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“The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer”. - Fridtjof Nansen.
With grander ambitions there come greater challenges and bigger rewards. Inherently there are also bigger risks, bigger decisions to be made, and sometimes bigger disappointments, and on this occasion mind and will were stronger than body.
I’m saddened to announce that Ian and I are back in the UK and the ENDURE expedition is for now, still incomplete. After just a few days of excellent progress and the blossoming of an original strategy we had to abandon the expedition for this year due to me sustaining a significant frostbite injury to my right hand. We are both very disappointed but I am personally devastated, not about my hand, but about everything thing else that goes with it.
Getting frost bite is not big and it’s certainly not clever. It absolutely should not happen on an ordinary expedition under ordinary circumstances. However what we were doing was, is and will be extraordinary. When you make a serious attempt at an ultra light speed expedition you have no luxuries, such as time, you are totally committed to making the distances.
We were unlucky with the weather and prior to our start there was relatively warm weather which we knew would make the snow bridges over the crevasses unstable in the first technical section. |
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To add to this we had a foot of fresh powder snow dumped over the glacier making reading our path very uncertain, and slow.
Despite this we cleared the technical section which ‘normally’ takes 2 days in less than a day and a half, making it up onto the ice cap proper where we were hit by storm conditions.
Testament to our endeavour, we past another team out on the ice who were fully fed, bedded down and surrounded by a perfectly constructed 5 foot tall storm wall at around 7 pm (A process which would have taken them up to three hours after stopping for the day.)
We made a conscious decision to push long and hard into the bad conditions late into the evening and after the sun had set when the temperature drops significantly. We put trust in our own experience and ability to keep going, and faith in our kit to protect us. Having said that after a great long day we made camp and were bedded down and fed within an hour and a half, when I removed my gloves for the first time in the day I was shocked to see that I had sustained a significant frost bite. I had simply been let down by a gloving system that is widely known to be one of the best and that I had personally used successfully on a summit and traverse of Denali in similar storm conditions. (I hastened to add this was NOT a piece of our sponsored kit.)
Thankfully, neither Ian or I suffer from an inflated ego and so were still able to make the very difficult but correct decision to pull the plug when we did, in spite of all the emotion, pressure, responsibility and expectation.
Despite only being out on the ice for a couple of days we saw our ultra light strategy start to bear fruit and saw us making a steady and sustainable 3-4 km an hour, and we had not even had a chance to unleash our ‘secret weapon’ for extra pace.
I am somewhat proud to be able to say without any false grandeur that we were out there genuinely pushing the limits and not just going through well established motions, and nobody can argue with that.
Our experience this year has left me personally devastated but convinced, and with evidence, that we have the ability to do what we have set out to do and that our strategy will work. We will use this experience to our advantage and return next year with a few small tweaks to kit and systems. The ENDURE project is not over until we have finished our successful speed crossing of Greenland.
I’ll leave you with a few apt words from the leader of the first ever crossing of Greenland, Fridtjof Nansen.
“The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer”. - Fridtjof Nansen.
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