every year.  Movement of the poles aside, the magnetic strength isn’t uniform across the planet, and as one gets closer to either pole these swings in magnetic frequency can begin to affect the accuracy of a compass.  This phenomenon is known as magnetic declination, and in essence it means I can almost never trust that the “South” my compass is pointing to is correctly South.  Modern GPS systems account for this on their own, thankfully, and so as I skied away from the plane with basecamp, my home and family, and, well, everything I’ve ever known Northward at my back, I oriented myself towards waypoints with a bearing acquired by my GPS.  I held myself true to this bearing with a permanently mounted compass that sat on a plastic arm and was fixed on my hips, stopping every few hours to ensure I was still on course and the changes in magnetism hadn’t thrown off my bearing.

This was it; the first few steps on the world’s most desolate continent.  I imagined the early morning hours I spent traning over the last few Winters.  The hundreds of thousands of feet climbed, the miles harnessed to a tire, the moments of failure along the way were all coming back to me now.  I could see myself on that porch in North Carolina sharing my dream with my friend years ago.  Everything I had been working toward was culminating in this moment.  It was time to prove something to myself.

Up From Hercules

Those first days were incredibly slow as predicted.  While most of the ascent to the South Pole, positioned at 9,300 feet above sea level for those who don’t know, is quite gradual, that ascent off the icy sea and onto land is quite challenging when the pulk is at its heaviest.  Expedition skis utilize skins made of synthetic fibers that allow the ski to slide in one direction but bite into the snow when sliding backwards, allowing the user to dig into the surface of the snow and propel themselves forward even when going uphill while bearing a load.  Naturally, I started with full skins which covered the greatest surface area of the ski which increases its ‘bite force’ to stick with the metaphor.  The trade off is this also creates more friction and so there is practically no glide when traversing over flatter terrain.  I imagined myself sticking with full skins for the first five days or so while I meticulously crawled my way up the hillside for up to eight hours a day.  

By the end of the first day, a half day really considering the time it took to leave basecamp and get all the gear situated on the ice, I was feeling incredibly strong.  At the start of the journey I was around 165 pounds, and so to be skiing uphill with nearly a hundred more pounds than I weighed strapped to my waist was challenging but not the exhausting effort I would have originally thought it to be.  Granted, whether it was tiring or not, it was incredibly slow.  My start point was just barely out of sight when I pitched camp one, and even while leaving a good 45-minutes ahead of the Finnish team, they, with their weight distributed among three pulks instead of one, ended their day camped close by, just ahead of me.

The day was incredibly hot by Antarctic standards.  A balmy 20 degrees or so down by the ocean.  I was absolutely drowning in sweat and didn’t want to go to bed that way.  After I stopped to pitch camp, fighting like all hell to break the surface of the ice with my shovel as it was like chiseling stone, I dug a separate hole about four feet deep or so and took a snow bath.  Stripped down to my skivvies and scrubbing my skin with abrasive snow in a frozen wasteland situated under a hole in the Ozone layer isn’t exactly where I imagined my life would go when I first began pursuing a career in the outdoors, but boy was that a beautiful moment for me.

After cleaning myself I began melting snow for drinks and dinner.  Shortly after I called in my position, hours of travel and distance covered for the day.  It was and continued to be a punch in the gut to read that number out loud, but I knew the journey would start slow and resigned myself to enjoying Jason Isbell’s “Here We Rest” album before falling asleep on top of my sleeping bag.

Day two started with a bit of fumbling after I removed my sleep mask and experienced the disorienting effect of Antarctica’s 24-hour daylight Summer.  The sun lit my tent up so brilliantly that I sat for a moment with my sunglasses on to let my eyes adjust.  As I skied along that day I imagined myself a solitary human charged with traversing some bizarre, lifeless planet far away from home.  Certainly this is what the experience felt like in any case.

Temperatures were still high, and I probably spent half the day skiing without a shirt on.  I was plenty warm as long as I was on the move, and the sunlight, even as powerful and concentrated as it is out there, felt nice on my back.

Other than the books I was listening to along the way, pieces on endurance, ultrarunning, adventure and the like, the day wasn’t very notable.  It was a long, hot slog up through surface conditions that fluctuated between sugar and raw ice.  I noted in my journal that night how strong I felt even as I covered little ground.

Entering The Void

By day three I had finished most of the difficult climbing in the first section of the journey and had finally hit ground I was capable of making progress on.  I remember checking my GPS for a bearing, throwing it back in my jacket, and marching forward at an honest working pace hoping to start closing the gap on falling further behind schedule.  I moved for a little over an hour and stopped to pee when I noticed something was wrong.  “There’s no way I managed to…” but after checking every pocket on my pulk suit I realized the mistake I’d made.  What felt like putting my GPS in my pocket was really just me placing it between my jacket and my ski overalls, and somewhere between my last bearing check and now it fell onto the ground.  What a rookie mistake.

I unclipped from my pulk and made my way back, marking the position of my equipment on a different GPS and then skiing along my own tracks, hoping the whole time that my pulk hadn’t run the device into the ground or that it had been buried by drifts of snow being blown around the area.  Thankfully, after about 25-minutes of skiing I came upon the GPS sitting atop the frozen surface and returned to my pulk with only one wasted hour.  I got away with a mistake, but that won’t always be the case and I needed to be more methodical to ensure I didn’t make more.

By day’s end I could see the three sails.  These rolling black rocks, known as “nunataks,” were the only major landmark for the first few hundred miles of the journey, and I distinctly remembered listening to my mentor, Wendy Searle, referring to them in her audio diaries I used to listen to every day.  It took a full two days before I passed them and could no longer see them in my periphery.

It was at this point in the journey I started taking a massive toll mentally.  Every day I worked hard and every day I was falling further behind schedule.  I switched to half skins and for certain was moving faster, but not quite fast enough.  I talked about this often with my team who assured me that as long as I stayed patient and worked honestly throughout each day I’d begin clearing that threshold in the coming days.  The mental stress of moving so slowly was exacerbated by, to use one of my good friend’s phrases, having too high an “emotional baseweight.”  Rumination is my worst habit, and I was continually torturing myself with an unhealthy perspective on what had been a very eventful few months before the expedition.  The majority of these scenarios I was playing for myself involved the loss of two friends shortly before I left, one of which was to suicide and the other to circumstance.

I had hoped to have a better grip on these situations and attempted to distract myself, but I recognize this as a great weakness of mine - an absolute unwillingness to accept things I can’t change.  When the clouds began rolling overhead and the fog swallowed me later that day I knew I’d have to do a better job managing these stresses if I was going to keep a clear head.

My first night in whiteout I checked the weather via a satellite update on my GPS unit, and it seemed I was in for three days of low visibility.  I could handle that.

I plugged a piece of equipment into my battery bank to get it up to speed and get a better sense of how much power I’d have to ration for the next few days.  To my surprise the device drank my entire battery bank dry but when turned on read “5% battery warning” in flashing text.  This is why spare batteries are important.  I wasn’t worried about losing my satellite phone or my GPS, but my InReach messenger, my battery bank, and my phone (so, my books) were all gone and I knew it would be a few days before I could recover them.  C’est la Vie.

Drawing on a miserable morning from my experience in the Yukon earlier this year where I marched in a suit of ice alone through the darkness, I drifted into my head and let my body run on auto while I basically drifted through violent and self-deprecating daydreams.  I had cycled through every last insufficiency I felt I had, and when I ran out of points to attack myself with I attempted to take on the perspective of people throughout my life and found all new inspiration to degrade myself.  With no visual stimulus in any direction, marching alone through the icy fog and devoid of any perspective on the progress I was making south, I enveloped myself completely in this space of self-hatred, which although incredibly unhelpful is a great way to distract oneself and make the hours go by quickly.

It got easier over time, thankfully, and after two days of wrestling with all this internal weight I began to come out of my own head.  There was a kind of serenity that wrapped over me there alone in the white void, and even as I could only see about six feet in any given direction I was really coming in tune with myself.  Every few hours I’d shed a few tears, refuel, compose myself and fall back into the hypnotic rhythm of my skis whumpfing and my working breath.  I studied my heart beating in my chest, and when I’d begin to slump back into that negative space, combing over details of past events one more time just to make sure I wasn’t some apathetic, unloving monster, I could pull the reigns in a bit easier each time.  At times it almost seemed like I was overseeing myself from outside my own mind.  I was a puppeteer noticing how frequently a particular pattern could tangle strings, and in time instead of allowing them to tangle and then undoing them I’d prevent them from getting crossed in the first place.  What I would give to get back there again.

While the day’s pulk hauling was getting to be more tiring, I knew the upcoming sun would massively recharge me.  After some time it began to seem like a question of ‘if’ it would come instead of ‘when.’  I’d pitch my tent among flat breaks between sastrugi (frozen ridges of snow created by powerful wind) and set myself asleep safely in the depths of the void.  Each night I’d pull another weather update, and each night I saw the fog was predicted to continue.  Not that I was aware of anything to see in this part of the journey aside from sastrugi, I was craving the sun and improved visibility, even if only marginally better.

On day 11 I faced into a strong headwind that demanded I drop the retractable nose piece on my balaclava down over my face, effectively doubling-up on protection when situated under the fleece duckbill I had sewn into my goggles.

For the first time during the journey I was skiing along outfitted with the entirety of my polar spacesuit-equivalent.  I was adorned with double-layered gloves with pogies attached to my ski poles, a down vest overtop my pulk suit, and all the face-coverings I had with me.  It gave me tunnel vision as all I could really make out for the first few hours was my compass hung atop my waist, a vague whiteness around my feet with imperceivable texture that masked the terrain, and the fur that lined the hood of my pulk jacket.  I was no longer looking forward but down, putting in great effort to keep my compass aligned as by this point in the journey I realized I had drifted about 3 miles West.

Every once in a while I would turn my head to the side and spot three black blips that would be swallowed by the fog before being revealed again to me minutes later. These shadowy figures appear to me between gaps of cloudy snow only to vanish from reality with incredible frequency.  They were uniform in size, never seeming to grow or shrink as the day went on, and I perceived them to be the Finnish team.  It rattled my brain that in an environment where I couldn’t even tell where I was placing my skis I thought I could spot another expedition party in the middle of nowhere, tucked somewhere in the vague beyond.  

But it truly could have been them.  Sometimes they would be lined up with one speck being in the far back and two in the front being very close to each other.  Sometimes all three stacked on top of each other, which I imagined was them taking a break.  All this information came from brief moments of peeking up from my compass, remember, and so I found myself creating an entire narrative about these three specks.  How were they finding the wind and blinding fog?  Were they still feeling strong after two weeks on the ice?  How, with such lighter pulks, were they staying parallel to me?  Perhaps it was never them at all, but it felt like I had good company that day as my hallucinatory friends skied alongside me a few miles out.

The powerful headwind was a welcomed presence though.  Even as it seemed to strip me of my warmth faster than other days, it did slowly attack the fog and by about mid afternoon I was finally set free from its grasp.  I was still under clouds, mind you, but enough light peaked through the clouds that the rolling fields of sastrugi were now available not just for my legs to perceive but my eyes as well.  The surface was pretty firm between the sastrugi clusters, and now that I could see I could adjust course to dance around some of these clusters and cover a little more ground.

By day’s end I had been going for 10 hours and felt content in my progress.  Little slivers of sun broke through the clouds and were beaming through the lite snow that was being thrown through the air by the wind.  I was, in a moment, enveloped completely in a crystalline wave of ice that shone and streamed across the horizon.  It was my very own private Antarctic Christmas light show.  It was a moment of intense, otherworldly beauty that existed for me and me alone.

The heavy winds demanded I built camp with undivided attention, and so I carabinered the head guyline to my pulk before kneeling on the loose fabric of my tent and building my home for the night, wrestling with the wind that was constantly trying to chuck my only place of safety into oblivion.  Back home in Montana I would run in the mountains and jump in the creek, even in the middle of Winter, to rehearse for this very situation, and it felt good to see all that effort paying off.  It all felt second nature, and even in heavy winds I never felt nervous or that the situation was getting out of control.

Another day of skiing was behind me and many more were ahead.  I went through my evening like any other day.  “No injuries to report. My position is South 81 degrees, 27 decimal 9662, West 80 degrees, 43 decimal 3932.  10 hours of skiing and 16 miles covered.”  16 miles??  For only the second time during the journey I had hit my minimum mileage, and even got a bonus two miles out of the day.

This felt like an incredible win after what was a very trying week.  Maybe things were finally looking up for this journey.

Muck and Surrender

The very next morning began with renewed fog and fresh snow.  In the polar world, you usually want wind to accompany snow, firstly so that it doesn’t fall flat upon your tent and threaten you in your sleep, but secondly so that it gets compacted on the snow’s surface which makes it more navigable.  Since the air was still the snow sat loose on the surface.  It concealed the sastrugi, causing me to ski into troughs between them and come off balance.  I fell continually throughout the morning, and the spaces without sastrugi weren’t much better as the fresh snow gobbed-up on the bottom of my skis causing them to hold snow which made them heavy and unable to gain any traction as the fibers of my skins were buried.  Every ten or fifteen minutes I’d need to scrape the bottom of my skis over one another to get the snow off, but I recognized this was placing strain on the fibers and the steel edge of the ski was ripping some of them away.  The less destructive measure was to take my skis off, use my ski poles to scrape away all the snow without damaging the skin, and then reattach them to my feet before repeating the process minutes later.  After about my tenth fall traversing sastrugi without grip a jarring thought came to me.  I was lying on my back with skis pointed to the side.  I could faintly tell the fog was rolling over me as small pieces of ice and snow drifted above.  I wanted this whole thing to end.  It only took a minute or so before I started getting cold, and I thought to myself that was probably the fastest way to put an end to all this nonsense.  After a while I would start to shiver, and then I’d go numb, and if I stayed still for just a while longer my body would get too cold to save myself.  One of the final phases of hypothermia before someone dies comes with the delusion that they are burning hot.  It would likely feel like I was burning to death amidst an ocean of apathetic ice, but if I just sat still long enough I could be remembered for perishing in the field.  People would talk about the ambitious young man that died an honorable death chasing his dream with no notion that I had passively allowed the cold to consume me.  I don’t like to admit how tempting the thought actually was in that moment, but regardless it’s not a path I would ever actually take, and so I stood up and continued to slog on for a couple hours without hardly making any progress.  I was exhausting myself in doing so, and I ended the day early hoping wind would come through at some point and improve conditions.

I was laying in my tent with my head spinning from how I was falling even further behind schedule.  By now the number was more than 50 miles I needed to make up, and the new average mileage necessary to complete the journey was almost as big as my biggest day so far.  Those 16 miles that tasted so good the day before now felt like a nightmare when I realized I’d have to hit that mark for the next 38 days in a row without falling short once.  I could extend my timeline some by going to half-rations later in the journey, but even doing that required me to hit my 14-mile minimum for over a month straight with no mistakes.  I called my fiancé and recognized for the first time how I was breaking down.  “It just won’t let up” I said to her between coughing fits and tears.  I’m no stranger to having a good cry during efforts like this.  They’re a perfectly acceptable way to unload some of the immense stress the field places on a person, but it wasn’t until much later during a conversation with her that she admitted the sound of me in that state truly scared her.

The Pole felt gone to me, at least in this style, and so I moved the goalpost. “I’m going to see just how far I can manage to get with the amount of food and time I have, and once I’m nearing the end of all my rations I’ll make a call on whether to absolutely starve myself in a marathon dash to the finish or call in a resupply,” abandoning the record but still completing the crossing.  She agreed with my new plan, if not worried about how far I may be willing to take this whole starved-Antarctic skiing thing.  I reached out to my expedition manager numerous times throughout the journey with the same concerns about not making progress, and she felt I wasn’t as behind as I felt I was. Skiing everyday was a good thing no matter how I framed that progress.

The second strongest winds I’d experience so far came whopping against my tent shortly after, and my anxiety changed to excitement.  Teammates from my ultrarunning group may tell you I don’t really buy into competition with others.  In a 100-mile foot race through the mountains of Montana earlier this year I refueled and departed an aid station 23 hours into my run with great efficiency, and my pacer excitedly told me “you just gained five spots in that aid station alone!  You’re doing so well.”  I hadn’t really registered his enthusiasm in that moment, but I did give him a good laugh when I responded “yeah, that’s great.”  Apathetically shrugging off me breaking forward in the pack as the race went on.

My intensity comes from the competition I’m constantly participating in with myself.  I have a constant need to prove to myself that I’m not the same weak person I see myself as.  I’m not the kid living in a parking garage anymore, or the guy completely unable to advocate for his own wellbeing in relationships.  I’m not the pushover I think I am.  The last five years of pursuing a life in the outdoors have slowly shaped me inot the kind of person I can respect, but I only recognize myself as that person for as often as I’m willing to prove it to myself.  I want the old me dead, and every time I step out of my tent into the vast whiteness I kill a piece of him.  I think about myself in this way all the time, and have even adorned the door to my tent with the phrase “a part of you must die” to remind myself of that every day.  

I barely slept that night, tossing and turning in a constant fight to not impatiently step out of my tent and irrationally take on bigger day than I’d be able to manage.  Even so, I started the next day early and fully reinvigorated to take on the challenge.  South Pole or not, I came out here to see where my limits lie and every day I was willing to put my skis on was another chance to approach those limits.  The surface had improved some, but with the terrain trending uphill it was still slow.  I saw the slope tapering up ahead and imagined I would be there within two hours.  Hour one went by slow and patient.  Hour two was exactly the same.  Hour three, however, felt more tiring as the slog wouldn’t let up.  I take a five-minute break every ninety minutes or so to eat and drink, and as I turned around to undo the zip on my pulk I noticed some tingling in my right hand.  I fiddled with the ziplock that held my grazing rations but quickly opened it with my left hand, not really paying the odd sensation any mind (kinks, pains, and odd sensations are an everyday occurrence on the ice).

By hour five I was having some pretty uncomfortable stomach pains.  These are another normal occurrence on the ice and tend to come and go every few days.  I can eat and drink in full kit just fine, but using the restroom requires taking my harness off, and when I reached for it I realized there was a bigger problem here.  I clasped my right hand against the buckle but my fingers wouldn’t close on it.  I strained and squeezed with all my might but I couldn’t so much as close my hand.  I stared in awe at the limp appendage dangling uselessly at the end of my arm.  Quickly, I started combing through the options out loud as if I was bouncing theories off an invisible companion.  “It’s cold and I was skiing into a headwind, but it’s not as cold as plenty of other days I’d gone through.  Did I fall so far behind on calories I’d lost all strength in my arms? No, it’s just the one hand.  Is it broken? No, that’s crazy.  There’s no way I broke it without noticing.  So not broken, but hurt? Somewhere along the plenty of falls I’d taken skiing blind over sastrugi, maybe I’d damaged it, but it didn’t seem to hurt at all.”  I spun through these options but wasn’t reaching any conclusions.  Whatever was wrong anyways, I needed to address how cold I was getting instead of wasting time on a diagnosis going nowhere.  I undid the buckle with my left hand and grabbed my exped jacket.  I thought some extra warmth would at least bring movement back into my hand, but I couldn’t grab the zipper on my pulk or so much as handle my shovel while I attempted to dig a cat hole.  Hell, I just barely managed to get the zippers undone on my pulk suit one-handed to avoid soiling myself.

The whole situation was a mess, but it was more than an embarrassing frustration. Being alone on the Antarctic Continent and on the move with only one functioning hand was incredibly dangerous, and I knew I needed to fix the situation before I could continue.

I pulled the head guyline of my tent out of the pulk carefully and fiddled with the carabiner for a good two minutes before I clipped it to my pulk.  Getting my tent poles slotted was surprisingly easy when tucked under my right arm, and I learned I could slot them into their seating by placing it between my boots and bending the pole over my knee.  I held my tent stakes in my teeth at the sacrifice of my lips which tore and bled when I pulled them back out of my mouth.  They went into my jacket pocket instead which was slower but better than bloodying up my lips.  Digging the snow out for burying the valences on my tent was probably the most difficult part as I seated the shovel on the surface, stomped it into the ice, and then knelt down on the shovel to lift slabs of snow out of the ground before maneuvering them into place.  I didn’t check my watch, but I imagine it took a full forty-five minutes to get the tent pitched properly, more than twice as long as it normally takes. 

Once inside I collected myself, admittedly panicked by the whole ordeal, and began looking over my hand in depth.  If I rolled my shoulder too far back the whole forearm went numb.  Sometimes it would tingle and sometimes it felt like nothing.  I held my arm in different positions to see if I could manage to close my hand, and in some positions I could move it a little but there was nothing I could do to coerce it into providing any strength.  The closing motion was what was most restricted as I could move the hand but not the fingers.  It wasn’t cold, or at least not colder than I would’ve expected it to be.

It didn’t take long to make my decision.  I was alone in a frozen desert with a worthless appendage.  Today was an incredible frustration, but on a colder day, on a stormier day, or on a day with more nuanced terrain to navigate, being one-handed would be compromising.  My expedition was over.

This wasn’t a decision I’d make lightly.  I recognized the money sponsors poured into me and the faith instilled in me by my mentors.  I thought about all the students in Appalachia that I had lectured to about the importance of chasing their dreams and how my story could serve as an example of what they were capable of.  I thought about how I had drained all my finances and taken out many loans to make this project happen.  I’d be returning home broke and in debt, banking on the success of the journey to provide me opportunities to dig myself back out of the hole.  I knew that my immense desire to be a world record holder was going to be forfeited as I aged out of my opportunity to be the youngest to pole.  All these factors didn’t change the facts of the situation; My dream died here.

With a limp hand I typed the message out to my family, training partners, and mentors.  “I pulled the plug.  The expedition is over.”  While on a satellite phone call with SAR creating an evacuation plan my InReach was exploding with messages of encouragement, begging me to continue on and insisting I could still make it.  They knew I was frustrated about being behind, but I hadn’t told them about my hand yet.  The comms team also wanted to know why I hadn’t said anything, but the occasional weakness seemed like an on-brand symptom of being on expedition right up until I realized something else was going on.

“Yes, there’s a headwind coming from the South but I was skiing through it.  There are consistent patches of sastrugi, most of them a foot or so in height and the larger ones being over three-foot tall.  Conditions are clear with distant clouds to the North.  Slope angle is mild.”  All these factors and more contributed to whether they could pull me out or if I’d need to manage my way to another location.  Luckily, it was a good place for landing, and a plane was already passing over my location from dropping off a cache of supplies for another party.  It was in many ways the most casual ‘rescue’ any of the pilots had been a part of.  I recounted in my audio diary that I “wasn’t quitting on a bad day.  All things considered, it’s a truly amazing day here in Antarctica.”

I got my tent back down which is much easier to do one-handed than setting it up as I only needed to pull pegs with my left hand and then kneel on the fabric I rolled it up with my right elbow.  The plane landed nearby, and the pilots came over to assist me in pulling my pulk over to it.  They helped me onto the Twin Otter and did what they could to soften the blow.  It was a very quiet and sullen scene though.  The only thing that was said during the flight was when I was unable to get my chapstick open and had to ask a crew member to open it for me.  It was in some ways a humorous scene as I, mr adventure and endurance athlete, couldn’t do something as mundane as opening a cap.

Return to Basecamp

I’d requested to see the doctors upon landing, but as my hand wasn’t an immediate emergency they asked me to wait until the morning.  I was received by a friend at camp who tried to support me however she could.  I told her Ireally just wanted to shower and eat alone.

It was an incredibly frustrating moment looking at myself in the mirror, and not just because it took ages to undress myself.  I had joked for over a year about how lethargic and scrawny I was going to look after the journey was done, but even as I was losing weight it was only two weeks and I looked stronger and more athletic than I probably ever had.  My core looked like a tree trunk.  I would’ve mistaken myself for fresh off a training block, peaked for a wrestling match or an ultramarathon and not in the slightest a recently evacuated failed expeditioner.  This moment hurt the most.  I knew I had more to give, and if the only thing I had to do was ski all day, irrelevant of my hand, I could’ve gone on for ages.  I often felt weak and slow in the field, but never like I couldn’t take on another day.  I hadn’t even come close to what I was capable of, and my body reflected this.

If I needed to be pulled out, I wanted it to be on the brink of starvation, marching into oblivion until my legs were quivering.  I wanted to have stories like my heroes did, ones where parts of my face were black with frostbite, where I was facing stoically into storms of such magnitude they’d instill fear and paralysis into the hearts of most people.  I wanted to keep getting beat down and then rise everyday just to see how far I’d go, but I didn’t get the chance.  It’s important to note that I agree with the call I made, and put in the same situation I’d make the same call.  Everyone more risk-averse than I was so proud of me for choosing to pull the plug, and some folks, the kind of a certain temperament I aspire to, feel I acted cowardly.  In the end it was only my expedition, my wellbeing, and my life on the line, so it shouldn’t matter what either of these parties think, though of course it does.

A couple I had become great friends with at basecamp welcomed me into the mess hall for dinner, shedding a few tears over how this all played out, and offered to make me a plate.  I stubbornly refused and instead tucked the plate under my right elbow crease and opted to spill food all over my shirt instead of just letting them take care of me.  For as battered as my pride was, I was still about as stubborn as I ever was.

I sat outside the mess tent to smoke a cigarette.  I always crave cigarettes when I’m in the field.  Almost immediately after lighting it a gentleman who’d just arrived at camp strolled by and remarked that “those will kill you, you know.” I told him it wouldn’t get the chance before everything else I do kills me first.

I retired to my tent and drowned myself in frustration, finally managing to fall asleep around 4:30 the next morning.

My legs felt heavier now than any point in the expedition and caused me to limp some.  I made my way to the medical building and explained everything that had convinced me to call off the exped.  The doctor’s were incredibly kind and let me vent before testing my upper body for range of motion and strength.  Initial evaluations hinted towards nerve damage in my shoulder manifesting as a lack of control in my hand but I’d need to follow up with an MRI to get confirmation.  I had also weighed myself in one of the admin buildings, and the accuracy was damaged by me having had two dinners the night before and by wearing baselayers in this weigh-in, but it showed I had lost eight pounds even with those factors, so I place my best estimate at 11-12 pounds lost in 13 days, twice the rate I was supposed to be losing weight according to the doctors.  I struggled to get through my cheese and salami each day, sure, but I would have never guessed I was tanking that fast based on my perceived effort.  I thought the work was hard but felt sustainable.

The rest of the day was spent returning what remained of my gas, saying goodbyes to all the staff, and throwing away over a month’s worth of food.  I was disgusted to see so much waste, but I wasn’t legally allowed to fly back with it since I moved all the dehydrated rations out of their original packaging to save weight.

C’est la Vie

Home

After a day in camp I took a plane back to Chile, and then two days later began my travels back to the United States.  All things said and done it was five days from calling SAR to being back in my home in Montana.  Across an expedition’s timeline that’s less than a single moment.

My fiancé grabbed me from the airport and left me to spend the afternoon alone to unpack my equipment and process the journey.  I wasn’t sure how to respond or what I should focus on, so I quietly went about putting everything back in its place.

Two days later I stepped out my front door to go for a ‘run,’ if you can call it that.  I hobbled down the road to the base of the Bridger Mountains and made my way up the College M trail like I had hundreds of times in the last few years.  My muscles felt like they were rotting from the inside and my heart rate skyrocketed even as I very slowly made my way up the mountain.  It was more painful than any hill I’ve climbed, and I can assure all readers I’ve been through some excruciating slogs before.

Somewhere along the hobbling a thought came into my head.  Predicated on Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Man in the arena’ quote, one I’ve always loved and had received no less than five times from different people since announcing to the world my failure, I told myself the whole ordeal was only a waste of time if I refused to aspire for more.  It’s in my nature, for better or worse, to keep striving for more, despite the result.  I really am a “the journey is the destination” kind of guy, even as I felt the sting of falling on my face in a very public way.

I climbed the same hill the next day, and managed to hold a jog, albeit an incredibly slow one, through a track workout two days later.  8 days removed from the expedition and I can climb the hill again, slowly of course, without needing to sit down.

This expedition has brought me into a career field I never imagined was available to someone like me, it has brought me the very best friends imaginable, memories and relationships with some of my heroes and a host of accomplished mountain athletes I hope to resemble one day.  It has allowed me to travel to some of the most beautiful and remote places on the planet, and for the first time in my life brought me into a place I can stand to look at the man I see in the mirror.  I’m not the same stoic, world-class adventurer as the people I look up to, but I’m trying to give myself breadth in remembering I’ve only been doing this for a few years.

I carry both the sting of failure and the fire to come back better.  For now I just want to get healthy again, figure out the issues with my hand, and enjoy Christmas - something which I hadn’t done in a few years.  

Afternote: On Accountability and Ownership

In a gesture of kindness many, many folks, bother strangers and loved ones alike, have reached out with messages akin to “there is no failure.  Only success or lessons.”  I want to make it very clear where I stand on this.  I absolutely did fail.  Perspectives like this, to me, are intended to soften the blow as they are so commonly provided to those who have fallen short of their goals.  My personal philosophy on the matter is, while filled with innumerable lessons and opportunities for growth, those lessons were born in failure.  It is both failure and opportunity, not opportunity exclusively.  I am striving to identify all the ways I personally contributed to my own insufficiency in the field so that I can come back stronger, and that starts with taking ownership of the decisions I made along the way.  Only by holding the standard at all costs can we tell if we’re meeting it, and I won’t give myself breadth to blame my failure on conditions and circumstances.  I couldn’t have prevented the issue with my hand (which is marginally improving, as you can tell by the length of this report), but there are a handful of things I could have done differently both in preparation and execution that would have better prepared me for my time in the field.

I hope to view this expedition as a turning point in which I started living up to my own expectations.

Thank y’all for the love and support these last few years.

-Val