Every so often there’s an amazing article from another outlet that we just HAVE to share. Last month The New Yorker magazine published an excellent account of a modern day explorer braving the body-breaking, soul-testing desolation of Antarctica as he pursued a trek on foot across the unforgiving continent. The engrossing account delves into the Shackleton and Scott expeditions too, plus enjoy great photos and some video.
Henry Worsley. * Photograph by Sebastian Copeland for the New Yorker article “The White Darkness” (Feb 12 & 19, 2018)
Here’s an excerpt of “THE WHITE DARKNESS, A Solitary Journey Across Antarctica” by David Grann.
From The New Yorker’s Feb 12 & 19, 2018, issue.
The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness. Every direction he turned, he could see ice stretching to the edge of the Earth: white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice tongues and ice wedges. There were no living creatures in sight. Not a bear or even a bird. Nothing but him.
It was hard to breathe, and each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face: a chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked. Get wet and you die, he often reminded himself. The temperature was nearly minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, and it felt far colder because of the wind, which sometimes whipped icy particles into a blinding cloud, making him so disoriented that he toppled over, his bones rattling against the ground.
The man, whose name was Henry Worsley, consulted a G.P.S. device to determine precisely where he was. According to his coördinates, he was on the Titan Dome, an ice formation near the South Pole that rises more than ten thousand feet above sea level. Sixty-two days earlier, on November 13, 2015, he’d set out from the coast of Antarctica, hoping to achieve what his hero, Ernest Shackleton, had failed to do a century earlier: to trek on foot from one side of the continent to the other. The journey, which would pass through the South Pole, was more than a thousand miles, and would traverse what is arguably the most brutal environment in the world. And, whereas Shackleton had been part of a large expedition, Worsley, who was fifty-five, was crossing alone and unsupported: no food caches had been deposited along the route to help him forestall starvation, and he had to haul all his provisions on a sled, without the assistance of dogs or a sail. Nobody had attempted this feat before.
To read the full story in The New Yorker, click here.
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** Photograph by Sebastian Copeland (for The New Yorker)
HEIDI SARNA
