Field Day

Andrew Pearce can remember the exact moment when he decided he wanted to go to the ends of the earth.

He was eight years old, at school and reading a book on explorers. It made, he said, a profound impression on him. “I knew from that moment it was something I had to do.”

The 44-year-old recently achieved his ambition after trekking to the south pole, in so doing notching up ‘the double’ having made it to the North Pole in 2006. “It’s quite a small club of us who have done both,” he says. “The number’s in double figures.”

His adventure began back in January when a 10-strong team (with two Norwegian guides, one of whom was the legendary explorer Borge Ousland) flew from South America to the Patriot Hills camp in Antarctica. After a brief sleep, they transferred to a Twin Otter plane fitted with skis and were heading for their start point on ‘the high plateau’.

“The scale of Antarctica is enormous,” Andrew says. “It’s 35% bigger than the USA and it’s the vastness that really strikes you. There’s simply nothing to focus on.”

He describes the place as the “coldest, driest, windiest and highest continent on earth” and soon the team realised just how tough conditions would be.

On skis and pulling sledges carrying 50kgs-plus of essential provisions, they experienced a gruelling first few days trekking, with the going painfully slow. Temperatures plummeted to below -40 degrees.

“The wind was blowing straight in your face and there’s nothing to hide behind,” says Andrew. “You’ve got the sun behind you, but you’re walking straight into the wind.” Blizzards, meanwhile, brought whiteouts. “We experienced Antarctica in all her moods.”

Although Andrew, whose day job is as a rural surveyor with property firm Humberts, didn’t suffer altitude sickness, not all the party were so lucky. The white, frozen landscape they were crossing was over 3000m above sea level (equivalent to 4000m because of the centrifugal force of the earth at the poles) and almost half the team were hit by the condition, which can leave sufferers with breathing problems, dehydrated, disorientated and ultimately comatose.

On the fourth day, one man experienced frostbite to his face and hand which forced them to put up camp. The guide decided there was no option but to split the team. Those unaffected by health problems would forge on as planned; the second team would either continue once their condition improved or be evacuated out with the main frostbite sufferer.

This, however, was all happening in an area where the ice was so rough there was no prospect of a plane landing. The only solution for the second group was an intimidating one: build a makeshift runway.

Andrew faced a conundrum at this point. Although he had frostbite on his thumb and throat, he was well enough to – and very much wanted to – continue. But he also knew – as one of the strongest members of the team – that his help building the runway for the evacuation plane could be invaluable and potentially save lives.

He took the unselfish decision to stay (although hoped to catch up with the first team at a later stage). They skied for more than seven hours before finding somewhere potentially suitable for a runway and started work. They marked it out with ski poles making it 500m long and 20m wide, working into the night and the next day chipping out ice with two shovels, cutting the peaks and filling the troughs. The task was exhausting: it involved two hours digging then 10 minutes rest in the tent.

With the plane able to land and the injured person rescued, they were now two days behind first party. The Twin Otter helped them make up some of the distance they’d lost and they met up with the other group and headed south.

Andrew had certainly done lots of preparation for this moment, training for six days a week in the three-month run-up to setting off. His regime involving dragging a 60kg tractor tyre up and down Lincolnshire’s lanes to simulate pulling a sledge.

The sight of him had raised a few eyebrows. Perplexed ramblers asked questions; one light aircraft even turned round and made a second low pass in a bid to get a better view. But this unique approach was great for developing the lower back and thigh muscles. In tandem with this, he did lots of cycling and running (he’s also a London marathon veteran).

The party trekked on, taking only three 10-minute breaks each day. Breakfast was Norwegian-style porridge which they mixed with melted ice, plenty of energy-rich chocolate for the day and boil-in-the-bag dry rations for the night time meal.

“It’s a true wilderness,” he says. “No one knows what’s there. Some of the ground we were covering had never been walked on before.”

It was a different set of dangers to those he’d encountered at the North Pole. “There, you never knew when a polar bear might turn up – I carried a rifle and you kept one eye open even when you were sleeping. There’s nothing living at the South Pole, it’s exclusively natural forces you have to contend with.”

As well as the physical difficulties, there is the mental challenge of finding yourself somewhere so huge, so empty. “Probably the most depressing point for me was when I thought I might not make it,” Andrew recalls. “I wanted it so much.

“But the place was also fantastically beautiful. It’s majestic, and a great privilege to have seen it. One day was really clear and bright and the wind whipped up loose ice into the sky making an ice crystal rainbow.

“You wonder about all the famous explorers and what they were thinking,” Andrew says. “I can only imagine what they must gone through during their journeys, but it was a privilege to walk in their footsteps. Landscape-wise, nothing much has changed since that time.”

Coincidentally, Captain Scott was the same age to within a couple of months as Andrew when he made his fated journey in 1912, arriving at the Pole only to find he’d been narrowly beaten there by a Norwegian party led by Amudsen. “It’s impossible to imagine how he would have felt when, after all that effort and suffering, he saw the Norwegian flag.”

Thirteen days after leaving South America, Andrew arrived at the Geographic South Pole, having trekked 190km (the first team coved 220km).

“As you get closer and closer, you can see a pinprick in the distance which is the camp become gradually bigger. I hadn’t seen any buildings for weeks.”

And there he stood, thousands of miles away from the nearest town, six hours flight from South America. It was almost two years after he’d made it unsupported to the North Pole. "Both have been truly epic adventures," says Andrew. “It’s odd, though, you don’t really get time to be scared when you’re there. I was concentrating so much on the task in hand - although naturally my wife Catherine worries when I’m away.

“It was a strange feeling standing at Scott’s and Amundsen’s memorial and a great feeling knowing I’d stood on both ends of the earth. It was very emotional. I put up a Lincolnshire flag – and I bet that’s the only county flag to have been erected at both ends of the earth.”

It was, it turned out, the right decision to have stayed and helped the evacuation. Andrew later learnt that the Danish doctor who treated the sufferer later said it was the worst case of frostbite to a hand he’d ever seen.

Back at home, a stone-a-quarter lighter than when he set off and his own frostbite cleared up, he soon found himself answering the same question time and time again: What next? “I tell them I’m going to Tuscany in May and I’ll ponder that question while I’m there.”

You can’t but feel that after a well-deserved rest, this intrepid character will be looking for a new challenge. Indeed, press him on it and he gives a hint of his thinking. “Either a mountain or a desert,” he says.

WHO WILL BENEFIT?
Andrew’s epic adventure is raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support and Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance.
He says air ambulances provide a vital service to farmers, country dwellers and rural motorists and is a MacMillan supporter having lost his father to cancer.
Last time, he raised nearly £30,000 and hopes to hit the £50,000-mark from this trip.
If you’d like to contribute to Andrew’s fundraising efforts, email andrew.pearce@humberts.co.uk