Tejas gets a picture of the Southernmost spot on Earth
As the known world shrunk with sailors exploring the oceans blue and mapping uncharted territory, one of the last remaining areas where man had not landed was the South Pole. Famous adventurers and scientists set out to plant flags at the Pole and earn glory as the discoverers and first humans to stand on that spot on earth.
Robert Falcon Scott, who later died on an Antarctic journey, led an expedition between 1901 and 1904 that sought to push its way to the Pole. One of his compatriots on that trip was famed explorer Ernest Shackleton.
They got only so far in 1902, and later Shackleton returned to try again. He made progress in 1909, but did not get to the Pole. Later, on another Antarctic voyage, he saw the trip turn into one of the most incredible, forbidding, and magnificent survival adventures of all time.
In-between, in 1911, Norwegian Roald Amundsen had claimed the Pole, just beating Scott to the location.
The South Pole is the southernmost point on earth, the polar opposite of the North Pole. The South Pole is at the center of the Southern Hemisphere and is referred to as the Geographic South Pole. There is also a magnetic South Pole, but that position changes.
There is a Ceremonial South Pole, located 590 feet from the South Pole Station, which is used for scientific research. Flags mark the spot. It would seem inconceivable to such explorers as Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen that tourists regularly visit and snap photographs at the South Pole. They do not endure life-threatening journeys of hundreds of miles, but are flown in, and in some cases merely ski the final miles to the Pole. Other adventure companies offer more daunting 730-mile, two-month-long ski treks to the South Pole.
There is no mountain to climb at the North Pole, no Seven Summits tie-in, only one of the most unusual and memorable places on earth.
The North Pole differs from the South Pole in significant ways besides that. The Geographic North Pole is not on land. It is on the Arctic Ocean. In recent years, the ice over the Arctic Ocean began melting for longer and longer periods each year, leaving open water. That warming trend is expected to continue, making it more difficult for people to approach the Pole on foot and easier for ships to reach the Pole by sea.
Because the North Pole is not on land, there is no scientific station at the North Pole as there is at the South Pole, and the location of the Pole seems to move. This is because the ice of the Arctic Ocean is constantly moving due to the wind and currents. A flow of two-to-three miles an hour is common. However, the Russians have been establishing temporary, annual sea-ice based stations nearby for several years. Remarkably, the water depth at the North Pole has been measured at only 13,980 feet.
Explorers first began trying to reach the North Pole in 1827. Although American Richard Peary, with Matthew Henson and four Canadian Inuit, was credited with being the first to reach the North Pole in 1909, years after their deaths, studies indicated they perhaps had not reached their final destination.
All early claims of firsts have been questioned. But in 1926, Roald Amundsen, who was the first to the South Pole in 1911, and his patron, pilot Lincoln Ellsworth, reached the North Pole via airship designed by Umberto Nobile, whom Amundsen insisted be the pilot. It is likely the matter of the true first arrivals will never be conclusively settled.
Unlike the on-the-premises partnership in Antarctica for scientific cooperation, claimed possession of the North Pole is murkier. Five countries, Russia, the United States, Norway, Canada, and Denmark share territorial claims. However, following international law, their right of possession only extends 200 miles into the ocean from their land boundaries.
As the Arctic Ocean melts more frequently for longer periods, nations are vying for North Pole area supremacy via the sea. In the meantime, civilian adventurers seek to visit the Pole one way or another, sometimes merely flying over it.
Given his many mountaineering trips to Mount Vinson, it was natural that Vern Tejas would cast his eyes on a visit to the South Pole. He was already most of the way there. Tejas has been on several ski treks and wheeled expeditions aiming for the Pole and has reached it six times. And he has also managed to guide skiers to the North Pole, making him the only one to have guided the Explorers Grand Slam: both Poles and the Seven Summits.
The South Pole is a neat place given all of the exploration history surrounding it. Not very many people have completed the Seven Summits and gone to the South and the North Pole, which I have done as a polar guide. It is somewhat remarkable to think that those who gained the earliest fame trying to reach the South Pole in some cases gave their lives to the quest. Robert Falcon Scott and his men died trying to get home from the Pole. Shackleton shipwrecked, but miraculously got his men home alive.
My first visit to the South Pole was under the direction of the National Science Foundation. I was working as a mountaineer for the U.S. Antarctic Program, which put four of us in the field trying to scout an overland route to the South Pole. There was one particularly promising route down the Leverett, a glacier that we needed to analyze from the air to scout a good path through the crevasses.
We hitched a ride on a South Pole C-130 fuel resupply plane and, after off-loading our fuel at the Pole, returned to McMurdo Station via the Leverett Glacier. So we got a good look. The captain of the plane took the craft in low and dropped the tail ramp down. Harnessed to a safety line we sat on the tailgate, legs dangling out of the rear of the plane. Thus positioned, we were able to take photos and video for a lengthy time as we flew 100 feet off the ice all the way down to the glacier.
A few days later we returned to our pre-scouted route with snowmobiles and two weeks’ worth of supplies for a more intensive examination of the route. Our efforts paid off. That glacier was key to connecting the Ross Ice Shelf to the Polar Plateau. Now most South Pole fuel travels overland via the path we scouted that day. That has limited the need for resupply flights and saved the U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
The first time I skied to the South Pole was in 2006. There were three people on my commercially guided trip. This trip involved skiing to the Pole from sixty nautical miles away, also known as “the last degree.” We skied and did quite well without any hassles. Trips like this cost $63,000, most of which goes to transportation. In this remote location, fuel is drop for drop more expensive than fine brandy. And while that seems very expensive, some adventurers will somehow find the means to take the trip.
There was a Chinese group there at the same time. These skiers were quite well-funded, but their guide wasn’t an experienced polar navigator. We were going straight each day, and after a while they noticed they were kind of zig-zagging. They were doing many more miles than we were, but we ended up camping near each other each night. After a while they figured it out. Around day three or four they began following us. I really did the navigating for both groups until we got close to the South Pole.
The Chinese leader seemed to be self-aggrandizing. He was one of the most famous climbers in China, though nobody knows his name unless they are Chinese. He wanted his group to be first to the Pole. After following us for several days, they bolted for the pole on the last day.
We had been making about ten miles a day, a steady ski pace. Now that they could see where they were going, they wanted to race. We did not take the bait, but skied at our normal, steady pace and came in about thirty minutes behind them.
When they got close, they saw the flags and the Ceremonial Pole, a stationary pole used for photos, and went there. I told our people, “Come on over here guys to the real Pole,” and led them to the geographic South Pole, which is 100 yards further. The Chinese looked confused so I hollered to them, “This is the real South Pole.”
We had taken all of our photos there when they came running over. They were like kids. They went, “Ahhh, we want to get that photograph.” So they scrambled to the true South Pole after us. As the Chinese group swarmed around the true South Pole, we went over to the flags and got our pictures of the Ceremonial Pole without them in the way.
Tejas gets a picture of the Southernmost spot on Earth
Due to ice movement, the North Pole seems to be constantly moving over the Arctic Ocean. Also, due to flowing ice, the South Pole seems to move about ten feet per year. It’s not too hard of a target to hit. The North Pole, the spot is there for a second and it’s gone. The South Pole is on a glacier. The snow gets higher every year. People remeasure the geographic South Pole every year on New Year’s Day. The Ceremonial Pole is a drifting barbershop pole, and that’s where the flags are. It’s more photogenic that way, but it’s not exactly at the South Pole.
At the permanent station, you can go in and buy souvenirs. Visitors can use the restroom and you can get a drink of water there. There is a post office on the premises, too. You can’t mail anything, but you can get your passport stamped. After doing it once, I haven’t repeated. It just burns up another page in my passport.
The station is all about science, and they don’t want to detract from the science by having visitors. But who is paying for the science? The taxpayers. So it is tricky to deny access to people who are actually your employers.
Many of the people who come to the Pole are movers and shakers. Since it costs so much, they are generally well off. It’s not riff-raff off the street. There are people who know U.S. Senators. Some of them are U.S. Senators and governors. They wouldn’t take too kindly to being told they can’t use the bathroom.
Will Steger made the first dog-sled traverse of Antarctica in 1988 and 1989, covering 3,471 miles in the International Trans-Antarctic Expedition. When he got there, they wouldn’t let him in the station. He was told the employees would love to have him, but they were just following orders from people higher up the ladder. This was an internationally famous guy doing something that had never been done before.
I have actually been to the South Pole several times, just haven’t always skied a long distance every time to get there. I have been there a half dozen times. In 2010, I was part of an overland driving trip to the South Pole in specially made large vans.
In 2012, I became a North Pole guide for a company named Polar Explorers. I was not going to Everest that year. I wanted to attend my son Cayman’s graduation. He was summa cum laude in physics. (Did I mention he took after his mom?)
So I called up my friend Rick Sweitzer and asked if he needed a guide. He said he had a lot of clients for the North Pole. The trip was for April, right in the middle of the Everest season. I had always wanted to go to the North Pole, but for the previous ten years, I had been guiding Everest. There were three guides and I think eight clients. North Pole trips cost almost as much as South Pole trips, between $40,000 and $50,000. Obviously, not everyone can afford to go, yet there is still constant demand.
Since we were not going to swim or take a kayak, we had to arrive when the Arctic Ocean was still frozen. There is a base-camp ice station run by the Russians on the frozen part, and you fly by helicopter to one degree of latitude shy of the Pole. The last degree is a circle, so you can be put down anywhere to ski the last sixty nautical miles.
The pole is stationary, but the ice is moving, so it is not good to be put down on the lee side of the ice pack. If so, you have an upstream battle. You lose distance while you’re sleeping. The season is very short, pretty much the month of April, and they try to put out several expeditions a day at the height of the season.
There is nothing there but ice and polar bears. The helicopter is not dropping you off at a landmark or a place, just one degree, or sixty nautical miles from the Pole. Hopefully, on the upwind side. There are no guarantees. The wind shifts and currents change. All of a sudden you might face a crosswind. If you are downwind, that can be really tough. Once, a guy got really antsy about the flight and just decided to go for it from the downwind side. He spent two weeks out there skiing really hard every day, and at night he lost five miles because the ice was just being blown backwards, away from the Pole. Wise people know you must be patient and work with nature to be successful.
We were shooting for a ten-day trip max, though with good conditions, a week is ideal. The organizers want to turn the groups over. They put out a lot of people on the same day that hopefully finish on the same day because of the basic rate of travel. The fewer people strung out on the ice, the less hassle they have. The ice can crack, and all of a sudden there will be an opening, splitting the teams. Things can happen.
As soon as the helicopter drops you off, you strap on the skis, hook up the sleds hauling supplies, and you start going. The guides pull out a GPS and say, “It’s that way.” You start skiing and pretty soon you kind of clue in to which way the wind is blowing, where the ice leads are broken and you can almost navigate without really having to look at the GPS.
The ice is your scenery. While skiing to the North Pole, you never notice the movement unless you’re right at a lead. At an open lead, you might be able to see that the ice is breaking apart or coming together. The weather is basically somewhat dismal. There are low clouds and wind. The wind is usually consistent from one direction. If you are fortunate, it is at your back.
In April, the temperature is most likely going to be around minus-twenty. A month earlier, it would be minus-forty. Now, almost year-round, there is some open water. The South Pole is actually colder than the North Pole. By May there is too much open water to ski to the North Pole. There is a huge swing in a short amount from March to April and April to May. That’s why April is the time to go.
By April there is also considerable daylight. The sun feels like it is up all of the time. You navigate a little by the sun depending on what time it is. I like to travel with my shadow falling in front of me because you don’t want to be going into the sun. You get glare all of the time. You’re squinting even with glacier glasses on, and your face gets sunburned. Skiing into the sun is bad for your eyes and worse for navigation.
You want to travel with the sun at your back. That’s what I found with polar travel. You also want to be able to navigate by the wind if it is consistent, so you don’t have to check your compass all of the time. Some people hang a little string or a piece of yarn at the end of their ski pole. If the string is blowing at the same angle all the time, they are probably going pretty straight.
This was a good group. I had one of the guys as a climber before in Antarctica, an older gentleman, jolly, fun, not a great skier, so he ended up walking a good chunk of it. There was snow on the ice, but in some places it was blown clean and you could walk right on it. It was sea ice and had some grip to it. It had salt in it and it was rough, not completely smooth and slippery.
Every couple of hundred feet there were pressure ridges where the ice was stacked up or opened up. It was discombobulated. There were places where you balanced on one slab of ice and jumped to another with your skis on. There was some risk of falling into the Arctic Ocean.
Besides the weather, there is objective danger from the water. If you go through the ice you can be in a bad situation really quickly. It did not happen on this trip, but I have heard stories of things going wrong and people getting wet from time to time. You are not roped up on this travel. If you fall in you grab your ski poles by the baskets and use the tips to help you haul out.
Sometimes you have to pick crossing points over open leads. The leads can be melting and the current can be strong underneath. This is freezing cold water. The leads can be opening or closing. You have to worry about falling into the water, but you also have to worry about what the ice is doing. It can be shearing and breaking into little pieces.
During the night, you might have started with a nice, flat place to camp twenty feet from the water, but overnight your spot could end up in the water. If you hear grinding noises, you have to get up and figure out what is going on. If you get a big cross-current where the water is going one way and the wind is blowing the other way, the ice can stack up twenty feet tall. Or you can get this shearing motion where the ice is grinding itself away. That’s scary, too. You can end up in the drink.
On this trip things went pretty smoothly. We saw polar bear tracks at one point and decided to head in the opposite direction. The destination is north and the bear tracks were on our west side, so we went east for a couple of miles before turning north again.
Polar bears can range 100 miles. If they want you for dinner, you’re going to have to do something. You have to carry a shotgun through there. But we never saw the bear. Another night we reached a place where there was open water. It looked as if the lead went for miles each way. It is so flat that you really can’t see too far in the distance. The most you can see is probably two miles to the horizon. We couldn’t see closure in the ice in either direction, so we camped. By the next morning, the open water had closed.
What had been ice sections 100 feet apart were ten feet apart and had frozen over in the lead right in front of us. I crawled across the freshly frozen lead, trying to keep my weight distributed, and found the ice would hold me without carrying a pack. I then skied across it a couple of times and returned to our skiers and said, “Hey, guys, we’ve got a road in front of us.” So we packed up and everyone got across without any problems.
Things like that happen. The reverse could have been true. We could have made camp and found out the lead opened overnight. If you can’t cross a big lead, just have patience. That’s the best thing you can do. I had wanted to get to the North Pole for some time and it was a cool trip. I liked it for the sheer rawness of living with the primal forces of nature.
Unlike the South Pole, with the research station and the Ceremonial Pole as landmarks, finding the North Pole combines using your GPS and pretty much guessing. We knew on the morning of our last day we were about five miles away, so we were closing in. You should be able to ski five miles by the afternoon.
When we reached a place where we should have been about a half mile from the Pole and realized how fast we were going, we went, “Holy smokes! It’s moving towards us right now.” It got within about a hundred feet, tick, tick, tick; it was coming closer. It looked like the Pole was coming to us.
We were sliding across the ice and two or three guys got out a GPS. We were going, “Here it comes. It’s right over there.” That’s what I mean about the North Pole being a moving target. Everybody ran to that spot and looked for something significant like a stack of ice to plant a flag on. You don’t need to be precisely on the Pole to say you were on it. After all, it’s only going to be in one place for a second or two. You can only pinpoint it for a brief moment and then it moves away.
A couple of British guys brought their country flag, stripped down and posed for a picture with their naked legs sticking out the bottom and their naked torsos above it while holding it. Stripping down? They were as nutty as me. They whipped out cigars and brandy. I wish I had taken out my guitar to celebrate, but playing at those temperatures in the wind is painful. There is nothing at the North Pole except for ice. In fact, ten feet from where we decided the Pole was on the GPS, there was open water. The North Pole was breaking up.
Climate change is definitely happening and that’s why there is more water. I met a fellow who believes he made the last, complete over-ice approach to the North Pole. Some adventurers are bringing portable boats now because there are so many openings. They stop, take off their skis, paddle for a bit, stop and put the skis back on. Some guides are practically getting people to the Pole by kayak. You can use kayaks that double as a sled. So the equipment is a sled on the ice and a boat in the water. If you’ve got two of them you can turn them into a catamaran, lashed together, and put up a sail. People have done that.
The change is happening much faster than most people believe. In the future there will be more boating and less skiing. On the last-degree ski trips some people are actually carrying dry suits so they can swim across leads. They might find a polar bear in there swimming with them one day, too. They will be hungry, and polar bears can swim like crazy. You might be able to out-paddle a bear—they go about four miles per hour—but probably not out-swim one.
For the adventurer, saying you got to the South Pole and the North Pole is an attraction. Some people call Mount Everest the third pole, but to me it is the first pole. The other two are much easier, the challenge of skiing that last one degree. If you go overland to the South Pole, that’s a whole different story. You can still take an epic trip across the Arctic Ocean, but eventually it’s going to be a lot more paddling than skiing.
As the water stays open longer, we’re about to see the beginning of an age of shipping freight around the North Pole. Then there will be tourism boats. There are debates about who owns the Arctic, but they should keep it like Antarctica with all nations sharing. Right now we have that 200-mile, offshore territorial claim for each country. The ships will have to cross between each other’s territories. Twelve different countries claim chunks of Antarctica. All of the claims look like pieces of a pie.
Everyone will also need a share of the North Pole.