Use The World :: The North Pole ski adventure

Tags: Adventure
I have skied the last degree to the North Pole

An 11 day/10 night epic journey

And the preparation for that was by pulling pulling tires, most people smiled at me, and admitted, I must have looked pretty stupid walking to work with tires and a backpack........ But I HAD TO exercise as much as possible. I have walked to and back from work on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays dragging these tires after me. A few days I was walking while it was snowing and wrongly I imagined that the tires would glide on top of the snow, but instead the tires are digging into the loose snow and ....... surprise surprise ...... the inside of the tires are getting filled with wet snow ...... damn, it was slowing me down

Now I know why skiing to the North Pole is not that popular, and I am not going to make a fortune selling used tires to people who want to exercise

We started in Longyearbyen with a a few days of testing the equipment and then we flew to Barneo Ice Camp. Since Barneo had drifted far to the North we flew back in a helikopter to start our ski trip towards the pole. We were a team of 4, 2 guides and 2 members ........ and as I was the only dane and the others were from Russia, I was left out of most conversations, but sometimes we were talking English. Video - Being dropped by the helicopter

Every night we had to set up the tent, which a long process to ensure that the tent is stable in snowstorms, and it proved to be a good idea not to under estimate the changes in the weather. We had 3 snowstorms during our walk and had to spent 4 days sitting in the tent. One of the snowstorms were particular hard and we realized that we during this snowstorm had open water on 3 sides and the snowstorm came in from the 4 side Video - snowstorm .......... an unnerving experience, which forced us to only unpack the neccersary equipment and stay very alert ...... going out in the snowstorm with such a low visibility and uncertainty was more risky than staying !!! Video - inside the tent

At Barneo they had their handfull of problems with their tents that they needed to secure with more ice screws to prevent them from flying away. They also found a big crack in the airstrip which prevented any flights to and from the ice for 8 days, and it took a stress on everybody, since the snowstorms were raging over the region, preventing people from being flown back to Barneo and home.

We often had to pass cracks in the ice Video - crossing crack and also walk over pressure ridges Video - pressure ridge

After the last snowstorm in which we decided to walk anyway to get around a huge "lake" of open water, that we later dubbed "Lake Ontario" ....... walking in a low visibility for many hours and actually we ended up making a huge u-turn because we faced yet another lake after the first one ......... at the end of the day we had only gained 2 km. on the North Pole

Video - panorama view

Being locked down by bad weather for so many days we needed a "jump" with a helikopter to take us across the open water, which finally happend and we were then able to finish our walk to the North Pole

YAHOO YAHOO YHAOO ............ We got there at 3:20 in the morning on 21. April 2007

And we had fantastic weather on this last day to finally just enjoy the view, the calm and the silence of the North Pole.

I had promissed my nephew that I would do 10 "push ups" when I got there, and I did ...... twice ........... but both times the video recording was not working

After running around during stupid things and taking photos, we set up the the camp for the last time ........ Video - setting up the last tent