OSLO: A French adventurer hopes to reach both the North and South Poles alone and unaided within one year in what would be a world first, he said yesterday after completing the first half of his trek.
Faysal Hanneche, 40, reached the North Pole on April 15 on his own, pulling two sleds loaded with 120 kilos of equipment across hundreds of kilometres in temperatures dropping to -42 degrees Celsius.
“It’s a French first. I did it alone, without anything to pull me (such as a sail), I pulled everything myself, all alone,” he said on his return to Oslo.
Hanneche, who divides his time between Norway and France, said he was surprised by the constant movement of the Arctic’s pack ice, which could in one night leave him 8km further from his goal, erasing half the distance he had progressed the previous day.
“It’s actually a game of chess,” he explained.
“The pack ice moves and you adapt to the movement. After two weeks, you start to move with it. You don’t look at the sun anymore (which never sets at this time of year), it’s the pack ice you have to watch,” he said.
His journey took him on a 400km roundtrip from the floating Russian base Barneo to the North Pole, and was peppered with frightening moments.
An ice barrier several kilometres long forced him to leave behind most of his equipment to cover the final 17km to the pole, not knowing if he would be able to recover his tent and sleds on the way back for his trek home.
“I only had my skis, a satellite phone, food for 24 hours and my flags,” he said. “When I told experts of polar expeditions what I’d done, they said it was a suicide mission.”
reuters
