When you’re skiing alone, without a single soul within five million square miles, and nothing but a flat white horizon ahead, you have a lot of time to think about your identity – if only to ponder, when things get really tough, what in God’s name am I doing here?
So who, or more specifically, what, does Ben Saunders think he is? To be honest, he’s not quite sure how to describe himself. ‘Adventurer’ has rather too many dodgy connotations. But ‘explorer’, especially ‘polar explorer’, seems to set his teeth on edge.
‘Returning to the city after months on the ice is like watching TV with the volume up too far’
It’s all down to Saunders’ relationship with his celebrated antecedents. He has clearly studied them closely: he knows just about everything about past polar expeditions: right down to who financed Captain Scott, or how many dogs Scott’s arch Norwegian rival, Amundsen, took when he won the race to the Pole in 1912 (for the record, he began with 52, ended with 16 and many of the casualties ended up on the dinner menu).
As we speak, he is gearing up to mark the centenary of that great struggle by trekking the return journey to the South Pole himself in 2011-12. Astonishingly, no one in the intervening 100 years has repeated the feat. Saunders, then, will be the first to walk in the footsteps of Scott, possibly encountering some of the relics and debris of that doomed journey along the way. He sees it as completing Scott’s mission.
But although Saunders falls quite naturally into the noble tradition of British exploration, he’s pretty keen to distance himself from it too. ‘Polar explorer sounds so Edwardian, like you ought to be wearing a tweed jacket and planting flags for colonial Britain. I’ve really tried to distance myself from this gentlemanly, slightly buffoonish ethos.’
One reason is because the tradition is so packed with the romance of courageous failure. Saunders has absolutely no time for losing. In fact, heresy upon heresy: ‘I operate in what, a hundred years ago, would have been seen a quite a Norwegian way of doing things. I train hard, I put a lot of effort into getting nutrition right. I get completely obsessive about these things.’
You can say that again. Saunders is blessed with an easy-going and curious nature, is comfortable in his own skin, and tends to focus on the funny side of things. But it turns out he has a mental Achilles heel.
Longjohns, zips, titanium spoons… and the unfortunate fate of the Life of Pi
It centres on weight logistics. One reason why he rates his soft merino Sunspel longjohns (to use the Edwardian parlance) is because they’re so light. Another favourite possession is his super-light titanium spoon. But is it really necessary to comb minutely through all his kit, eliminating every scrap of excess metal, right down to zips?
Saunders insists the strategy has real benefits – ‘we save a gram a zip’ – and reckons to shave kilos off the total weight burden. But he admits he occasionally goes a bit bananas. On a 2004 solo expedition to the North Pole, the only thing he took to read was Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi. It’s fairly slim volume. But he nonetheless insisted on burning each instalment as he read it, to lighten the load. Sadly, it rather backfired. ‘There was a real twist at the end of the book and I wanted to go back and re-read the earlier bits and of course I couldn’t.’
Fathers and sons
Are great explorers born or made? There seems to be a link between the urge to conquer new territory and some kind of loss or setback at the start of life. Captain Scott was haunted by his father’s bankruptcy, and the same theme of loss runs through the lives of a bizarre string of explorers. ‘Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ father died before he was born; Lance Armstrong’s father disappeared when he was very young.’ Saunders falls into the same camp: his parents split when he was five, and he lost contact completely with his father when he was 12. ‘He disappeared; just vanished. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.
‘I never really knew him so I don’t feel like I missed out. I’m intrigued more than anything else, but no doubt a psychologist would have a field day.’ He thinks there’s some truth in the idea that this lack of male role model drove him to find inspiration elsewhere. ‘I’ve got a younger brother. He’s a very good racing cyclist. So we both have this similar, slightly obsessive streak. If you’re going to do something, do it absolutely full on.’
Born in 1977, he grew up in Devon and spent a lot of time on Dartmoor as a child watching the Marines train. An early memory was watching the homecoming of the Falklands taskforce. ‘I remember seeing the ships coming in and thinking: wow, that’s what a MAN looks like.’ He cackles at the memory. But it influenced his decision to join the army – though a few months at Sandhurst convinced him he’d made a big mistake. ‘Really, you were just a cog in a machine. It made me realise that I valued my freedom pretty highly.’
He’d already fallen in love with wild places during a gap year climbing in the Nepalese Himalayas. But he found his true mentor in Scotland, when he took a job as an instructor at John Ridgway’s adventure school on the north-west coast of the Highlands. Ridgway – clearly something of a Boys Own hero – was ‘just a genuinely inspiring guy to be around. He’d been the first [with Chay Blyth] to row across the Atlantic and had sailed around the world. He’d also boxed for Great Britain and had been in the SAS for several years. He’d written loads of books and had this real charisma. To me, he was just a superhero. He’s now in his seventies and still as large as life.’
Hairy moments
Saunders was equally fortunate in his polar mentor. In 2001, he joined Pen Hadow for a two-man trek to the North Pole. ‘It was master and apprentice really.’ The two main dangers, he discovered, ‘are the sea ice itself — that it will crack and break up particularly under a tent at night — and the bears; especially a bear coming along when you’re in a tent.’
More often than not, the bears are merely curious and a quick bang from the shotgun is all it takes to scare them away. But they had a close shave on that trip, not helped when, at the pivotal moment, ‘our very dodgy Russian shotgun jammed five times’.
‘It’s really very odd feeling like prey. I mean you can’t outrun something coming at you at 25 mph, the only thing you can do is stand your ground and try and frighten him off. So we made a lot of noise and waved our skis around. It was a peculiar, primeval kind of aggression.’
‘You can’t outrun something coming at you at 25mph…’
For all the hairy moments and physical hardship, there’s a real spiritual element to these journeys, says Saunders. ‘You almost get into a trance. It’s very odd how natural it feels to be moving or walking for nine hours a day.’
He does, though, edit his MP3 player meticulously. ‘You can’t have anything melancholic. I had Coldplay on one expedition and it was no good at all: it just sent me spiralling into dark moods. So music has to be fairly upbeat: either good rock music, or good electronic dance stuff. ‘
A man of extremes
The return to civilisation can be equally surreal. Saunders describes himself as a man of extremes. ‘I love the wilderness and I love big cities. I was in Tokyo speaking a few weeks ago and I love that crazy place.’
But the transition between the two is sometimes overwhelming: a kind of sensory overload. ‘Returning to the city after months on the ice is like watching the TV with the volume up too far. But it’s like that with every sense. Colour, brightness, smell – everything is like slightly one or two notches too high. It takes a while for everything to tune back in again.
‘And people are fascinating when you’re away that long. I find myself doing everything you’re not supposed to do in London. I stare at people and try and start conversations on the Tube, probably putting myself in far more danger than when I’m in the Arctic.’
‘I like the fact that the clothes are absolutely authentic and quite low key’
A particular pleasure of any home-coming is the chance to climb out of expedition kit (not as whiffy as you might think: sub-zero temperatures kill bacteria) into some real clothes. Saunders, who rather surprisingly put in a formative youthful stint working at Austin Reed, describes himself as ‘bizarrely interested’ in tailoring and ‘a real old clothing snob’.
He rates Sunspel for its ‘wonderful heritage’. ‘I like the fact that the clothes are absolutely authentic and quite low key. The quality is superb, but they don’t shout about it and put huge logos everywhere. There’s a similarity there in how I’m trying to do things.’
Gunning for Clarkson
Saunders’ particular bug-bear is Jeremy Clarkson. Or, more specifically, people like Clarkson who make short-cut trips to the Poles that grab the headlines and devalue the efforts of those risking ‘brain cells and finger tips’ to make the really hard slog.
Clarkson’s much trumpeted road trip to the North Pole was actually to the magnetic North Pole, which shifts around a lot, and is relatively easy to get to compared with its geographic equivalent, says Saunders. He doesn’t want to sound bitter, but he has to grit his teeth when people say: ‘Oh well, Clarkson drove there… How hard can it be?’
He should rest easy. As every old explorer (and, for that matter, Sunspel aficionado) will tell you, it’s not the flash exterior that counts, but what’s going on underneath.
Tags: Ben Saunders