Her routine is making tea and coffee, plus dehydrated porridge, then melting enough snow to fill flasks with the six liters of water they will need for the day. This takes three hours, which is why Daniels will get up at 3am. They plan to trek in 75-minute bursts, with five-minute breaks, when they eat chocolate chips, nuts and biscuits. The biggest challenge — apart from the polar bears, storms, frostbite and hypothermia — is eating enough.
“We have to get in 6,000 calories and we still lose weight,” she said. “By the time I come back I expect to be a goddess!”
Dinner is dehydrated chicken curry and rice or beef and potato stew.
The lack of terra firma, it becomes clear, is what makes the North Pole so testing.
“The ice moves, breaks up, and you can be in danger of being mangled, crushed up with the ice as it shifts,” she said.
The South Pole is much easier, she said, because it’s just an endless flat white wasteland.
So why does she do it? It’s not for solo self-advancement, that’s for sure.
“She’s not about strutting her stuff,” Hadow said.
My guess is that her reports of cracking ice, sensory deprivation and howling wind are partly about conquest and moral determination — “It’s the challenge and not only coming out of it, but being able to deal with it and deal with it well” — but also about something far more primitive.
“Yes, it’s cold, yes it’s terrible, yes it’s painful,” she said, “but actually it’s nature at its best and it’s huge and it makes you realize just how small you are — how humble, how insignificant.”
RSS