Most people go on holidays to get away from it all and relax. The North Pole is about as far away as it gets, but during Louise Allard’s Arctic Circle break, relaxation was never an option.
Louise Allard didn’t intend to be the first Australian woman to make it to the North Pole. She was just after a nice holiday to remember her 40th birthday by. It wasn’t until four days after she had committed to the trip that she discovered that no other Australian women had ever been there. The question that worried her the most was ‘Why?’ Did natural athleticism give men a decisive edge when trying to outrun polar bears? Did women feel the cold so much more as to render the entire North Pole off limits? Was the shifting sea ice so perilous that only the recklessness of the Y chromosome was capable of overcoming it? She decided to find out for herself.
I first heard of Allard’s impending adventure on New Year’s Eve, 2005, at Mount Macedon Victoria. It was the hottest New Year’s Eve on record and, as she described her concerns about the trip (the frostbite, the cracking sea ice, how a 30 knot wind would make minus 30 feel like minus 50) it seemed implausible that such an environment could ever exist. In a thin summer dress varnished with perspiration Allard was mentally preparing to immerse herself in a climate almost 100 degrees colder than our current environs.
She and husband Wayne Eaton are no strangers to adventure - they’ve crossed Iceland on horseback, cycled from Vienna to Budapest and hiked to Everest base camp - but never considered anything as extreme as a polar conquest. Allard was introduced to the North Pole expedition through her boss Carl Le Souef, owner of Dr LeWinn’s skin care products in Melbourne. Le Souef’s father helped build the Arctic early warning stations during the Cold War. He and friend Kingsley Brown were intent on seeing the region for themselves. The trip was organised through Icetrek Expeditions, a Tasmanian group run by Eric Philips and his assistant guide Matt McFadyen. The party grew to eight when ex-Big Brother winners, the Logan twins signed up. They called themselves Australian Polar Extreme and the plan was quite simple. During the brief one-month window of good weather (not so warm as to crack the ice or so cold as to freeze the flesh) they would ski for nine days, over a distance of 100 kilometres, to the North Pole. “It’s not a race,” said Allard. “If you go fast you sweat and the sweat freezes - then you end up coated in ice.” And besides, in the Arctic, ten kilometres per day is good going.
Unlike the South Pole the Artic doesn’t have a steady foundation of land. It’s comprised of floating sea ice - some formations are as thick as ten metres and others as thin as eggshell. The challenge is telling them apart. The ice is always moving, rarely in the direction you want.
The first stop was Spitsbergen: a Russian coal mining town situated well inside the Arctic circle. It’s an unlikely tourist destination but is the closest land mass from which to push north. The population of humans (a mere 4000) is outnumbered by polar bears two to one. “Seven year old kids walk to school with shotguns slung over their shoulders,” says Allard, thankful for being spared a bear encounter. This was the dress rehearsal. “In a big hanger we practiced putting up out tents and cooking our food. Each meal had to be in colour-coded bags: green for brekkie, orange for lunch and red for dinner. In the tent you’d could only fit yourself, a cooker, dinner and breakfast - so you had to know what was what.” Once they got suited up they wouldn’t change their clothes for the next nine days. All members of the team had to tow their equipment in a sled weighing 30 kg. “When everyone put on their skis and fully-laden sleds for the first time, you could see them thinking, ‘Will I be able to do this?’” she admits. They had little time for second thoughts. “Around midnight we discovered that the flight had been brought forward seven hours. We packed immediately and after just two hours sleep we were at the airport.”
Their second destination was Borneo Ice Station (a name more synonymous with the tropics). The seasonal outpost a hundred kilometres from the pole comprised of a wind-beaten assortment of tents and a landing strip. “The last 300 meters of the runway had cracked and fallen into the ocean,” recalls Allard with horror. “The way the Russians test the ice for the best place to put a runway is to drop a very heavy tractor from a helicopter. If the ice doesn’t break they build the runway.”
At 10am Australian Polar Extreme were ready for a polar assault. There was just one problem. “We were renting our sleeping bags from a team who hadn’t yet returned,” she says. When they finally arrived twelve hours later, Allard’s group voted unanimously to get under way. “We wanted to not be able to see any civilisation.”
Soon they were rewarded with silence. “I expected the North Pole to be relatively flat but it went from being totally calm to ice rubble meters high,” she says. One of the greatest obstacles was the many open fissures of water called leads created by the moving ice. “Skiing around them would take hours so the only option is to cross them.” For smaller ones they’d use one of the kayaks towed by Philips and McFadyen as makeshift bridge. For larger ones the two kayaks became a raft. On their first day the team encountered six leads - some for Allard were as mesmerising as they were perilous. “When they had just frozen over they were a luminescent blue colour and we could clearly see the water underneath,” she says. “That night we pitched out tents in a fracture zone. There were cracks big enough to put your foot through.” As a precaution, individual team members attached their sleds, skis and poles to their tents. If the ice shifted overnight they’d find themselves at sea on their own floating island.
After two twelve-hour days Allard’s team had skied a punishing twenty kilometres into a 30 knot gale. Meanwhile the ice had drifted in the opposite direction for eighteen kilometres. “It was pretty hard to get out of the tent knowing that,” she says. On day three the storm blew over and the ice slowed down. “It was glorious.”
The group settled into a routine. “We’d start at six, get going by nine, ski for two hours, break for ten minutes, drink, eat and repeat six times a day,” recalls Allard. There was no chance for quiet introspection; she was consumed with the task of picking her way through the arctic ice puzzle. “I spent a lot of time putting one foot in front of the other. I was so thirsty, always looking forward to the next break to have a drink. I kept thinking about what I had to eat.” As it turned out, that wasn’t such a pleasant thing to ponder. “For breakfast I’d have six rashers of bacon, porridge with olive oil, hot cocoa, cheese, sausage. If you didn’t have your energy stores you couldn’t ski. We had to eat 31000 kilojoules a day,” she says, which is about three times the average adult’s daily intake. “The thought of having to devour more raw butter just turned my stomach.”
With open water continuing to hinder their progress they found themselves navigating increasingly fragile ice. “Eric would ski out to test the strength of open leads by jumping up and down. We could see the ice moving underneath him. I was terrified at the thought of going across. If you fell through into the ocean your 30-kilo sled would pull you under. At one point the ice cracked under me and my ski went in. Everyone then had to try to avoid the hole. Wayne was last. The ice broke and he went in up to his knee. He was straddling the hole on the thin ice with his sled behind him. I’ve never screamed so much in my life.”
Allard explains that they had no idea how much open water was considered normal. “Later Eric told us that this was the most difficult trip he’s ever done. The amount of water was unprecedented,” she says. Scientists predict that within eighty years global warming will completely melt the polar cap during summer. Within twenty an expedition like Allard’s will be impossible.
They tried to settle into a steady rhythm but were frustrated by the ever-changing terrain. By day eight the continuous tugging of the sled started to take its toll. “The sled works fine when it’s totally flat, like on a skating rink. But we were constantly battling mounds of windswept snow rubble, and undulating sastrugie [a snow formation similar to low sand dunes]. I was always being yanked and the pain shooting down my neck and shoulder was unbearable. Originally I thought I might slow everyone up. But it wasn’t just me, all the boys were suffering. You could see it: the hanging shoulders, the lowered head, the foot strokes, the dipping of the poles into the snow. No one had to say anything,” she remembers. “I felt very alone, very isolated. At one point we were skiing among pressure ridges and ice rubble and Eric said, ‘Stop. Listen.’ We could hear what sounded like cannons firing in the distance. It was the sound of two ice plates crashing together,” she says. The team quickened their pace north towards the crashing ice.
After crossing the massive demolition zone of ice rubble and stretches of open water thirty meters wide, Eric Philips asked them to pause once more. “He got out his GPS and said, ‘The North Pole is just over there,” recalls Allard, adding, “Of course ‘over there’ looks no different to the last nine days. We skied in one long line and counted down the meters 5…4…3…2…1. Then we jumped up and down like lunatics and had a big group hug. My favourite photograph is of all our skis crossed over at the North Pole at that exact moment.”
At 9pm local time Louise Allard became the first Australian woman to reach the north pole, but she had one last chore before the helicopter picked them up. “I had a letter from my 11 year old niece that I promised to deliver to Santa Claus - and she wanted photographic proof. We dressed Kingsley up as Santa and photographed him hiding behind an ice mound. My niece was beside herself,” laughs Allard.
During her Arctic ordeal Louise Allard skied for 12-14 hours a day for nine days in minus 30 degree temperatures. In spite of a diet consisting mostly of fat she lost eight kilos and estimates it took about a month for her to fully recover. It’s a process she equates to childbirth. “You know these women who say they’ll never have another baby then they end up having three or four. Well, we’re currently talking about tackling the South Pole,” she says, adding with a grin; “Wayne looks at me in horror.”
Words by Adam McCulloch. Originally published in Sunday Magazine. The format has been altered to suit Tumblr.
