WENT FOR A STROLL
Stories:
Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s story
Written by Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Me and my Goldfish remember well those weeks of hell in that zone of icy horror. The journey had at first gone smoothly and the floes had for the most part provided easy going through the months of March and April.
My aim had been to pull my sledge from the North Pole to the Siberian coast in order to raise funds for an Anglo-Russian charity, the inspiration of ex-Secretary General Misha Gorbachev.
Most of my gear was lightweight and high-tech but, in extreme cold, modern electronic gear is often unreliable, so I also had some trusted items from the old days like my Goldfish, a heavy-duty magnetic compass.
An ex-Afghan war helicopter had flown me, via Vorkuta and Norilsk, both heavily polluted mining towns, to Sredniy on the Siberian coast and then over 500 miles of semi frozen ice floes to the North Pole. After a photo session grasping mini UK and Russian flags, the cameraman had retreated with cold hands back on board, the pilot gave me a thumbs-up from his cockpit and the ungainly yellow machine rose with a roar leaving me alone at the top of the world in a thick fog of ice crystals disturbed by the rotor blades.
I checked my sledge gear, loaded my 44 Magnum Ruger Redhawk revolver with six soft-nose bullets, fastened the manhaul harness over my parker and headed due south according to the GPS unit which swung from my neck loop and which provided me with instant directions, unlike my old Goldfish which, though trusty, had a needle that took forever to settle in extreme temperatures.
This was my first foray onto arctic sea-ice on the Russian side of the world although, for over three decades I had travelled in the northern latitudes of the Canadian Arctic. I had no reason to think conditions over on this side would be different apart from the key factor that the currents here headed from land to pole so I would be travelling against the generally northward movement of the ice floes. Every time I camped for the night on a floe I would be floated willy-nilly back north towards the pole losing some of the southerly distance travelled the previous day, a treadmill effect which could be worsened or countered by strong winds.
The entire distance as a crow would have flown had one been stupid enough to come here, was some 525 nautical miles and involved a race against time. I had set out in mid March as soon as I could see without a torch and travel without freezing to death. I must reach the Siberian coast before early June when the arctic summer would loosen the ice pack and render any further travel highly dangerous. In the last week of May I was camping some twenty miles north of the Russian coastline when all hell broke loose and the ice floes all around me began to fragment in a jigsaw of a thousand jagged pieces. The noise, at first the spine-chilling rumble of million-ton floes on the move, then the grinding shriek of opposing floes mounting one another and rising high out of the sea, leviathan-like, as though locked in combat.
Where only the previous day, smooth flat floes had stretched away on every side of my tent, a scene of wild chaos now imprisoned my camp and ice blocks bigger than bungalows teetered above me and my little world.
I hurried to break camp in the eerie silence that followed the nightmare cacophony of natural elements showing off. I must find a safer spot or risk being crushed as flat as my shadow.
I was not certain what had caused the sudden shift of the pack ice but a storm 200 miles away could easily spark off a domino effect whereby heavy multi-year floes on the move could crush weaker ice a great distance from the original disturbance.
The full moon might also be the culprit because rising tides can burst the surface floes in response to the lunar demands.
An hour of hard manhaul took me clear of the worst rubble and I began to relax…Always a mistake in an unstable region. I entered a bank of sea mist, a white-out so dense I could hardly see my own boots. I slowed my pace to a cautious crawl for I knew the cause of the fog must be open water nearby. Where the surface of unfrozen water meets super-cool polar air, fog is always the result.
It happened without a second’s warning. One moment I was breathing hard with the effort of manhaul, my ski sticks pressed against the ice to provide thrust and balance – the next I was under water, shocked by the sudden immersion and thrashing wildly to re-surface. Within a minute or two of furious effort I had hauled myself onto solid ice beyond the porridge-like shuga sludge hole that had snared me.
With my arms and chest out of the water, I could emerge no further for my sledge to which I was attached was trapped under water behind me. So I unclipped my tow-harness, climbed onto the floe and tried hard, my teeth already chattering, to heave on the harness. But the sledge was jammed firm beneath several inches of thick sludge and as I watched an advancing raft of new ice crept over the semi-submerged sledge which disappeared entirely.
All that now lay between imminent death and me by hypothermia was my backpack. On previous arctic journeys colleagues had lost their sledges but never when alone. My fingers were already growing numb for the air temperature, at minus 20 degrees centigrade was sharpened by the steady breeze and within minutes I would be unable to erect a shelter or prime my cooker. On a nearby flat pan of ice I unlashed my backpack and erected the single tube shaped bivi shelter which weighed a mere 3lbs. I used my teeth to hold the handle on my cooker whilst applying my lighter, for one hand had already gone dead, as useless as a lump of meat.
With the life-giving warmth of my cooker filling the bivi I took stock of my chances of survival. My backpack was planned for just such an emergency with basic rations and fuel for seven days.
With twenty miles to the coastline I could with luck reach a Siberian native village in two or three days but I must set out as soon as my hands were functional. Time was vital. I would use my watch and the sun’s position to navigate and hope that no polar bears came my way. Items including my sat phone, GPS, firearm and charts had all been in the ready-bag at the front of my sledge and were by now 17,000 feet below on the sea bed.
The next two days were, I can state without exaggeration, a nightmare for the fog locked the icepack firmly in its grip. I could only stumble blindly with my eyes glued to my Goldfish, the simple prismatic compass I had borrowed from the British army thirty years before. The name of its previous user, Sam Goldfish, was still printed on its metal tag, it had saved my life in the Omani Desert back then and did so now for on the third day after my sledge loss I heard the hum of a skidoo and followed the sound to the tundra beach of Ostrot Bolshevik (Bolshevik Island) where a native
Laptev fishing family took me in.
I go nowhere wild these days without my prismatic. My GPS could always go on the blink, but not my Goldfish.