After a gruelling 1400km, 66-day journey through some of Antarctica's toughest and most remote terrain, Gareth and Richard reached the South Pole at 6.30 pm on January 18, 2023.
Battling temperatures below -400C with windchill, hundreds of kilometres of rock-hard ice ridges, and extreme physical and psychological isolation, the two doctors gathered crucial Antarctic climate science data en route to the Pole to aid the global fight against climate change.
As ambassadors for Scouts Australia, Gareth, and Richard’s epic journey has been followed by and inspired tens of thousands of young scouts around Australia and New Zealand to reach for their goals and take positive action in the face of the global climate emergency.
“After being dropped off on the edge of Berkner Island 66 days before, we have finally reached the end of our journey. We have pushed as hard as our bodies could go. No rest days, late starts, or early finishes – we gave it everything, every day.” Dr Gareth Andrews.
The full story
In a triumph of mental and physical resilience and the spirit of adventure, we reached the Geographic South Pole at 6.30 pm on January 18th, extremely proud to have completed the grueling 1400 kilometre journey from the very edge of the Antarctic continent. We have achieved the realisation of a childhood dream, and our arrival at the South Pole celebrates three years of meticulous planning and preparation by all the Antarctica 2023 team.
Growing up in the wilds of the UK before making our homes in Australia and New Zealand, we were inspired by the tales of the explorers from the heroic age of polar exploration. Scott, Shackleton, and Mason formed an influential part of our adventurous upbringing, and from an early age, we knew that one day, we would follow our heroes South to the frozen continent.
After 3 years of planning and preparation, the Basler aircraft dropped us on the North coast of Berkner Island on the shores of the Weddell Sea. At that moment, we were among the most isolated people on the planet. Our first task was to turn our backs on the South Pole and ski 10 kilometres north to ensure that we started our expedition on the true coast of Antarctica amongst the Emperor Penguins and Icebergs of the Weddell Sea. The enduring memory of the start of our journey will be staring out across the sea ice and icebergs in the glorious Antarctic sunshine, remembering the history of past expeditions that have also attempted a journey across Antarctica from the true coastline of the continent, most notably Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition.
The Antarctica 2023 expedition's intention was to attempt the longest unsupported ski crossing of Antarctica (PECS* Terminology), starting from the North coast of Berkner Island and finishing at the base of the Reedy Glacier on the Ross Ice Shelf.
Our motivations for attempting such an audacious journey come from our love of adventure and the polar regions and our deep desire to immerse ourselves in the wild and uncompromising Antarctic environment. The time we have spent together in the high Arctic, Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard has instilled in us a passion for the polar regions and a willingness to conserve these last true wilderness areas for future generations.
We attempted this expedition with two further objectives: to collect 66 days of critical climate and meteorological data and to inspire a generation of young people to conserve Antarctica into the future through our work with Scouts Australia, Scouts New Zealand, and World Scouting.
Our expedition started on the 14th of November 2022 with sleds weighing 165 kg. We had enough supplies for a 66-day, 2023-kilometre journey across Antarctica. Our arrival into Antarctica was delayed by 7 days as the blue ice runway at Union Glacier was heavily snowbound after the severe Antarctic.
Winter. It was an ominous sign of things to come. The delay meant that our planned 73-day expedition was now cut down to 66 days, and we faced a daunting daily average of 30.65 kilometres to achieve our objective—a formidable but not impossible challenge.
We began the expedition by dragging our sleds from sea level to the high point on Berkner Island at about 800m above sea level. On day 2, we first tasted how severe the Antarctic weather could be. Howling, gusting winds, freezing temperatures, and minimal visibility saw our progress fall to 10 kilometres a day as drifting snow made dragging our heavy sleds uphill almost impossible. After this initial storm, we made excellent progress across Berkner Island, averaging 22-24 kilometers a day– exactly what we needed to achieve at this expedition stage. We completed the crossing of Berkner Island as planned in 18 days and embarked on our crossing of the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf. This section of the expedition brought us to the base of the Wujek Ridge and the start of the mainland of Antarctica itself, our gateway through the Pensacola Mountains and through to the polar plateau.
The ascent of the Wujek Ridge went exactly as planned, and we completed it in a day. A huge, steep wall of snow and ice, the Wujek Ridge took two journeys to ascend. We cached one sled each at the base, donned our crampons, and hauled the other sleds up before returning and repeating the journey a second time to collect the sleds left behind. Exposed crevasses with fragile snow bridges greeted us at the top, but we negotiated a route through without incident.
The Sallee and Median Snowfields lay before us now, and we knew that to be in with a chance of making the crossing, we would need to start increasing our daily distances. We faced 200 kilometres of soft, knee-deep powder snow that slowed our progress, but we maintained our daily distances at an average of 22-23 kilometres per day. We traversed the snowfields with the mountains of the Forrestal Range to our East and the craggy spires and hanging glaciers of the Neptune Range to our west.
Just before S84040, we hit our first significant sastrugi, iron-hard ridges of snow and ice forged by the fierce winds of the Antarctic winter. We knew from past expeditions that this was a sastrugi-prone route, but previous reports had sastrugi starting at around S85030, which was almost a full degree of latitude(111km) later. We experienced solid, unbroken sastrugi from this point for more than 380 kilometres. Huge waves of ice, some 2.5 meters high and as big as small houses, are stunningly beautiful structures that are devastatingly difficult to traverse. The physical and mental toll of travelling hundreds of kilometres in this terrain saw our progress fall to 18-20 kilometres per day. We gave everything we had to move forward as far as possible every day, and we would stumble into camp each evening with exhaustion. Most nights, we would struggle to find a flat place to pitch our tent amongst the broken, uneven ground.
At S880, the sastrugi finally relented, but temperatures dropped, and the drag on our sleds had increased dramatically. A strange phenomenon occurs when it is very cold; the crystal surface structure of the snow becomes rougher, and there is much more friction when dragging sleds. Through the last two degrees of latitude, temperatures remained at around -300C as we made our way toward the South Pole. At this stage, we made the difficult but necessary decision to end our expedition at the South Pole. Clearly, we did not have enough time or supplies to go more than a couple of days past the pole. The correct decision was to finish the expedition at the South Pole.
We arrived at the Geographic South Pole, friends and teammates, at 6.30 pm on the 18th of January 2023, elated to have completed such an arduous expedition from the very edge of Antarctica. Whilst the Antarctic summer expedition season proved too short for us to cross onto the Ross IceShelf, we are immensely proud to have reached the Geographic South Pole from the true coast of the Antarctica continent. To have given everything and reached the bottom of the planet in a season when great swathes of our route had been carved up by fierce winter storms, leaving dense sastrugi and deep drifting snow, is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of our lives.
We have fulfilled a childhood dream and experienced Antarctica for 66 days in all its brutal, spectacular glory. We are extremely proud to have achieved our objectives, collected a transect of crucial climate and meteorological data, and brought more than 60,000 Scouts on this journey with us.
We would like to thank our sponsors and supporters for their unwavering support and for helping make this wonderful project a reality.
Find out more about the boys' journey here:
@Antartica2023
www.Antarctica2023.com.au
