Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Mile Živković
This is a story
about one of the most difficult expeditions on the planet,
to a place that few people understand,
that may be the last of its kind in history.
Unfortunately for you, this is not a story about going to the edge,
rather this is a story that starts at the edge and goes much farther.
Most of you will probably ask me why, and some of you will ask me how
or what use is any sort of extreme adventure,
and I hope to answer these questions.
In the past, explorers have famously quipped,
"Because it's there."
My reasons stand in stark contrast
because it might not be there in the future.
I am not discovering new territory,
rather I'm discovering this place as it exists today,
and the goal of any of my adventures is to connect people
to the last great frozen wilderness that's left on the planet
and show them how they are changing.
When people meet me, most of them are pretty disappointed.
(Laughter)
And I think it's because I look a lot stronger in my polar gear
than I do in real life.
(Laughter)
In 2006, I completed the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole.
In 2010, I completed a world record journey
to the South Pole, the North Pole, and the top of Mount Everest,
all in one year.
I call myself a polar explorer;
it's not a job that you find listed on any sort of help-wanted ad,
but I leave it on my business card
because it seems to draw interest at dinner parties.
(Laughter)
But most people seem to lean away a little bit when I mention the fact
that my current no-shower record stands at 72 days.
(Laughter)
Just saying.
(Laughter)
It's been difficult for me - smelling badly aside -
to garner interest in my sport
which happens so far from even the edge of civilization,
at the breakneck pace of one mile per hour.
So I've worked very hard over the past 20 years
to try to make what I do sexy.
(Laughter)
And it hasn't been easy
considering the number of base layers that I wear at any given day.
(Laughter)
Especially, with all the extreme sports out there,
I've had to turn up my game just a few notches
and become a little more risqué.
(Laughter)
I even started planking, but I realized that...
(Laughter)
penguins have been doing it a long before I have.
But all this is in a singular effort to help share place.
And one place in particular: a cold place, the coldest place, the Arctic Ocean.
It's a place that very few people really understand.
In 1995, Reinhold Messner,
arguably the most accomplished mountaineer in all of history,
called his failed attempt to reach the North Pole the horizontal Everest.
And while 6,000 people have stood on the summit of Mount Everest,
less than 250 people have reached the geographic North Pole from land,
less than 50 of those traveling in an unsupported way
which is carrying all their supplies.
To understand why this particular adventure is so difficult,
you need to understand a bit more about the Arctic Ocean itself.
It's a huge place.
It's 5.5 million square miles huge, it's larger than all of Europe,
it plunges to a depth of 15,000 feet and is covered in a thin layer of ice.
Do you want to see the cutest thing in the world?
Do you think you can handle it? (Audience) Yes.
(Audience) Oh!
Eric Larsen: You can't handle it. You said you could, but you couldn't.
(Laughter)
Penguins live in Antarctica, Antarctica is a continent,
and all the snow and ice in Antarctica is ice on land.
There is so much snow and ice in Antarctica
that when you're standing at the South Pole,
you're actually standing at the elevation of 9,000 feet.
The Arctic Ocean, on the other hand, is ice that is floating on water.
The elevation at the North Pole is just a couple feet.
That sea ice only reaches about four or five feet thick at the most.
It's ice that is floating on water, broken up in the sheets or pans,
and it does whatever the water does due to winds, tides, and ocean currents,
so it can fracture apart, and form what's called an aufeis
which can be just a few feet across, it can be upwards of a half a mile across.
Those sheets or pans of ice can also collide together with such a force
that they form massive pressure ridges that can be 10, 20, 25 feet tall.
To get to the geographic North Pole from land
is a journey of 480 miles in a straight line,
but that journey is anything, but straightforward.
There's an overall drift of the ice which moves from the Pole
towards Canada, Greenland, and the U.S.
Waking up in the morning, we would check our GPS and find
that we had drifted farther south, upwards of three miles every day,
while we slept.
I have a simple philosophy
in terms of planning and preparing for my expeditions,
and it's called 'train hard and travel easy'.
Just getting to the starting line, I find,
is one of the most difficult parts of these entire journeys.
On February 28, I would leave Colorado and we would fly north,
we're moving ourselves from civilization one step at a time,
eventually ending on a place called Resolute, Canada,
on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the historic Northwest Passage.
We would spend another week there in final preparations
sorting the 650 pounds of gear that would need,
everything that we would need to live and survive
for nearly two months on the ice,
taking extra pains to make sure that we had enough calories,
- 7,500 per person per day -
including all this butter, to sustain that hard effort.
After another eight days of weather delay,
we eventually loaded on a small plane
and flew over Ellesmere Island what I can only describe
as the most beautiful day I've ever seen in the Arctic.
It was so crystal clear and blue,
and looking out the window at all those mountains and glaciers was so amazing,
stopping to refuel at a major international airport along in the way.
(Laughter)
Then we're off and flying, and finally reach Cape Discovery,
the northernmost point of land in North America.
There's no roads, there's no runway, there's no marketers,
there's no support team, there's no camera crew filming this.
The plane takes off, and it's just us
and one of the most difficult adventures left on the planet,
and this overwhelming sense of being alone and isolated,
the biting cold.
But the physical act of moving, putting on our skis or snowshoes,
we took solace in that because that's what we've trained so hard to do.
I'm not going to lie to to you, the first two weeks were very difficult.
Our sleds were so heavy, nearly 320 pounds each,
and ice so rough that we had to relay them forward both of us,
pulling one sled and then going back to get the next sled.
After 8 or 9 hours of work, we would check our GPS,
and we would have progressed one mile, one and a half miles,
after the hardest work you could possibly imagine.
After three weeks on the trail,
we had progressed only 50 of the 480 miles that we would need to get to the Pole,
and I cried because I was afraid: afraid of being a failure.
And afraid of dying.
We had a very close encounter with two polar bears
early on in the expedition as well.
I call polar travel is death by 1,000 cuts,
because each day we're losing a bit of energy that we'd never get back,
and so we worked very hard on our routines and systems
to be efficient and save energy and make our way forward.
Each day starts out in the tent.
Not being much of a morning person,
waking up at 30 degrees below zero in a frosty sleeping bag
is not the most comfortable situation in the world,
and it takes us nearly three hours to melt snow, cook breakfast,
and gear up for our day on the ice in which we're skiing, snowshoing,
and sometimes just hiking through this rough, jumbled ice.
At 30 degrees below zero, we're traveling in a very narrow margin of safety,
but surprisingly at that temperature, my concern isn't really getting too cold,
it's getting too hot.
We're working very hard, and we have to be very careful,
because we're traveling in a very narrow margin of safety.
We employ a lot of strategies to be able to get through the day
and, hopefully, be successful.
To be efficient, we travel in a single file line,
we tell ourselves to navigate towards the nice
and veer towards the clear, stringing flat pieces of ice together
in a series of motions.
But it can be difficult
when you're dealing with these very tough conditions,
physically and mentally stressed,
to make a decision where you might end up in some very rough ice.
So we have to remind ourselves: be decisive, be confident, and be safe.
We navigate with a compass throughout the day.
Sometimes the ice is so rough we have to climb up
on a chunk of ice and scout a route.
But in reality, in these conditions, there never really is a clear route,
we have to go up and down,
sometimes both of us are unhooking from our sleds.
It might take us two hours to travel a quarter of a mile.
Thin ice, ice so thin that it bends underneath our skis.
Open water is always a concern.
Falling through unprotected, we're hypothermic in just a few minutes,
dead in another minute after that.
We increasingly have to take these risks once chance after another,
crossing on bridges, jumping,
using our sleds the Huck Finn style to catamaran across this ice,
or putting a dry suit swimming in a 14,000-foot-deep icy ocean.
It's a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to try it sometime.
(Laughter)
And then whiteouts.
You want to know what life is like on a major polar expedition?
Here's what you do: go home tonight, sit in a bathtub full of ice water
and stare at a white sheet of paper for 12 hours
(Laughter)
and you'll start to realize some of the scenery that we get to see.
(Laughter)
Worse yet, we don't know in these conditions
if we are going to end into good, flat ice
or rough ice where it might take us 2 hours to travel a quarter of a mile.
Then, of course, there are things that want to eat you: a polar bear.
But I'm more concerned about these ice sharks
which are all over the Arctic Ocean, and I had a pretty close encounter.
(Laughter)
You can believe it, it's OK. (Laughter)
Then, another step. Every hour we switch leads.
At the halfway point through the day, we put on our big down jackets,
we get out a soup, we huddle behind an ice chunk,
and then we keep going.
Breaking that big problem up into these small steps
we're able to keep moving forward
through some of these very, very difficult situations, mentally stressful,
and look at this place through a different lens.
And even though we're tired, exhausted, hungry, and scared,
that step-by-step process allows us to look at this amazing environment,
this unique, last great frozen wilderness that is left on the planet
and appreciate it for what it is.
These huge, massive ice chunks, I mean, are you kidding me?
That is incredible!
Or these small crystals of hoarfrost, delicate curves of snow, the sublime,
and still finding time to keep everything sexy on the ice.
(Laughter)
And then, another step.
To think about the beginning or the end of the expedition
the beginning is overwhelming, even the end of the day at the beginning.
So we break that big problem up into these manageable pieces.
After 41 days, we're still 180 miles from the North Pole,
so we reevaluated our strategy.
We cut our sleep to 4.5 hours and increased our travel time to 15 hours.
We started going, and still after 10 days of that,
the ice just seemed to break it up.
If I thought the conditions were bad already,
now they just seemed to get worse, everything was set up against us.
Now we're 17 miles from the North Pole, 10 miles from the North Pole,
3,5 miles from the North Pole, the ice is breaking up underneath us.
We have to scramble across these chunks,
as these pieces of ice are moving up against us.
Instead of more ice, we're encountering these leads, these cracks of ice,
after a section of open water,
and getting in with our dry suit to swim
is one of the most difficult and dangerous situations.
But it's also the physical act of doing something,
that allows me to think a little bit.
It takes 20 or 30 minutes to cross one of these leads.
So I get to ask myself that question: why?
It's hard to describe where passion comes from,
but the goal of any of my adventures
is to remind us all that all of our actions
directly affect the quality of environment.
And how?
We skied and snowshoed, we encountered problems,
but we persevered to find solutions.
We set short-term and long-term goals,
we took that big problem, and we broke it up into small steps.
Of what use is any sort of extreme adventure?
On this expedition,
everything that we needed to live and survive fit in our sleds.
And for the most part, we had what we needed.
That idea of comfort, that's a relative term.
You don't need to be an explorer to go to an extreme place,
but we do need to be reminded that we had the amazing ability to endure.
We just needed to be reminded and inspired to do that.
Eventually, we would reach the geographic North Pole
in what I can only call the biggest moment of anticlimax...
(Applause)
the biggest moment of anticlimax that I've ever had in my entire life.
There's no land, there's no marker, that ice is moving and drifting,
so after a few minutes, we were already south of the North Pole.
(Laughter)
My importance in any of this only lies in my ability to share my experiences.
The ice is melting at an alarming rate, and it is up to us to do something.
As explorers in the 21st century,
our job isn't necessarily to go to the edge and conquer these places,
but it is more to protect them,
and that is the message that I'd like to leave with you today.
Thank you.
(Applause)