The Times UK online edition
March 13, 2000
By Ranulph Fiennes

The choice: lose a sledge in the Arctic Ocean and end the expedition, or rescue it and risk losing your hand. Sir Ranulph Fiennes tells how disaster struck his solo trek to the North Pole.

Within minutes of the accident I knew that my situation did not involve mere frostbite and amputation. The more immediate problem was how to avoid imminent death by exposure with a wet foot, dead hand and no effective fingers. The temperature was -49C, the wind was rising and ice floes between me and the coastline were cracking up in response to the moon's tidal pull.

Earlier that week I had begun an attempt to reach the North Pole, solo and unsupported, by the direct route from the Arctic coastline of North America. Only one man, a Norwegian, had done so, and he had used the drift route from Russia. Nobody had ever succeeded via the far more difficult direct route.

Exel Logistics took on the sponsorship and chose the Cancer Research Campaign as our charity, with a target of £1 million to raise for a cancer gene study, whether the expedition succeeded or not. The Prince of Wales was our Patron. Dr Mike Stroud, my polar travelling partner for ten years, helped to organise the vital calorific planning and medical gear. Mac Mackenney, an experienced base leader, took over most of the organisation and Laurence Howell, as for the past 20 years, dealt with our communications plans.

For high calorie, low-weight rations I had the backing and experience of Brian Welsby of Be-Well nutritional products. The amphibious sledges were made by Europe's top sledge maker, Roger Daynes of Snowsled in Malmesbury.

Physical fitness was obviously important to have any chance of success when having to lug more than 500lb over 700 miles in a dog harness attached to a sledge like an outsize bathtub. The Arctic Ocean is never more than 75 per cent solid ice, even in the depths of winter. Winds, tides and currents constantly break up the ice, producing huge zones of open water and pressure ridges up to 40ft in height.

My diet, like the physical training, began in 1998. I ate half a pound of complex carbohydrate on top of my normal daily intake, usually brown rice, pasta or potatoes. The fitness training schedule included a two-hour run every other day, with an hour in the gym on alternate days. To ensure that I didn't miss out on the training schedule, I joined one of England's two Eco-Challenge endurance teams.

In 1999 training took a more stringent pace, including a target time of 3hr 30min for the London Marathon. I missed out by 29 seconds but still improved by more than an hour on my previous best. Then we knocked off the 125-mile, non-stop Devizes to Warminster canoe race in 26 hours. Various speed marches followed at weekends in Wales, Scotland and other hilly places.

In December 1999 we entered the Patagonia Eco-Challenge against 55 of the world's top teams. At 56, I was the oldest competitor and 23 years older than my three team-mates. On day one I developed big blisters on the balls of both feet that healed fully only a week before I left England for the North Pole attempt. Still, I had no qualms about being too old for the polar challenge, having kept up with world-class athletes in their prime for eight days and nights.

Mac Mackenney and I arrived at Resolute Bay in northern Canada on February 5, not long after the sun had reappeared there for the first time in five months. We were met in driving snow at -42C by Morag Howell, the base manager for First Air, the airline due to fly me north in a week's time to the startline at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. With her was Karl Z'berg, a legendary polar bush pilot of great skill and daring.

There are two modes of polar manhauling; very fast or very slow. The Norwegians are the chief proponents of the "Speedy Gonzales" approach: light equipment, medium-range calorific intake, superb fitness and, above all, the brilliant skiing technique that comes from cross-country ski-racing since childhood.

At 55 I could not hope to reach the Pole in less than 50 days, the period that Norwegians such as Sjur Mordre were aiming for.I would have to go for the tortoise approach, which I estimated would take 85 days. For safety I would carry 90 days' food. This alone would weigh more than 230lb, with fuel to melt ice to rehydrate it coming to another 60lb. All additional gear - tent, sleeping bag, mat, cooking kit, rope, axe, shovel, grapnel, hook, spare ski, spare clothes, repair kit, medical kit, camera, shotgun, lithium batteries, fluorescent marker poles, paddle - would total another 160lb, too much for a single sledge travelling in Arctic rubble ice so I had to use two sledges.

Altogether, I would need to haul 510lb and relay two loads,which meant every mile gained to the north would involve three travelled on the ground. This added to the dangers of a one-sledge trip, in that blizzards and white-outs are common. In such conditions perspective is wiped out and ski tracks become invisible.

You are in a world of cotton wool or white night, able to see only your own body; all else is a greywhite blur. You may fall into the water or crash into a 30ft-high wall with no visual warning. To all intents you are blind.

In such conditions the need to relay sledges involves a potentially lethal risk - once you have parked the first sledge and set off for your second load, you may never find it. At some point you will decide, because of the cold, to return to the first sledge. But it, too, may be impossible to find. You will then die from the cold.

I had no option but to take two sledges, so my schedule took the extra mileage into account. If I could travel north for ten hours every day for 80 days, with no rest day for injuries, bad weather or watery obstacles, my best progress would be 500 yards a day for the first three days, 1.4 miles daily for the next 30 days, 4.5 miles daily until day 58 and then, with a single sledge only, 11 miles daily to the Pole.

Many unsupported treks to the Pole have been scuppered by stretches of open water blocking the way north without temperatures low enough to refreeze the sea water. To avoid such delays I had two buoyancy tubes designed by Snowsled that fastened to either side of my bigger sledge, making it buoyant even when fully laden and with me sitting atop its load wielding a paddle.

At Resolute Bay I spent a week testing equipment and hauling the sledges over ice blocks on the sea ice a mile from the self-catering house Mac and I rented. On February 14 we flew to the most northerly of Canada's meteorological stations at Eureka, where musk oxen and wolves roam the hills around the airstrip. After refuelling, Karl Z'berg piloted the Twin Otter 300 miles north of Eureka and reached the edge of the Arctic Ocean and the conical hill at the north end of Ward Hunt Island, starting point of most North Pole attempts. With lurching bumps, we were down. As the door opened I felt the bitter cold of 84 degrees north in winter. The sun would not show its face here for three more weeks, and then only for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, I would travel by moonlight and head torch, powered by lithium batteries. I bid goodbye to Karl, Mac and the ITN film crew of Terry Lloyd and Rob Bowles, who had covered previous expeditions. Once the skiplane had gone I took a bearing to geographical north. The compass needle pointed to magnetic north 300 miles west of Resolute Bay and 600 miles south of my position. I had to set a magnetic lay-off of 98 degrees, then wait a minute for the needle to settle in the less than normal viscosity of its alcohol-filled housing. I could not use the North Star as a marker because it was almost directly overhead. Nor, pulling a sledge, could I use my GPS position-finder for direction.

The clothing policy I had evolved over 28 years of polar expeditions was based on non-stop movement and light, breathable clothes. Any halt, however brief, led quickly to hypothermia. Once my metabolism was up and running, pumping blood furiously to my extremities, I took off my duckdown duvet and stuffed it in the sledge next to my Thermos and 12-bore pump shotgun. Now I was wearing only a thin wickaway vest and longjohns under a black jacket and trousers made of 100 per cent ventile cotton. Cotton is not windproof so body heat is not sealed in. Alas, no modern clothing such as Goretex is completely breathable so, when pulling excessive loads over difficult terrain, the manhauler perspires. The sweat turns to ice inside the clothing and can quickly lead to hypothermia and death. Cotton is still the best compromise, provided you keep your blood running fast, except when in your tent and sleeping bag.

My schedule allowed two days to descend the soft snowfields of Ward Island's ice shelf to the edge of the sea. But I kept going without a rest and established both sleds at the coastline within seven hours. This boded well, for the sledges were running easily despite their full loads, the low temperature and soft, deep snow.

Geoff Somers, an experienced polar man, had advised me to include a cantilever design in the sledge moulds. Snowsled had done so, and the result was good. After seven hours of hard manhauling, I was cold and tired. I erected the tent in six minutes and started the cooker in four. These two acts, which I had practised thousands of times, are the key to survival, and with two usable hands can be performed easily in extreme temperatures, high winds and blizzards. I got in my sleeping bag, drank energy drink, ate chocolate and set my alarm watch for three hours. The weather was clear when I woke and the sea ice quiet to the north, a sign that the ice floes were not on the move.

The moon had vanished behind the hills so I would not be able to differentiate clearly between solid ice and thinly skinned zones, so the overall silence was a bonus. I restowed the big sledge, moving rapidly to keep my body core temperature up. I decided to take the smaller sledge first. Its load was 210lb, a third less than the 8ft sled. The ice floes that are blown south against this northern coastline of the Canadian Archipelago shatter against the ice shelf and blocks up to 35ft high tumble over one another, often forming huge ramparts that run east-west for miles. Behind them a scene of utter chaos can meet the despairing manhauler, slab upon slab of fractured ice block as far as the weary eye can see.

Travelling over the past 25 years with two or three colleagues I had four times broken the current world record for unsupported travel to the North Pole. Each time the ice conditions north of Ward Hunt Island were invariably bad to horrible. To my joy, I saw that this year the walls and rubble were split everywhere by recent breakage. New ice floes of twilight grey zigzagged through the obstacles wherever I looked. My schedule of 500 yards a day for the first three miles from the start began to look pessimistic.

I pressed on over the fissure dividing land from sea and into a broad belt of rubble. I took my skis off. For a few hundred yards I would have to haul each sled over a vista similar to that of postwar Berlin. Between each ice slab soft, deep snow covered the fissures. I often fell into traps, sinking waist deep.

I came to a wall of slabs 15ft high. I decided to test the simple pulley system devised by Mac. I attached it to the big sledge, which I had hauled first to the wall, and tugged it jerkily up the 45-degree slope. With the 300lb sled at the top of the wall, I detached the tiny grapnel hook and rolled up the pulley line. Too late I heard movement, and leapt towards the sledge, which quickly gathered momentum in its slide over the edge of the wall. I managed to grab the rear end but my 200lb body weight was not enough. The far side of the wall was a sheer 15ft drop on to sharp ice blocks. I landed hard and was winded but unhurt.

At first the sledge looked all right but closer inspection revealed a 16in tear under the bow, presumably where the sharp edge of the ice block had made contact with the 300lb falling sledge. I tried pulling the sledge but snow was caught in the damaged section and dragging it became difficult. Also, the sledge's hull, designed to be 100 per cent watertight, was compromised.

There was no course but to head back to the hut on Ward Hunt Island and find suitable substitute materials to effect a repair. In the mid-1980s we had erected a canvas cover over the steel skeleton of a hut long abandoned by scientists and installed a couple of wind-powered generators to provide electricity. With minimal safety gear in a bag, I skied for two hours back up that dark trail via the Twin Otter's landing strip about a mile east of the huts. The huts looked like a ghost camp, unchanged over the 12 years since my last visit. After an hour spent digging out the door of our old hut, I gained entry. There were a few tools and canvas materials so I decided to bring the sled back to make it watertight and capable of towing in all conditions. I skied back to the sledges and loaded minimal camping gear on to the smaller one. Then I lashed the damaged sled on top. Uphill through soft snow was slow going, some seven hours back to the hut.

I put my tent up inside the hut. The temperature had fallen to -49C and a bitter breeze caressed the hut. With the cooker on, a hot drink inside me and fully clothed, I began the repairs. Some hours later I was back at the ice edge, happy that my work had made the sledge easy to tow, even in soft snow, and pretty much watertight.

I found my previous trail easily. I camped on thin ice and woke to hear all manner of noises: cracking and rumbling, then silence. Then a frightening roar that galvanised me into movement from the depths of my four-layer sleeping bag. The moon was full, the scenery startlingly beautiful. Moonshadows played about the upended ice blocks and the ice shapes took on an uncanny resemblance to animals, castles or giant mushrooms.

Fearful of imminent upheaval due to the tidal influence of the full moon fracturing the floes, and the notoriety of the first four miles of ice to the north of Ward Hunt, I pressed on northwards. I dared not take either sledge too far because the surface between the rubble fields consisted of very thin ice, through which my probing skistick passed with ease into the dark waters below. After eight hours I had moved both sledges more than a mile to the north. My morale was high for the sledges ran well whatever the surface, far better than any previous design. My mental arithmetic raced ahead and I estimated a Pole arrival in only 70 days.

I kept an eye open for a good campsite. Sea ice grows at a rate of 2 to 3ft a year. Ice floes that survive intact for more than two years are easy to identify, for the broken blocks that litter their surfaces will be rounded off by two or more years of summer melt. The wind and snow round them into hummocks. Such floes can be at least 8ft thick and more likely to withstand great pressure from neighbouring floes. They can provide good landing strips for skiplanes. Above all, the surface snow will have had most of its original salt content leached away by the sun and so will provide good drinking water. Unfortunately, time passed without the appearance of any floe older than a few months. Indeed the area began to show increasing signs of recent open water only partially refrozen. My skistick frequently sank through the surface skin, forcing me to detour to safer ice.

I had been travelling for well over the intended ten hours and making good progress but was tired and cold. I ate a chocolate bar every two hours to ward off hypothermia but was still very weary. My longtime polar colleague Mike Stroud had become hypothermic three times on our travels and each time I had pitched the tent and given him hot drinks in his sleeping bag. Once, within two days of the South Pole, I caught him just in time; another hour and he would have died. Mike has taught soldiers the dangers and symptoms of hypothermia, yet even he did not recognise its onset in himself.

I decided to camp on any flat surface that looked solid. I came to a zone of interlacing fractures. The moon had vanished but whenever I stopped, I heard the grumble of ice on the move. To avoid a trench of black water, I mounted a bridge of 12in-thick slabs, buckled by floe pressure. I had the small sledge with me and the big one 500 yards to the south. I clambered over the slabs with my skis on. The sledge followed easily in my wake.

There was no warning. A slab tilted suddenly under the sledge, which responded to gravity and, unbalancing me, pulled me backwards. I fell on my back and slid down the slab. The noise that followed was the one I most hate to hear in the Arctic, a splash as the sledge fell into the sea.

I kicked out with my skis and flailed at the slab with both hands. One ski boot plunged into the sea and one gloved hand found an edge of the slab. Taking a firm grip I pulled my wet foot and ski out of the water. I unfastened the manhaul harness. I was already beginning to shiver. I squirmed around until I could sit on a flatter slab to inspect the sledge in the gloom.

It was under water, but afloat. I hauled on the traces but they were jammed under the slabs. Seventy days worth of food and 30 of fuel were on the sledge - and the communications gear; without it, the expedition was over. A nearby slab crashed into the sea: the ice was moving. I had to save the sledge quickly. Soon I would be dangerously cold.

With my feet (skis off), hooked around a slab, I lay on my stomach and stretched my left arm under the slab to free the sledge trace. I pushed up my sledge jacket sleeve and took off my mitt. In retrospect I may have been better off keeping it on, but I had to feel the submerged rope.

For a minute or so I could not find the snag. Then by jiggling the rope sharply, it came free. I pulled hard and the sodden sledge rose to the surface. My wet hand was numb but I could not replace the mitt until the sledge was out of the sea. Gradually the prow rose on to a slab and water cascaded off its canvas cover. Minutes later the sledge was on "dry land"; I danced about like a madman. Both my mitts were back on and I used my "cold hands revival technique" to restore life to the numb fingers. This involves a fast windmill motion with the fingers on the outside of the resulting centrifugal orbit. Usually my blood returns painfully to all my fingers; this time, it did not.

I took the mitt off and felt the dead hand. The fingers were ramrod stiff and ivory white. They might as well have been wooden. I knew that if I let my good hand go even partially numb, I would be unable to erect the tent and start the cooker - which I needed to do quickly for I was shivering in my thin gear.

I returned to the big sledge. The next 30 minutes were a nightmare. The cover zip jammed. With only five numb fingers, precious minutes went by before it was free and I unpacked the tent. By the time I had eased one tentpole into its sleeve my teeth were chattering violently and my good hand was numb. I had to get the cooker going in minutes or it would be too late. I crawled into the partially erect tent, closed its doorzip and began a 20-minute battle to start the cooker. I could not use the petrol lighter with my fingers but I found some matches I could hold in my teeth.

Starting an extremely cold petrol cooker involves careful priming so that just the right amount of fuel seeps into the pad below the fuel jet. The cold makes washers brittle and the priming plunger sticky. Using my teeth and a numb index finger, I finally worked the pump enough to squirt fuel on to the pad but was slow in shutting the valve; when I applied the match a 3ft flame reached to the roof. Luckily I had had a custom-made flame lining installed, so the tent was undamaged. And the cooker was alight - one of the best moments of my life.

Slowly and painfully some life came back into my fingers. An hour later, with my body warm again, I unlaced my wet boot. Only two toes had been affected. Soon they would exhibit big blood blisters and lose their nails but they had escaped true frostbite. All around the tent cracking noises sounded above the steady roar of the cooker. I was in no doubt as to the fate of my bad hand. I had seen enough frostbite in others to realise I was in serious trouble. I had to get quickly to a hospital to save some fingers from the surgeon's knife. I hated to leave the warmth of the tent. Both hands were excruciatingly painful. I battered ice off the smaller sledge, unloaded it and hauled it back to the big sledge. I set out in great trepidation. Twice my earlier tracks had been cut by newly open leads but both needed only small diversions to detour the open water. Five hours later I was back on the ice shelf. I erected the tent properly and spent three hours massaging my good hand and wet foot over the cooker.

I drank hot tea and ate chocolate. I felt tired and dizzy but the wind was showing signs of rising and I knew I should not risk a high wind chill. The journey to the hut took forever. Once I fell asleep on the move and woke in a trough of soft snow well away from my intended route.

When I came to the hut I erected the tent on the floor, started the cooker and prepared the communications gear which we call a Flobox after Laurence "Flo" Howell, who has organised communications for my expeditions for 20 years. I spoke to Morag in Resolute Bay. She promised to evacuate me the following day using a Twin Otter due to exchange weathermen at Eureka.

The fingers on my left hand began to grow great liquid blisters. The pain was bad so I raided my medical stores for drugs. The next day I found an airstrip near the hut and marked its ends with kerosene rags. When I heard the approaching skiplane I lit the rags; an hour later I was on my way to Eureka.

Thirty six hours after that I was at Ottawa General Hospital, watching as a surgeon stripped skin and sliced blisters from my fingers. For the next two weeks I received daily treatment in a hyperbaricoxygen chamber. I am still in hospital as I write this, hoping the treatment will save even millimetres of my fingers. At least a part of each finger and half of the thumb will be amputated back in England but the doctors here have saved a good deal of digit.

I have spent years travelling the polar wastes and had many narrow escapes. The odds, I suppose, were always narrowing; this time they caught up with me. I am sure that our travel plans were correct this time; we had the mathematics right. But it was not to be. Whether I can try again depends on what happens to my hands - time will tell.

To raise funds for The Cancer Research Campaign, call Explore Your Limits, 020-7820 6928, e-mail exploreyourlimits@crc.org.uk with your name and address or send a donation to Explore Your Limits, The Cancer Research Campaign, 89 Albert Embankment, London, SE1 7TE; www.crc.org.uk/press/under.html.
© Westward Ho Adventure Holidays Limited 2000

WEBSITES
www.adventure-mag.com - Past and present exploits
www.rgs.org - polar pictures at The Royal Geographical Society
www.crc.org.uk - The Exel Northpole expedition for The Cancer Research Campaign
BOOKS
Fit for Life, by Ranulph Fiennes - Little, Brown
The Feather Men, by Ranulph Fiennes - Penguin
Living Dangerously, by Ranulph Fiennes - Macmillan
Mind Over Matter: The Epic Crossing of the Antarctic Continent, by Ranulph Fiennes - Delta Trade Paperbacks