MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

77 Antarctica, January 1993 Her skis crunched on wind-packed snow as Sunniva Sorby slogged across a flat featureless expanse of the Antarctic plateau. The landscape stretched out like a white blanket, bleak and disorienting in every direction, and apart from an unsteady compass bearing and the ever-present southerly wind, all sense of direction was lost. And yet each step would bring Sorby closer to that arbitrary point on the ice, the South Pole. Unsure at times if she was still on her home planet or a distant icy moon, Sorby’s only tether to the rest of the world was an uncertain one-way radio transmission echoing off a single, distant reflector, invisible in the white abyss. In an era long before the convenience of handheld GPS, consumer satellite phones and personal emergency locator beacons, Sorby and her team of four women were in complete isolation, attempting to be the first all-female expedition to successfully reach the South Pole. “At the end of our ten-hour day skiing south, we would split up the tasks,” she recalls. “Two of us would set up the tents, one would start melting snow for water, and one of us would assemble the radio.” Unable to receive any signal from beyond Antarctica, the expedition’s military radio weighed about 30 pounds and had a telephone receiver. It was the best equipment available at the time. “We would have to set up the di-pole—a long cable antenna attached to our skis and poles to get some elevation—and point it in an absolutely straight line towards 80 degrees south,” says Sorby. “This was the only way to send a call to Patriot Hills Basecamp which would relay our position and information to a 1-800 number in the United States and let people know we were alive. There was no news from home, we had no idea what was going on, and that was kind of nice. To experience true silence, upstairs. It enabled us to focus on the real experience.” Despite the welcome solitude, Norwegian-born Sorby and her team were committed to communicate their daily position and expedition details back to the hundreds of schools who were following their journey in real time and learning about Antarctica. Such practices are standard nowadays, but in 1992-3 it was a groundbreaking endeavour. National Geographic even provided schools with paper maps for the kids to follow the expedition using push pins. A veteran of many polar expeditions since that first foray, Sorby has continued attempting to engage school kids in her adventures. “Kids have such intellectual plasticity and unbound curiosity,” she says. “They need to be part of the adventure—they bring new ideas, and their generation really understands the issues facing our planet and its inhabitants.” The expedition’s military radio weighed about 30 pounds and had a telephone receiver. TOP LEFT Sunniva Sorby and the first all-female team to make it self-supported to the South Pole. ABOVE Sorby bringing supplies to Bamsebu via snowmobile. BOTTOM LEFT Before GPS navigation, expedition leader Ann Bancroft working out their position en route to the South Pole the old fashioned way. COURTESY HITI PROJECT DATABASE