For most of the previous day David Hempleman-Adams, adventurer, explorer and a man whose thirst for danger, excitement and records remains unquenchable had been in high spirits, content to be back in an environment he called home. On the first morning of our two-day, polar trek, his mood, however, transformed as rapidly as the rising, Spring sun in these extreme parts.
"Now listen very carefully to what I have to say," he ordered, as we were driven high into the snow and ice-capped hills of Spitsbergen, at 78 degrees north a near-frozen island some 840 miles inside the Arctic Circle. "No-one's here to help us. Do you understand? I've lost a few, good friends over the years doing something like this. So, if we fuck up in the next 48 hours, we die."
It was, to put it mildly, a little disconcerting to hear Hempleman-Adams say this. It was even more unnerving to witness a man ill at ease who, in his time, has climbed Everest, become the first Brit to walk, solo and unsupported to the South Pole, trek to the North Pole, reach the North and South Magnetic Poles, climb the highest mountain on each of the planet's seven continents and, last summer, become the first man to balloon over the North Pole.
Yet this was his demeanour as we bade farewell to our driver and gazed out across a vast expanse of white. Over the past few years I have experienced some potentially dangerous challenges. Fighting Roy Jones jr, for example, or wrestling in a professional bout. This, however, was in a league of its own. For while some other adventures could have ended with a fracture here or a breakage there, joining Hempleman-Adams for a training and acclimatisation exercise in the most uncompromising and unforgiving environment on the planet presented true dangers that I had never faced before in my life.
Don't take this from me, though. Take it from Hempleman-Adams. "They have a simple saying in these parts," he explained. "Cold can kill. And they're right. Expose your flesh for more than fifteen minutes and you may well lose a digit. If our tent tonight is blown away by the inevitable strong gusts of wind, then we're in big trouble. If one of us falls severely ill with something like appendicitis then, again, we've got major problems.
"Then there's the crevasses. You never quite know where they are. That is, until you fall down one. There's snow blindness, there's moving pack ice, and there's always the very real danger of falling through frozen water either on the Arctic Ocean or one of the fjords we're likely to be walking across. The worst part of any polar trip is the first few days. That's when you're tired, you're not really acclimatised, and you're not into any kind of routine."
He kept the most frightening aspect until last on his disturbingly long list. On an island rich with wildlife and flora, including reindeer and Arctic foxes, mousse, seals, walruses and whales, there is one predator who is undoubtedly the guvnor. "Finally, and perhaps most threatening of all, we have polar bears. Big, white, hungry bears just out of hibernation, who can run at speeds up to 30 mph, and who can smell us from a good few miles away." He paused and stared at me for so long that I was convinced he was sizing me up. "Are you sure you still want to go through with this?" he asked, eventually.
I had already been alerted to the threat of polar bears by an in-your-face poster at Tromso airport pinned next to the gate where flights to Spitsbergen, or Svalbard as the Norwegians refer to it, departed from. "Take the danger from the polar bear seriously," it stated, next to a photo of two bears devouring a large, bloodied and very dead animal lying on the ice. It's not something you see at Gatwick, after all. And in the arrivals hall at Longyearbyen airport, Spitsbergen, a large, stuffed bear took pride of place in a glass case. "That one's just a baby," Hempleman-Adams commented.
But now we were here, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, where you have to depend purely on natural, survival instincts. In a world mostly dominated by the human being, this was a place where the human was secondary to the environment, an insignificant irrelevance in comparison to the might and the power of the terrain and the elements.
"I don't want to concern you too much, Ian, but this, without any doubt, is bear country," the adventurer continued. "They say some 4,000 polar bears live on Spitsbergen alone. When I was last here a bear walked right down the middle of the main road in the settlement of Longyearbyen. This is their territory. They have more right to be here than we have."
Which is why we were not only armed with a rifle and five rounds of ammunition, but also four husky dogs, who would remain at the tent while we trudged for the day, and who would alert us of an approaching bear at night as we attempted to sleep. "The dogs will go ballistic if they see or smell a bear," Hempleman-Adams explained. "And with luck the bear will go for the dogs before it goes for us."
His fear, borne out of experience in contrast to my happy naivety, was understandable. In 1984, on his way to becoming the first man to walk solo and unsupported to the North Magnetic Pole, he was charged by a bear. "The first time I knew a bear was there was when he stuck his head into my tent," the 44-year-old recalled. "I've never moved so quickly in my life. I let out a shot into the air and the bear ran off. Then he stopped, some thirty metres away, turned round and just stared at me before then running straight back. I reckon I had time for one shot only. I felt bad after I'd killed it. But if I'd missed, he would most certainly have killed me."
Hempleman-Adams has twice fallen through the ice, suffered severe frostbite on his nose and toes leaving indelible scars, and been dragged uncontrollably across the ice for thirty minutes and six miles last summer as he attempted to land his balloon, at a speed of twelve knots with tons of propane gas smacking against pressure ridges. "Nevertheless, the incident with the bear scared me the most," he insisted.
The cold, too, is something else. You know when you place your hand inside the freezer at home? Now imagine more than twice that temperature below. The temperature was officially recorded at minus 24 degrees. Add on to this the height of 3,000 feet we found ourselves up in the mountains, and then the strong winds that made the snow gusting around our legs appear like spirits floating in the air, and we are talking about a wind-chill factor of minus 52 degrees.
It is something the good people of Spitsbergen have grown accustomed to. Some 1,400 people have made Longyearbyne their home, with a further 850 inhabitants living in the Russian mining community of Barentsburg, and a further 60 at a Norwegian research centre. There are no roads connecting the communities, and the only method of travelling to the island is by plane from Tromso. Outside the airport a road-sign informs you that whilst we were some 3043 kilometres away from London, the town of Anchorage, in Alaska, was only a further 1,400 kms on. The world, at least the one we are mostly familiar with, looks very differently from up here. On entering the town of Longyearbyne you are greeted with another road-sign, rather like the ones we have in Britain depicting deer. This one sported a polar bear.
Before leaving the warmth of our hotel room Hempleman-Adams kitted me out with the appropriate attire for polar trekking. Over my usual underwear I placed a pair of thick, woollen shorts. Thermal leggings and a padded pair of salopettes followed, as well as two layers of socks. Above the waist I wore a woollen jumper, a fleece and then a padded coat, that made my figure resemble the Michelin Man. For my head a thick, woollen scarf was wrapped around my neck, a balaclava placed on my head, then a bobble hat and, finally, a thick cap with flaps. Gloves and snow boots, with woollen lining and inner boots rounded off the wardrobe.
"You don't touch exposed metal out here with your bare hand, not unless you want to rip your flesh off," the explorer advised. "You don't want to eat something like a Mars Bar, if it's been left out in the cold, because you'll lose your teeth. And then there's the small problem of going to the toilet."
Hempleman-Adams proceeded to show me exactly how a polar explorer relieves himself - and yes, I'm talking both ways - inside my hotel room. I'm not willing to go into particulars here, suffice to say that arguably the world's greatest living adventurer spent five minutes crouching on my floor exposing himself. If anyone had burst in at this point it would have taken some explaining. Still, it was a useful exercise, because nobody wanted a mess, albeit a frozen mess inside a tent that would be our home, nor even less the possibility of frostbite on your genitals.
Within minutes of being left to our own devices out in the wilderness I suffered a nosebleed. People can be divided into those who suffer from nose bleeds, and those who don't. I belong to the second category, except when in the High Arctic you are at the mercy of the environment. "It's the pressure," Hempleman-Adams explained, as he handed me a tissue. "Everyone gets nose bleeds at first."
We assembled the tent, ensuring that the entrance was away from the wind, and piling shovel after shovel load of snow on to the sides to help keep it entrenched into the ground. We practiced with our rifle, taking one shot each at the dogs' bowl some thirty metres away but neither hitting the target. "A bear's bigger," my partner reasoned. And then we took a last swig out of a fine bottle of Irish whiskey before setting off on our way for a long, hard day's slog out on the ice.
Each of us pulled a sledge weighing, with its contents, around sixty pounds. When Hempleman-Adams begins his sixty-day, solo treks to either Pole, his sledge weighs a back-breaking 325lbs. "I lost 40lbs in weight in two months doing just this," he shouted, as I led him in a formation line up the slopes of an ice-covered mountain. "I'd go through 9,000-12,000 calories a day and six litres of liquids. It's that bloody hard."
More often than not my leg would sink into knee-deep snow, or I would lose my footing in the slippery conditions. Moreover, tears created by the cold would stream down my cheeks, my nose started to run and my body sweat under the physical exertions of trekking in such inhospitable but beautiful surroundings. Every ten minutes David would shout out an order. "Wriggle your fingers and toes," he would say. "You don't even know you're getting frostbite until it's too late. And wipe away any tears. Otherwise, they'll freeze."
After two of the most arduous hours of my life we decided to turn around and head back to the tent. "Believe me, that will be enough," Hempleman-Adams insisted. "It's very cold, the wind's blowing, it's beginning to snow and this, my friend, is no picnic. We've still got a long way to go before we're inside that tent."
Pausing to regain our breath, we observed the raw beauty of the mountains and the frozen ocean. We gazed at a white that was whiter than any white we had seen before. And we listened to the silence, a silence so strong that it became almost over-bearing.
"This is such a great leveller," David commented, with a contented expression plastered all over his now puffy face. "Out here you strip people bare of money or education, beliefs or their position in society's pecking order. Out here, in the cold and the danger, none of that is relevant. It's just about the person inside you.
"You see, you can't beat working with nature. It's very cerebral. The Arctic can be kind to you if it likes, or it can make life unbearable. It's not down to us. It's down to a better being than us. It's indefinable, but there's something working out there."
These are not the mutterings of a religious zealot. Far from it. Hempleman-Adams, a Wiltshire-based glue and resins businessman, is as black and white, as assured and steady a person you could ever wish to meet. Indeed, if you have to spend two days in such unforgiving conditions, David Hempleman-Adams is probably the man you would most want to spend them with.
Yet he touched upon something here. At base camp, at the foot of Everest, the sherpas insist on conducting a modest ceremony in which they throw rice at a "pujah," a makeshift alter. All mountaineers facing Everest participate in this under the belief that if the sherpas, the best Himalayan climbers in the world, carry out this process, then so should they. To this day hard-bitten, spirit-swigging Australian sailors like to throw chrysanthemums into the sea just as they leave the Hobart swell and enter the treacherous waters of the Southern Ocean. This, so they will tell you, is a gift to the sea gods.
So when Hempleman-Adams talks of greater powers you tend to listen. "I felt it close to the summit of Everest. I feel it when I'm close to the Pole. After a while it remains lodged in your gut. In 1999 I was all set to climb Mont Blanc with my friend, Rune Gjeldnes, the Norwegian adventurer. This is a mountain I've climbed five times before. We were all kitted out when I just had a strange feeling about it. Much to Rune's annoyance, I refused to go. Six climbers died the same day on the mountain in an avalanche. It is just an instinct, and a knowledge I have developed over the years.
"When I started out I thought I knew best, that I was the boss. But there's only one boss here, and it's certainly not us. So you must always respect the mountains, the sea, and most definitely the Arctic and Antarctic. For our lives right now are in the Arctic's hands."
It was a long and exhausting slog back to the tent. Throughout this time, despite our growing fatigue, we remained very aware of what was around us. Ahead lay a potential crevasse, above mountains that showed signs of previous avalanches, below seas with cracks in the ice. And always, without the safety alarm of our huskies waiting for us back at our tent, we looked out for polar bears. The wind was picking up and the light fading to the extent that both of us were grateful to collapse inside our home for the night.
Despite being relatively warm compared to the temperature outside, the ink in my pen had frozen after four hours in the tent, as had the cola inside its bottle, and much of the whiskey. This would be our sleeping quarters, and although the warmth from a stove and the tea and soup we subsequently made kept us comfortable for a few hours, much of the ensuing fourteen hours would be spent in the cold and pitch black darkness of the Arctic night.
Despite the cold of the previous four hours' walking, my body and clothes steamed inside the tent from the perspiration developed for over an hour. Inside our sleeping bags we removed our exterior clothing, boots and socks, to be left wearing leggings and jumpers. Only our heads would be exposed to the cold air in the tent, which was why both of us wore balaclavas.
As we lay on our respective sides of the tent and looked at each other I felt compelled to ask the man a question quite a few have asked me in jest over the last couple of years. "David, are you mad?"
He laughed at the inquiry, and shook his head. "No, I'm not," he replied, after giving it some thought. "The problem with some adventurers is that they believe they are immortal. Well, I'm reminded of my mortality every time I do anything like this. And the more adventures I undertake, so the odds shorten in terms of danger. Nothing I ever do is reckless. Everything is well-planned. I've learned to minimise the risks. That's not to say I don't still face great danger, because I do. But, although I've had my fair share of luck, I've also been able to size things up. I know when I have to walk away from danger and, so far, I've managed to do this."
Here, in an environment such as this, is where he is clearly at his happiest. "I remember when I first discovered the outdoors," he recollected. "I was thirteen, came from a divided home in Swindon, and found myself lying on the ground at night on the Brecon Beacons during a Duke of Edinburgh course just staring up at the night sky. That's when I knew I would be destined to do all this for the rest of my life."
Hempleman-Adams slept like a proverbial baby that night. I did not. Occasionally I would poke my head out of the tent, just for a few minutes to avoid frostbite, and gaze up at stars bigger and brighter than I had ever seen in my life. The moon, too, appeared almost within touching distance. This truly felt like the top of the globe.
Mostly though, I just lay in the cold and dark, uncomfortable, miserable, and scared. I thought of Jack London's rather apt description of hypothermia, a death the writer referred to a century ago as "the most gentle doorway into the night." I lay in fear of the winds howling outside and battering against the tent, the cold that was draining my body, and most of all the concept of bears prowling outside. Each time a husky even whined my hand edged closer to the loaded rifle placed between us on the floor.
Mercifully, at least for an hour or two, I managed to doze. When I was woken by the huskies once more, the first rays of morning light were hitting the top of the tent, and the furious winds of the night before had calmed down. The insides of the roof of the net were now covered in a white crust of frost and ice. "That's from condensation and our breath," David explained as we gazed upwards. Ice, too, had developed on my eyelids and lips as I slept, forcing me to pick it off carefully to avoid pain.
"Where you scared last night, David?" I asked, once we had packed up the tent and started to walk back to our pick-up point on the road, hauling our sledges once more behind us.
"I'm always scared," he replied. "And I'm always on my guard."
A few hours' later we were back in Longyearbyne, enjoying the pleasures of the simple things in life we take for granted: a hot shower, a warm, solid meal, and a short doze in an inviting bed. That evening we left for the Norwegian mainland, both of us staring out of the window as our aircraft lifted itself up and over the Spitsbergen coastline.
I don't know if I will ever return to such an environment again in my life. Part of me felt a sadness about this. Another, more dominant aspect, felt relieved. Never again would I complain about the cold again in Britain. I was thankful, too, that an encounter with a polar bear did not materialise. As beautiful a sight as it might have been, it would have ended in tears for someone, or something.
David Hempleman-Adams will be back, though. It's only a matter of time. "You know, I miss my wife and my kids every time I go away on these adventures," he said, as his gaze remained fixed on the Arctic wastes below. "I really do. But I'm afraid I'm hooked on this adventuring drug."
Sooner or later the law of averages demand that something quite terrible could happen to the man. He nodded his head and smiled. "I can't argue with that," he replied. "But there are more reasons to do it than to not." He closed his eyes and sunk back in his seat, before turning round and looking straight into my face.
"You must understand, I can't let it go. I just can't let it go."
