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. Also available: the Horizontal Everest DVD, a Discovery Channel documentary about Jerry's Ellesmere Island journeys.

February 10

At this time before an expedition, my L.A. partner Bob might be picking up a last-minute pair of ski bibs at The North Face store on Rodeo Drive. Today my Inuit partner, Noah, is out on his first polar bear hunt, trying to score himself a pair of pants. Each method has its charms...

February 7

All systems are go, I leave on Feb. 15 for Labrador, with an estimated expedition start of Feb. 20 from Nain. I've even learned how to pronounce our destination, Kangiqsualujjuaq, with reasonable fluency.

February 1

It's always exciting when the great unruly piles of equipment finally coalesce into neat units ready for shipment. In this case, most of the gear is going to Labrador in one great sled load, boxed for protection with cardboard reinforced by several rolls of duct tape. Thanks to Air Labrador and to the Canadian Rangers, a northern branch of military volunteers, for helping transport this enormous load from Calgary to Nain. Shipment of sleds typically costs at least as much as the sleds themselves, so I simply leave the sleds in the north. Some travelers have a girl in every port; I have sleds in every port.

This week's Nunatsiaq News, out of Iqaluit, has a nice story of my partner Noah and our upcoming journey. Noah recently came up with a wonderful name for our project: the Tukimuatvut Expedition. Tukimuatvut is an Inuktitut word meaning, "We're going in the right direction." And Noah certainly is. I leave for Labrador in mid-February. The journey begins approximately Feb. 20.

Meanwhile, ExplorersWeb -- a valuable and honest resource for who's doing what -- has a recent photo essay on the war wounds of this year's crop of Antarctic travelers. The images of frostbitten digits and raw blistered feet make me cringe, not out of horror from the rigors of the polar trail (which is the implication) but from how unnecessary these injuries are. Frostbite and blisters indicate that you've chosen the wrong footwear or are not taking care of yourself out there. They are not inevitable.

January 5, 2012

Next expedition: Beginning in February, manhauling 550km from Nain (Labrador) to Kangiqsualujjuaq (northern Quebec)

Noah and Jerry

In just over a month, I'll be leaving for Labrador to sled from Nain to what was formerly called George River Post with Noah Nochasak of Nain. Noah, 23, is the only Inuit guy I know who is passionate about long-distance travel. Last summer, paddling his homemade kayak, he traveled 300km alone from Nain to Hebron. He didn't want to go alone, but despite knocking door to door, he couldn't find anyone willing to go with him. He also joined Alexandra and I for two days at the beginning of our month-long July kayak journey from Nain to Rigolet.

The previous winter, Noah tried to do a long snowshoe trek, pulling his own wooden sled, or komatik, behind him, but had equipment problems and had to abort. His trek was a mixture of modern and traditional, with the emphasis on traditional: He brought a nylon dome tent, but also an Inuit seal oil lamp. This sort of lamp is fine when simmering all day in the snow house, but since it's not pressurized, it takes forever for a traveler to melt enough drinking water on it.

550 km is a decent distance, but I've done expeditions around that length 15 or 16 times before. The new and most exciting part of this upcoming trek will be sharing my winter travel secrets with Noah, and learning from him about the Inuit approach to life on the land. Our food will be largely dried, but he'll also bring raw seal and caribou and hunt ptarmigan en route. (I'll share the seal and caribou but will probably pass on the raw ptarmigan.) In future, I expect he'll take my techniques and adapt them to a more traditional way of travel, which would be so cool.

You don't often get a chance to help out a promising young traveler, and maybe also be present at the beginning of a renaissance of traditional Inuit travel. No reason why only white guys from the south should be doing these crazy arctic treks. Sometimes, all it takes is one person: Further south in Labrador, Innu elder Elizabeth Penashue has been leading snowshoe treks for years, and now several Innu are journeying in a way that was lost for a couple of generations.

NOTE: Three 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 of Global Warming. 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 still so formidable that they're 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 diastrous 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.