If you’re going to traverse Antarctica on cross-country skis, it’s advisable to go in a group, ideally with psychologically sturdy comrades in preternaturally good shape. You might bring kites, to harness the propulsive power of the wind, or arrange to have caches of food deposited along your route. The continent has seen sixteen such successful crossings. Four years ago, Henry Worsley, a retired lieutenant-colonel in the British Army, made the first attempt at an unassisted solo expedition, dragging a sled of provisions weighing more than three hundred pounds at the journey’s start. (Worsley died; David Grann wrote about his endeavor for this magazine.) Not long after, Ben Saunders, another British polar explorer, set out on the ice, but he misjudged how much food he’d require and was forced to abandon his mission at the South Pole. Finally, in late 2018, a thirty-three-year-old American endurance athlete named Colin O’Brady pulled it off: an unsupported, nearly thousand-mile hike across one of the most unforgiving landscapes on the planet.
In O’Brady’s new memoir, “The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice—Crossing Antarctica Alone,” he describes the undertaking less as a matter of grit than as a “brutal math problem,” the main variables being “miles, calories, hours, days.” Pack as much nutrient-dense food as you can carry—enough to sustain you but not so much that it’s impossible to haul—and make it to the other side before the twenty-four-hour sunshine of Antarctic summer gives way to the unbroken darkness of winter. O’Brady had budgeted for a daily intake of seven thousand calories, but he ended up burning more than ten thousand a day—a starvation diet, unsustainable for much longer than the two months he had planned for the trek. Even the pace at which energy is expended in subzero temperatures is a careful balancing act: too little exertion and hypothermia sets in, but too much will result in sweat-dampened clothes, which can rapidly freeze against the body. One veteran explorer advised O’Brady on how to use plastic bags to keep the insides of his footwear dry. “A frozen boot never thaws in the deep cold,” he warned. “That’s it. Frostbite. Toes goodbye.”
Beyond the physical perils lies an even greater danger. Marching twelve or thirteen hours a day, often in a sensory void, O’Brady felt “the quiet erosion of judgment and reason and sanity.” His thoughts would race, descending into “that place of obsessive what-if fears.” He contemplated the probable outcome should a freak squall send his tent flying: “I’d die alone, in the cold, my body temperature falling. I’d grow sleepy, then increasingly irrational, and finally I’d just lie down.” At times, he’d stare absently at his compass and feel as though he were falling into it, relinquishing “the sense that it was separate from me.” One night, while he was setting up camp, everything went blank. He stood there, shovel in hand, unsure of what he was doing or why, “as though my mind had just sort of walked off the field.”
The obvious question is: Why do this to yourself? A charitable reading would credit O’Brady for testing the limits of human potential and furnishing us with a rich metaphor for chasing our dreams. A cynic might see naked ambition and a competitiveness verging on the colonial. (Louis Rudd, the second person to complete the crossing, along a parallel route, two days after O’Brady, had told the Telegraph: “It’s really important it’s a Brit that cracks this journey first.”) For the last seventy-seven miles, O’Brady gave up on sleep entirely and trudged on for thirty-two straight hours. “I was a reduced man, stripped to his essence,” he writes. “Everything unnecessary in the universe was gone.” After fifty-four days of severe cold and isolation, and having lost twenty-five pounds, he reached a solitary wooden post, set into the frozen ground by the United States Geological Survey, marking the end of the continent and the beginning of the Ross Ice Shelf. In itself, O’Brady’s story is neither cautionary nor inspirational; it’s a Rorschach test for one’s own character and aspirations. To what extremes would you go, and how much punishment would you endure, in the service of a single goal? If there is a lesson, it’s that the path of the reduced man can lead to triumph, or madness, or both.
