EXPEDITIONS

Filing daily reports from the field would ruin a trip, but it's fun to do pre-briefs and debriefs.

NOTE:

The store is open! You can now buy books, calendars, prints and the Sledding Equipment List with one-click shopping, via Paypal. Just go to the Store link at the top of this page. Jerry's latest book, Arctic Eden, is now available for order. It recently won the William Mills Prize as the best polar book of the last two years. Also available: the Horizontal Everest DVD, a Discovery Channel documentary about Jerry's Ellesmere Island journeys.

May 11

Next week two partners and I are off to Kluane National Park in the Yukon to ski 250 kilometres around Mount Logan, the most massive mountain on earth. Nothing unique about this route -- there's even a map of Mount Logan showing the usual circumski route with a dotted red line. A Kluane park warden I spoke to estimated that it's done once every couple of years. The route was pioneered in the 1970s by two local mountaineers from here in Canmore, Alberta. Adventurer Pat Morrow also did the trip in his salad days, and considers it one of the loveliest he's done. Some of his photos are below. It's entirely on glaciers, which means ropes and climbing harnesses as well as the usual accoutrements of sledding. Our route runs from 5,000 to about 10,000 feet. At this time of year, even the world's largest ice cap outside the polar regions is not that cold: -17C (0 F) would be a minimum. On a sunny, windless day, we'd be in T-shirts.

My two partners are local ski mountaineers Glen Crawford and Jerry Auld. Glen's a full-time videographer; among many other projects, he filmed the Discovery Channel/Canadian Geographic Television documentary based on my book, The Horizontal Everest. Jerry Auld, whose idea this trip was, is a programmer and writer of mountain fiction. Both are serious ski mountaineers who can rig Z-pulleys in their sleep. I'm a mediocre downhiller and more or less a non-climber, but I've done 17 sledding expeditions longer than this one, while they've never sledded and this is their longest journey -- so ours will be a mix of skills.

We're planning on skiing the distance in two and a half weeks. However, another party attempting the same route earlier this spring turned back because of heavy snowfall. Even with relatively light sleds, dragging through deep powder is one of the most aerobic tests you could ask for. It's like doing sprint sets on 400 metres all day long. You have to stop to catch your breath after every 50 or 100 steps.

Photos from circumski of Mt. Logan courtesy of Pat Morrow.

April 23

The four guys currently sledding on Ellesmere seem to be enjoying their time on the land. They've had no problems, and they're now into the warmer part of spring. Sledding Ellesmere at this time of year approaches paradise.

It's a little odd that they received an air drop after just two weeks. It's possible to do their entire projected route without any resupplies, and they'll have at least two, including another one in a further two weeks at the Eureka Weather Station. The whole beauty of sledding is that it lets you travel completely self-sustained for six to eight weeks; a handful of teams have even sledded three months unsupported across Antarctica. This is also the best part of Ellesmere Island for sledding -- sunny weather, little wind, flat ice, great snow -- so I wonder why they weren't more ambitious. Lack of confidence? A 20 mpd average is a realistic target in that region. But they're putting in a low-key six or seven hours a day and covering 13-14 miles. Considering that there's 24 hours of sunlight, that's a short day.

Of course, on this current trip each member is carrying almost twice the necessary food because they have four dogs with them. Dogs eat about 2 lbs/day, almost as much as a person does. The Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, whom their project loosely commemorates, combined skiing and dogs, but Sverdrup had full teams and hunted muskoxen and polar bears to feed them.

April 6

Gym rats, day trippers and the physical life

Here in the Rockies there are two kinds of active outdoor people. There are the day tourers, who are constantly hieing off for a full day of skiing or hiking, but would never be caught running round a track or skiing laps at the Nordic Centre. Then there are the gym rats, who are constantly exercising but for whom a day outing is an event.

Day to day, I'm a gym rat. Yesterday I swam 2500 metres; the day before that, I did bike, treadmill and weights at Canmore's new recreation facility; before that, I skate-skied for an hour in the heavy mush of melting snow at the Nordic Centre. Last weekend, Alexandra and I did a little ski tour into Paradise Valley near Lake Louise. That's the once every week or two event.

The gym rat stuff is mere maintenance for the yearly hard expeditions. The daily hour or two of exercise slows deterioration, but the deterioration is subtly occurring. But I spend on average two full months every year out in the wilderness, exercising 12 hours a day. That total physical life is what really checks deterioration and keeps fitness at a decently high level.

These long spells of exercise feel completely different from the gym rat stuff or the day tour. So few of us have the chance to experience this difference, because regular life prohibits. How many of us can simply disappear for a month or two at a time? I'm not bragging that I can; I'm just saying: Expedition exercise feels different because it involves almost every waking moment, not just an hour or two slotted in. Apart from the general cardio and muscle benefits, those long days of measured effort for weeks toughen the important little things like ligaments and tendons and develop core strength. The benefits of those two months carry over the rest of the year. I credit expeditions with helping me avoid athletic injuries.

So many studies on athletics, and so many workout columns in the outdoor mags, yet I've never seen one piece investigating the physiological differences between working out an hour a day at a higher intensity versus 12 hours a day for two months.

March 12

British Magnetic Pole expedition fizzles out

I've poked the Brits often enough on this website, with justification, but sometimes a little sympathy is in order. This pair weren't very good, but at least they weren't billing themselves as the greatest thing since Captain Cook. They weren't blaming climate change for their failure.

These two guys from the Royal Air Force were trying to sled the approximately 600 km from Resolute to Ellef Ringnes Island. Why Ellef Ringnes? Because it was briefly the site of the North Magnetic Pole in the 1990s and is relatively easy to get to. So in a stretch, you can call it a "Pole" -- although you could with equal justification just stay in Resolute and call that a Pole too, since on its wanderings since James Clark Ross discovered it on the Boothia Peninsula in 1831, the Magnetic Pole passed just west of town. When I started traveling the High Arctic in the late 1980s, the Magnetic Pole was still so close that the compass didn't work in Resolute. The needle moved sluggishly, as if through treacle, and never settled on anything.

European adventurers in the 1980s and 1990s who wanted to do the much harder Geographic North Pole often did the Magnetic Pole first. This shakedown trip gave them a decent distance to manage, and some experience sledding and dealing with the sort of cold that you just can't find in Europe. A few for whom the Magnetic Pole was an end in itself tried to deceive the public by calling it simply "the Pole" and hoping no one would notice.

After spending several years conveniently close to Resolute, the Magnetic Pole went on a tear after 1996 and is now somewhere in the Arctic Ocean, toward Russia. It's now even harder to reach than the Geographic Pole. That hasn't stopped some from continuing to run trips from Resolute to Ellef Ringnes Island and billing it as a "Magnetic Pole" journey. There's a very silly race with teams of beginners doing that route every year or so. When I was in Resolute in 2005, they had just shot two polar bears -- that route runs through pretty heavy bear country. No idea whether they've shot any bears since. It's not something you hear about unless you're there.

This current duo were using the route in the old way, as preparation for a Geographic Pole expedition. Unfortunately, many Brits who seem attracted to the Arctic do not have an aptitude for it. Perhaps it's partly cultural: They follow the old British style of avoiding too much preparation because that smacks of professionalism and is in poor style. The idea is to succeed as plucky gentlemen amateurs.

Perhaps the military background also has a lot to do with it: In my observation, military style often clashes with good arctic sense. As part of a magazine assignment, I did a winter snowshoe trip once with some Canadian soldiers out of Ottawa. Two hours into the hike, half of them were crippled with blisters and drenched with sweat. In the military, one person just does not stop a troop of 20 to tweak his clothing layers or to put on moleskin, but that is precisely the sort of individual care that the Arctic requires. You can't just tough out the cold or ignore an incipient injury. To be both British and military is a double whammy.

You don't actually need training to do a sledding expedition, which is mostly nontechnical. I started out on my own, with a lot of research and preparation. So did several other competent arctic travelers I know. And maybe I was naturally careful about looking after myself in the cold.

Before two Australian beginners did their South Pole round trip a couple of years ago, they took a Northwinds course in Iqaluit -- far cheaper and more effective than heading off on your own to Resolute. Others hire guides. A guide would have helped this twosome. Among other things, a guide would have asked them: Why are you doing this route at the coldest time of year, in early March? If you started in early April, it would still be plenty cold but you'd have more light and slipperier snow for sledding. You'd learn 90% of what you'd need to travel in even colder conditions for a Geographic Pole journey.

February 27

Shortly, a 20-strong party of mostly Innu will be snowshoeing the 220 kilometres from Makkovik to Sheshatshui in Labrador. At the same time, Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue will leave next week on her annual three-week snowshoe trek through the Mealy Mountains to what locals call Pants Lake. Such communal treks have been going on for several years now. More than other Canadian aboriginal groups, the Innu seem to be making an attempt to renew their connection to the land.

Elizabeth started this custom about 13 years ago. In 2009, an Innu fellow in his mid-20s named Michel Andrew walked alone between Labrador's two Innu communities, Sheshashui to Natuashish. This was the first of a series of walks for him. They have been more community events than hard-core treks: Supporters on snowmobiles transport most of the food, set up camp each night and tamp down the trail. (Large Innu bush tents take hours to set up.) However, the softer nature of the projects has allowed many people to participate who would not want or be able to drag a heavy sled through winter Labrador. Nevertheless, it's possible that one or two of the young walkers will enjoy the experience so much that they will eventually do truly traditional, unsupported treks. It's been three generations since Innu in Labrador have traveled the old way.

When I was starting out, I spent one Christmas in a bush tent with an Innu friend and his family. Luc Andre didn't snowshoe long distances trapping and hunting, but he grew up among traditional generations who had. One morning I joined Luc on a ptarmigan hunt. He started snowshoeing at a tremendous clip. Though I was an athlete and he was an overweight guy who never exercised, I could barely keep up. We were flying through the soft snow at about 4-1/2 mph. After an hour, his wheels fell off, but I've never forgotten that pace. I had the impression that this was the traditional Innu pace that those who lived on the land could keep up all day.

Elizabeth Penashue hauling, with friend, in the Mealy Mountains.

January 24

Yike...30 years ago today, on January 24, 1983, I began my first northern expedition, a 600-kilometre solo manhauling journey across midwinter Labrador. I only made it halfway that first time (I returned a year later and successfully did the entire route), but I immediately fell in love with sledding, the Arctic and life on the land. I've done arctic wilderness journeys almost every year since.

Some travel highlights:

1983. Looking rugged after a month and a half of camping, rather than like a dog.

1984. Learning to make dozens of thousand-calorie peanut butter and jam sandwiches the day before leaving on a winter expedition. Frozen, they stay fresh for months. Much more efficient than chipping rock-hard shards of peanut butter out of the jar with a knife at 40 below.

1985. Retracing Leonidas Hubbard's 1903 canoe journey up the Susan River in Labrador and discovering that wilderness travel can be a valid form of historical research.

1986. First night of paradise on Ellesmere Island.

1987. Carrying 100-lb packs in Central Asia with Russian adventurers to train for a North Pole expedition. Russia's a crazy place! Love it!

1988. Two months on Ellesmere on two separate sledding expeditions with different partners, including getting wasted from traveling round the clock for three days straight.

1989. Walked 500km from Eureka to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere in 11 days. A pure athletic exercise. At that speed, you learn a lot about travel but not much about a place. Fastest manhauling trek in the polar regions until Christian Eide's fine sprint to the South Pole a couple of years ago.

1990. First expedition to Axel Heiberg Island. Also did a waterless trek across Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert with some nutty Russians. Traveled at night (keep mouth closed to minimize water loss!) and took refuge during the hot day in pits dug in the sand with our hands. Tried drinking pee during the trek to see if it would help. As expected, it was too salty. And gross!

1991: Climbed Mt. Caubvick on first visit to Labrador's Torngats. Learned Russian and spent three months photographing during the fall of the Soviet Union. Most surreal trip ever. The wife of a friend tells me, with classic Russian bluntness, "You just like it here because when you get tired of living our interesting life, you can go back to your country, where everything works."

1992. Poking around Russia's hard-to-reach Kuril Islands. Lenin statues still common but new churches springing up like weeds. Earthquakes so common here that people slept with their IDs beside their beds so they could grab them and run in the middle of the night, if necessary. And indeed, this part of Yuzhno-Kurilsk was destroyed by an earthquake and subsequent tsumami a year or two after this photo was taken.

1993. Returned to the spectacular volcanic region of Kamchatka. 27 rolls of film in one day; almost 1,000 frames: a record. Possibly the second best scenery in the world, next to the US Southwest.

1994. Back to the High Arctic. A 600-km solo expedition cut short by a running injury during training that allowed just 7-8 hours of hauling/day. Not enough. As usual, carried no radio or satphone, which is like climbing free solo: Without a rope, you have to be more conservative with field decisions. I only began bringing comms in 2005, as a luxury.

1995. Hiking/photographing northern Ellesmere. Not high mileage but hard travel because of the heavy backpack, which included 30 lbs of camera gear. The 500mm lens, in particular, was a killer.

1996. Two months' spring sledding on Ellesmere. Joined Inuit sovereignty patrol and found the spot from which explorer Otto Sverdrup discovered Axel Heiberg Island. Returned to hike the island most of the summer.

1997. 700km Ellesmere/Axel expedition. Then photographing Ukraine: climbing radio antennas, scrambling over sloped roofs for better angles...love how no one cares about liability over there!

1998. Four months on Ellesmere/Axel on four expeditions. A lot of travel compared to most, but a bush pilot in Resolute tells me, "Last year, I spent 321 days in hotel rooms."

1999. Alexandra's first expeditions: two months on Devon and Axel Heiberg Islands. Incredibly warm weather, sunshine 24 hours a day. Earworm of the summer: I Wear My Sunglasses At Night.

2000. We become the first travelers in over 20 years to get permission to visit the restricted military base at Alert. Military hospitality, once granted, is second to none. Some years earlier -- at the end of the season when the commander was trying to use up allotted helicopter hours -- a Canadian Forces chopper flew 100 miles across Ellesmere to deliver me a surprise treat of some ham sandwiches.

2001. While guiding an Ellesmere tour, we meet "L.A. Bob" Cochran, left, who becomes a close friend and travel partner. Bob has long been obsessed with David Brainard, right, of the Greely expedition.

2002. Traveled two months in Russia's Kuril Islands and Tuva, where Alexandra was thrown at full gallop by her horse. She landed on her back but was just winded. Her closest call.

2004. Returned to winter Labrador to re-do 1984 route, to see how a veteran traveler would fare 20 years later against his younger self. Finished a week faster this time around.

2005. A month sledding Ellesmere with L.A. Bob. Revisited the ice cave discovered by Otto Sverdrup in 1900 and which I first saw in 1988. "It was like fairyland, beautiful and fear-inspiring at the same time," wrote the normally stuffy Norwegian.

2006. Kayaking the length of Labrador's Torngat Mountains with Alexandra. Weather idyllic. We're the first official visitors to the new national park.

2007. Weatherbeaten after sledding 700km on Ellesmere. Summer kayak trip in Labrador. Five close calls with polar bears: worst year ever.

2008. Kayaking 800km solo along the southeastern coast of Labrador. Spent a day looking unsuccessfully for the 18th-C remains of George Cartwright's house in Stage Cove.

2009. Writing Arctic Eden. Only three nights in a tent all year!

2010. A planned Labrador summer expedition flops at the last minute, so exploring the Mealy Mountains by foot and packraft.

2011. Alexandra and I kayak Labrador's midcoast from Nain to Rigolet. Have now kayaked the entire coast of Labrador from Killinek to the Straits. A polar bear scared the hell out of us a few hours after this photo was taken.

2012. Manhauled 550km from Nain to Kangiqsualujjuaq with 25-year-old Inuit friend, Noah Nochasak. Lousy weather, good partner!

January 15

I've read 30 to 35 books on the North Pole, but it doesn't take a studious streak to conclude that neither Robert Peary nor Frederick Cook reached it. Mainly, it takes a bullshit detector. It's an alarm bell that rings when fraud is present. It doesn't have anything to do with brains or insight. It's a separate bell.

It's been clanging lately, as I read of Lance Armstrong's latest maneuvers. The guy has always creeped me out. To those with a bullshit detector, the fact that such a person would dope is a no-brainer, and it astonished me how many otherwise intelligent journalists failed to see it. Some are now hurt and angry; others wonder if his contrition is genuine: the lack of a bullshit detector once again.

Robert Peary and Lance Armstrong are very similar: They were both into the fame and power game. In this game, anything goes. Morals are for suckers. Truth is a maneuver. Both are inconvenient but can be useful. Both are meted out in highly controlled doses. You can't trust anything they say or do. Instead, you try to understand the strategy behind it.

There's a lot of lesser bullshit in the expedition world. Reading about polar projects, I can usually tick off pretty quickly bull, bull, bull, genuine, bull, bull, maybe. A lot of the bull is small pumpkins, and doesn't need a Royal Commission or a lot of fretting. In fact, the best thing about a bullshit detector is that the genuine can be truly loved, and it will never disappoint you.

January 7, 2013

Received an email yesterday from an articulate 16-year-old who had just read Arctic Eden and fell in love with the High Arctic. He wanted to know how he could live that sort of life, or get up there, or start doing these things, or find a career that would let him indulge his (still distant) love of the outdoors. Part of my response was tailored to his letter, but since it also answers general questions of possible interest to others, I reproduce it below:

Your letter raises big questions about your future course that are impossible for anyone to answer -- not me, not you. That's not to say that answers don't exist. It's just that you have to try things before you know whether or not they're right for you.

I did many of the expeditions from Arctic Eden while based in Toronto. So while southern Ontario is the worst place in the country for someone who loves the outdoors, you don't have to live in the north to travel the north.

In The Horizontal Everest, I describe how I started arctic travel. I had no experience, and knew no one. I prepared as well as I could and then made a leap in the dark. That doesn't work with some things, but winter travel isn't very technical (compared to, say, whitewater canoeing or downhill skiing), so it worked. Such dreams are not impossible, but you have to try them on for size before you can say they're really for you.

At 16, incidentally, I was a long way from doing these things. I was more interested in athletics and being a good student (yuck, I know). Arctic travel is not like some things, like climbing. Here in the Rockies, where I now live, a lot of climber friends moved here just after high school or university and joined the outdoor community. Those drawn to sea kayaking move beside the ocean when they're old enough. Whitewater kayakers live around rivers. But wilderness travelers usually live in the south and craft a certain flexibility in their lives that let them travel for two or three months a year. Don't ask me how to do this: everyone does it differently. Some turn down good careers in order to have flexible jobs. Some avoid buying a house, which is the most expensive thing that adults deal with, next to kids. If you want to live a certain life, you go for it, and are willfully deaf to what other people say.

The High Arctic is truly great, but I started with the subarctic, which is more accessible and almost as wild. You have no idea how expensive it is to get to Ellesmere! It was much cheaper when I started. On the other hand, I can do a trip in Labrador or the northern mainland for comparatively little. The first trip or two will tell you if you really like crazy wilderness travel, or if it just seems great from the comfort of home.

The two key things I did in my early years, I think, was to be superfit, and study hard. I wasn't particularly interested in school, but in retrospect studying is like lifting weights with your brain: it makes your brain stronger. Then in time, you can apply that organized thinking to things you really care about. When I lived in southern Ontario, I wasn't doing a lot of outdoor stuff, apart from those long trips a couple of times a year, but I was at the gym almost every day, or running, or marathon swimming, or walking for hours on city streets, which I still enjoy.

I have no idea if these thoughts will be any help. But one thing I can say: the only way you'll choose the right course is to try different things. Some you'll discover you like, some you won't, and gradually your path begins to focus.

NOTE: A few years ago, I made a list here called the Top Ten Expedition BS that somehow has gone semi-viral. Every day, people come to this site looking for it. You can still find it through the Expeditions2008 archive, but for easy access, I thought I'd include it at the bottom of this page. I have made one tweak to the original list, replacing one item with another more common one.

Top Ten Expedition BS

Expedition bs has always been around. Those quaint Renaissance-era sagas of someone sailing to the North Pole and finding a tunnel to the center of the earth probably traces back to some huckster in a frilled collar and balloon pants looking for the Elizabethan version of celebrity, or hoping to convince a gullible king to fund his future endeavors. Expedition bs crosses all outdoor disciplines, although Everest climbs and North Pole treks get more than their fair share, because of their iconic stature. The less technical something is, and the more instantly famous you can get doing it, the more it attracts amateurs with questionable motives. In arctic travel today, it's common for those with big egos and small experience to boast of undertaking "the greatest exploration of the Arctic ever" or trekking to "the last important place on Earth no one has reached." 

In compiling this list, I first vetted it with other adventurers, since this Top Ten is admittedly polar-bs-biased. Climber/paraglider Will Gadd, one of the world's best outdoor athletes, suggested another entry: "Decrying all future attempts on your objective as unworthy." I'd never heard of this, so I asked another well-known mountaineer about it: "Is this a climbing thing?"

"It's a Reinhold Messner thing," he replied.

Below, the 10 most egregious ways outdoor types posture and/or try to fool the public.

1. Faking an accomplishment

Explorers' claims used to be taken at face value before it became clear that gentlemen could, and did, lie. Whether it's a first ascent of Mt. McKinley or up some aesthetic Patagonian spire, a round-the-world yacht race, or a trek to a slippery place like the North Pole, where you can't leave notes or build cairns, exploration has a rich history of fakery.

The question is, how much still goes on? The late, great Resolute outfitter Bezal Jesudason used to clear his throat tellingly whenever the conversation turned to a certain Italian who claimed to have reached the North Pole in the 1970s. Now and then, rumors bruit -- about expeditions, supposedly unsupported, that received surreptitious air drops, for example, or the motivational speaker who didn't really summit. But most modern fakery probably occurs in less complicated projects, especially solo ones. The media never investigates whether a traveler is telling the truth or not. Why bother?

On the other hand, there's little to be gained from lying if you just go out quietly and try something. Attention-getting projects require greater scrutiny.

In general, most bs comes not from what someone does, but why they do it. Exploration remains one of the easiest roads to celebrity. A beginner fires off a press release and so it begins. By contrast, imagine how much work it takes for an athlete or a physicist to become as well known.

2. Claiming something is a first, when it's not

Usually this is just self-serving laziness. Why look too closely into what's been done before when ignorance allows you to grandly claim priority? Other times it involves splitting hairs, so if an earlier expedition did something microscopically different from you, it can, for your convenience, be ignored. Rarely, it is an outright lie from someone for whom the end justifies the means, as when Robert Peary tried to wrest the discovery of Axel Heiberg Island from Otto Sverdrup: "No, no, no, he didn't discover it -- I saw that island the year before." Yeah, right.

Nowadays, this doesn't work with iconic endeavors, in which who did what, when, how is well known. But it's still in play with more obscure challenges.

3. Pretending that an expedition is all about something socially relevant

A century ago, climbers used to boil a thermometer on summits to estimate the mountain's height and claimed to be contributing to science.  Later, others made a big deal of taking ice samples, or blood samples, or water samples en route. This hobby science was popular expedition shtick for years and still has its practitioners. In large, though, it's been replaced by the mantra of Raising Awareness, as in Raising Awareness of Multiple Sclerosis or, especially, Raising Awareness about Climate Change. If I see one more expedition muttering concerned platitudes about how the Arctic has changed since they were there ten years ago, or how there are actually areas of open water on the Arctic Ocean in summer, I'm going to scream.

Very occasionally, there are people for whom environmental concern is the real spinning cog driving their project. They're incredibly admirable, but they're also rare as hen's teeth. With most, it's just a fundraising and publicity gimmick.

4. Claiming that an expedition proves something it doesn't

Wearing wool knickers and hobnail boots while climbing the Second Step on Everest does not prove Mallory did it. Nor does cutting off eight of your toes and dogsledding to the North Pole prove Peary succeeded, either.

I've always envied mountaineers their sense of history. Many polar travelers, on the other hand, even good ones, seem to have barely skimmed the Coles Notes version of arctic history. Still, if you're trying to get your expedition noticed, there are few better ways than claiming that your endeavor resolves some age-old controversy. 

Not that there's anything wrong with following in the footsteps of past explorers. It's a legitimate form of historical research, as valid as poring through archives. But you gotta do your homework first. Otherwise it's just misinformation, or disinformation.

Some challenges are so formidable that they're almost beyond guiding -- climbing K2, for example. In the case of others, and polar travel in particular, a guide reduces something that is extremely difficult, especially psychologically, to an endurance feat that any fit and motivated client can accomplish.

Increasingly, expeditions to the North Pole and South Pole are guided. Not just last-degree expeditions, which have always been for tourists (albeit a special kind), but also full-length projects. I'm not sure how necessary a guide is on a South Pole trek, but in the case of the more difficult North Pole, it's an enormous advantage. Very few people succeed in doing the entire distance to the North Pole themselves. Even fewer succeed on the first attempt. Add a guide, and the success rate becomes essentially 100%.

Today, an expedition may be named the Tom Thumb Polar Expedition, but likely as not, Tom's just the vain and ambitious guy holding the purse strings, hoping to make a name as an explorer and often forgetting to mention publicly that one of his teammates is a little more than a fellow traveler.

6. Making an expedition sound harder than it is

One of the nice things about climbing or white-water kayaking is that challenges are graded numerically, so there's little opportunity to inflate an accomplishment. Not so in polar travel, which the public doesn't really understand and where there are no clear yardsticks. Many imagine, for example, that pulling a 150-pound sled is a superhuman act, little realizing that any grandmother who jogs on Sunday can do it. But 150 pounds sounds good, and 250 pounds sounds even better, because for those unfamiliar with sledding, it's natural to compare it to how hard it would be to backpack those weights. As a result, those who want to impress can easily do so. Because there's not really a polar community as such, just a few people doing things independently of one another, it's hard for the media to verify just how difficult something is.

The other side of this equation -- and this comes up time and again in this countdown -- is that many polar adventurers are novices. Given that this sort of project takes a healthy amount of self-esteem to begin with, it's easy for the adventurers themselves to think, "Wow, I'm pulling a 250-pound sled for 12 miles at 30 below. I must be amazing." Alas, it's easier than it sounds.

7. Telling your audience that all it takes to live this life is the courage to follow your dreams, when you're sitting on a trust fund

Many people would be surprised at the number of adventurers who don't have to make a living. Nothing wrong with being born well off, if you make the most of it: the great Bill Tillman was a gentleman amateur. So, for that matter, was Charles Darwin.

But as a poor bloke, I've always been aware that the hardest part of adventure is making a living at it. (The adventure itself is just personal hunger, and is almost effortless.) When adventurers give presentations and claim -- often in response to audience questions at the end -- that they make a living from selling photos, or from book royalties, I cringe. Since I myself survive partly from photography, I know the business and I can say that the only ones making serious coin from adventure photography are full-time photographers, not expedition types. 

Even if you're a serious shooter, it's not easy. A National Geographic photographer I know used to make much of his income flipping houses -- he'd buy a fixer-upper, renovate it, then resell at a profit. Several handyman adventurers go that route. One well-known big-wall climber builds outdoor decks. As for books, the royalties are rarely significant unless you're Jon Krakauer or David Roberts. So it's dishonest when a "professional" adventurer tries to inspire without admitting that he or she doesn't need to earn a living like the rest of us.

8. Motivational speaking

If you want to know how adventurers really make a living, it's often by motivational speaking. I'm not talking about storytelling with pretty pictures, but presentations crafted to a business audience, in which the message is Teamwork or Leadership or similar corporate psychology buzzwords. Nowadays, it seems, everyone bills themselves as a "keynote speaker". And why not? If you can lay it on thick, the money is incredible. There are people making a six-figure income based on 10 hours work a year.

Sometimes the accomplishments of these adventurers are genuine. Twenty years later, sadly, some of them are still giving the same lecture, based on one triumphant afternoon. Others are glib phonies. Neither climbers nor adventurers, they climb Mt. Everest specifically to launch a career in motivational speaking. As bad, in my mind, are the ones who haven't done anything yet but presume to have valuable lessons to impart to the rest of us.

There is something refreshing about the attitude of a first-class adventurer like Pat Morrow, who admits that he never gave motivational talks because "I just couldn't see myself telling a convention of hog farmers that they too can climb their personal Everest."

9. Doing one or two expeditions, then retiring and affecting the pose of an elder statesman

Again, the nature of polar travel. Good climbers climb every day or two, but most polar sledders are not, pardon the pun, in it for the long haul. Typically they do the North Pole or the South Pole, then retire. A few do both. If they're particularly serious, they also cross Antarctica or the Arctic Ocean. That's it. End of polar icons. Too bad, because the sledding life really is a fine one. It's as if 99% of climbers just did Everest and maybe the Seven Summits.

Especially in Britain, it seems that once retired, these one-trick ponies vigorously posture as wise greybeards in all matters polar. (Maybe one-eyed kings rather than one-trick ponies is a more apt description.) This was more understandable in the 19th century -- for years, Adolphus Greely was considered America's greatest living polar explorer, based on one disastrous expedition. But standards of experience are different now. Will Steger, for example, was doing impressive arctic stuff as a dirtbag long before he hit the big time.

10. Presenting mistakes or incompetence as force majeure

Every year, expeditioners strike off to a flourish of trumpets, only to quit sometimes for the silliest reasons. Their stove breaks down. The satphone fails to charge. Gasoline leaks and contaminates their food. Or they run out of food/fuel, necessitating a high-profile "rescue."

On extreme projects, gear often needs repairs. But unless a polar bear smashes the sled into 100 pieces, the journey should be able to continue. That's what a repair kit and backups of key items are for. But some adventurers use these minor glitches as an excuse to bail. Others are so out of their depth that they can't deal with more adversity. Or in their preparations, they've taken the time to create a website, get sponsors and have a media plan, but have neglected to learn how a stove works. Few own up to these mistakes: It's always the fault of the equipment or the conditions.

Sometimes, it seems as if an expedition invents problems to get more media attention. The media is not very interested in most adventures except as a cute kicker at the end of the real news. The exception is, if something goes wrong. If a delayed pickup is made to seem like you're stranded and desperate and out of food, you might get world headlines rather than a shadow of a whisper of a postscript of a mention.