“We were in the middle of June now, so everything was melting around us. But there was also much more wildlife than we have in the winter. The sky was just filled with birds like mosquitoes, breeding on every cliff we went by. And also, of course, lots of polar bears. We met about 40 of them on this expedition, and when you meet a polar bear out skiing that’s fine. You see them at a distance normally, and you have time to sort out who is the boss. But when you’re in your tiny little tent trying to sleep, with this thin fabric between yourself and those padded footsteps outside, that’s not always so easy. And [team member] Thomas, he’s a snorer—he snores quite a lot. But that is not enough to scare away a polar bear. It happened sometimes when we opened the zipper in the morning, there was just this big wide piece of fur standing outside.”
Subzero temperatures and encounters with Arctic predators are everyday hazards to National Geographic grantee and polar explorer Børge Ousland. In 1997, he made history as the first person to cross the Arctic unassisted. Since then, Ousland has journeyed to both of Earth’s Poles and successfully circumnavigated the North Pole.
Here, Ousland and a polar bear lock eyes through a tent opening during an expedition to Franz Josef Land in Russia.
“We wanted to do the entire Nansen and Johansen journey, so we started at the North Pole on the first of May, 2007 and skied south. That meant that we had to cross more than 1,000 kilometers of drifting ice just before we reached land. This was a huge undertaking. After about one and a half months, we finally saw land. When you’ve been away for a long time on the packed ice, that’s a great moment—a really magical moment with lots of feelings. When finally we came to the ice edge, the ice stopped and was just water. We skied and also paddled from one island to the other.
No comments: