ADVENTURER AND CINEMATOGRAPHER CANADAI love wide open spaces, nature’s beauty, and the Arctic’s vast regions covered with snow through most of the year.
—SARAH MCNAIR-LANDRY
The icy winds howled and shrieked around her. Must be blowing fifty miles an hour, thought Sarah. Feels like forty below. She tugged her scarf higher on her face so just her eyes peeked out. Bits of flying snow pricked her skin and tiny icicles covered her eyelashes. Sarah couldn’t hear the snick-snick of her cross-country skis over the wind.
Sarah turned to look at the team running beside her: twelve Canadian Inuit huskies, the best dogs in the world for sledding across the harsh Arctic plains. They seemed fine. They were pulling her hand-built sled uphill into the fierce winds, following her partner, Boomer. She and Boomer were both on skis to keep the sled light for their long journey.
The trip was supposed to take 120 days for them to travel 2,500 miles around the edge of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. They were only four days in and already they’d been hit by a storm.
Sarah knew it wouldn’t be easy. Her parents had done the same trip twenty-five years earlier, and growing up, Sarah had heard stories about windstorms, melted ice, unruly dogs, and frozen body parts. She was ready for anything.
Suddenly, the team slowed and the lead dog turned toward her.
What’s he doing? Sarah wondered, Oh no . . . he’s leading the team back downhill!
“Whoa!” she yelled. “Whoa!” But her command was lost in the wind.
Or maybe the dogs weren’t listening—maybe they’d had enough. As they raced past her, a line looped around Sarah’s leg and jerked her off her feet.
Sarah’s foot caught in the line, and she was dragged backward down the hill.
“Put the dogs down!” she screamed to Boomer, hoping he could hear her and stop the team.1
Sarah tried to free her foot but couldn’t reach it. She was terrified that at any moment she would hit a rock, smashing her skull or breaking a leg.
“Put the dogs down!” she screamed again. Where was Boomer?
Again she stretched to reach the line. As she did, she noticed the sled, heavy with all their gear, was picking up speed. It was sliding right toward her, faster than the dogs were running. In seconds she would be under it.
Sarah’s life of ice, dogs, and adventure began in 1986 in the tiny town of Iqaluit, Canada. She grew up in the Canadian Arctic on Baffin Island, just a stone’s throw from Greenland and the North Pole. As a girl, Sarah had the Arctic Ocean for a playground and a pack of huskies for friends.
Her parents were Arctic guides who owned and operated an adventure tourism company. Sarah grew up sledding, camping, hunting, and taking care of the dog team. She learned early on how to travel and survive in the extreme cold. She took her first overnight trip without grown-ups when she was just eight years old. She and her ten-year-old brother did an overnight hiking trip up one river and down another: “My parents made us practice camping on the back porch, putting up the tent, and lighting stoves before we were able to head out on our own.”2 After that, the siblings went out into the wilderness together quite often.
What is an “adventurer,” exactly? According to Sarah, “I explore places that are new to me. Some routes I have taken have never been done before; other expeditions retrace past routes.”4 To earn money, she writes, takes photos, and guides other groups.
Sarah’s first big expedition was a month-long dogsledding and kite-skiing journey across the Greenland Ice Cap with her brother—they were the first brother-sister team to do it. It’s 1,500 miles across, which is like going from Boston to Miami on a sled! During that trip, she fell in love with polar expeditions and started thinking about even bigger trips.
When she was eighteen, she joined an expedition to the South Pole, and at nineteen, she dogsledded to the North Pole. These two trips made her the youngest person, male or female, to reach both poles. Even as a teen, Sarah had an endurance and mind-set beyond her years. As one travel partner described, “Sarah grew up out on the ice, running dogs and living out of tents in the extreme cold, and because of that, our system is second nature to her. She is also very driven to keep traveling, but keeps a fun attitude the whole time.”3
A life of adventure keeps you in great shape. During one trip to the North Pole, Sarah got hit by a storm and fell behind schedule. To make up time, she cross-country skied for 15 hours a day!
Since her groundbreaking teenage expeditions, it’s been nonstop adventure for Sarah. She’s continued exploring frozen lands, returning to the North and South Poles as a guide. In 2014, Sarah and her boyfriend, Erik Boomer, spent 120 days circumnavigating Baffin Island by dog team, retracing the trip her parents had done years before. Sarah survived getting tangled in the dog lines and being dragged along with her sled, but it was no easy trip.
Sarah doesn’t limit her adventures to just the frozen places. In 2009, she crossed the Gobi Desert in a kite buggy. She had never traveled in the desert before, which presented some new and unusual challenges for her: “We encountered a lot of dust devils—small tornadoes of sand blowing across the desert. When they hit you, within seconds you would be lifted out of your buggy and crash down on the ground.”5 She followed that up with a canoe trip on the lakes of Mongolia and a camel trek across Egypt’s Sahara Desert.
On her Arctic expeditions, Sarah must bring all the food for herself and her dogs. For the dogs, it’s dried food with lots of fat, plus fresh seal meat when they can get it. For Sarah, the menu is granola for breakfast; chocolate, nuts, soup, and dried fish for lunch; and dehydrated meals for dinner. Fortunately, she has access to all the water she needs—by melting snow!
Although she’s young, Sarah is already a leader in her field. She’s been nominated for National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year, was named one of Adventure Magazine’s top ten women in adventure, and has won the Outdoor Idol Award. She’s a talented photographer and filmmaker as well; she takes photos on all her trips, which she later posts and sells to magazines and websites. She has also directed several documentaries, the most recent being one about the problem of garbage in northern Canada and another showcasing an Inuit artist.
Why is Sarah drawn to these extreme, often dangerous environments? Her answer is “the challenge, the adventure, and the fun. Once you have learnt how to travel comfortably in the Arctic, you then notice the beauty of the areas you’re traveling through.”6 She also hopes to inspire young people to get outside, explore their world, and be active. “Exploration doesn’t need to be multi-month expeditions; I just want to encourage youth to get outside and explore their backyard, or the park down the road.”7
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
My swimming heroes are Missy Franklin and Michael Phelps, and I hope that someday I can be a combination of both of them. I started swimming when I was nine, and now I practice fifteen hours a week. Even though there are days when I’m in pain from a hard practice and from pushing myself, I know it’s making me stronger and faster. I can see how much I’ve improved with this hard work. I’ve gone to state championships four times and made it into regionals this spring. I hope someday I’ll go to the Olympic trials and get to swim in the Olympics, just like my heroes.
SIENA GEREN 
AGE 14