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Børge Ousland (born 31 May 1962) is a Norwegian polar explorer. He was the first person to cross Antarctica solo. He started his career as a Norwegian Navy Special Forces Officer with Marinejegerkommandoen, and he also spent several years working as a deep sea diver for the oil industry in the North Sea.
- Overview
- The expedition begins
- The explorer’s gene
- Thinner than ever
- Across the sea
- Life on the ice
- The sun sets for good
- Sign of life
- Top of the world
- Alone in the cosmos
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
Two of the greatest living polar explorers went to investigate the extent of the melting Arctic for themselves. It almost killed them.
Borge Ousland and Mike Horn leave their sailboat Pangea and begin their 87-day ski traverse of the Arctic ice cap.
Somewhere near the North Pole, in a small tent staked to a plate of floating ice, Børge Ousland’s satellite phone buzzed. It was November 20, 2019, and Ousland, the leading polar explorer of his generation, and adventurer Mike Horn had set out two months earlier with an audacious goal: to ski across the top of the world. They’d been in total isolation ever since, making their way, stride by stride, along the increasingly fragile ice floes that form a floating cap over the Arctic Ocean.
It was one of the most daring polar journeys in history—and the men were in trouble.
The ice was fracturing around them, opening in gaping cracks. Slowed by the poor conditions, the sleds they pulled were nearly empty of food. Horn’s frostbitten hands, virtually useless in the cold, were dangerously infected.
Now their expedition manager, Lars Ebbesen, was on the phone from Norway with a lifeline. A passing Norwegian icebreaker happened to be in the sea north of Svalbard and would briefly be in position to serve as a refueling platform for a helicopter to reach them. For one day only, they could be rescued. Should he give the ok to start the rescue?
On August 28 of last year, with little fanfare or media hype, Ousland, Horn, and their crew set sail from Nome, Alaska, in Horn’s 115-foot sailboat Pangaea and headed north into the Arctic Ocean. They saw whales and birds on their annual migrations south.
Horn admits, “It felt like we were going the wrong direction.”
Soon, the ocean began to freeze. There is no land in the high Arctic—the ice cap here floats atop an abyss of frigid seawater. Exploring the ice’s farthest reaches, teeming with polar bears and peril, has provided explorers one of the Earth’s ultimate challenges for over a century.
But now, with the Arctic warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, everything is changing. For the first time since records have been kept, temperatures reached 100 degrees this summer in the Siberian Arctic. Wildfires erupted on thawing permafrost. And the unyielding ice cap that has held the top of the planet in its frozen grip for 15 million years is melting.
Scientists use an array of satellites and sensors to feed computer models that provide a picture of this changing realm. Ousland and Horn had a more direct experience in mind—they were returning to the heart of the high Arctic to witness the changes at ground level.
They aimed to ski 1,000 miles across the entirety of the ice cap, each pulling sleds with 410 pounds of supplies, enough to keep them alive for 85 days. If they encountered trouble in this void—polar bears, falling through ice, frostbite, or any debilitating illness—they would be on their own.
Inspired by the accounts of polar explorers his father read to him as a child, Ousland has had a lifelong love affair with the Arctic and, in his words, “creating new history.” In 1990, at 28, he embarked on his first historic challenge, skiing unsupported to the North Pole. Until then, the idea of skiing to the center of the vast frozen wilderness at the top of the planet, relying solely on the gear and supplies one could carry, was considered impossible. As many as 700 people had already died trying to reach the North Pole—more than twice as many who’ve died attempting to climb Mount Everest. But Ousland and another Norwegian, Erling Kagge achieved the feat in 58 days. Four years later, Ousland dramatically ramped up the danger and risk by repeating the trip alone, which garnered him international acclaim. Three years after that, he became the first person to ski across Antarctica alone.
None other than Reinhold Messner, the famous Italian alpinist who made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest, promptly labeled Ousland, “The supreme polar traveler of our time.”
But Ousland wasn’t done. Other Arctic coups followed, including an expedition in 2010 when he led a crew in a small trimaran sailboat on a circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean through both the Northeast and Northwest passages, the first crew to do so in a single summer season. Two years later, he even married his wife at the North Pole.
Horn, from South Africa, is a kindred soul also seemingly born for an earlier age of exploration. At 31, he river-boarded 4,000 miles down the Amazon (which involves lying prone atop something that resembles a boogie board and alternately paddling and riding the currents). Along the way he hunted snakes and caiman for food. Then he circumnavigated the planet at the equator without motorized assistance, crossing jungle and sea and narrowly escaping Congolese firing squads. He speaks seven languages and is the rare person who can, and frequently does, spout motivational slogans without sounding ridiculous. His favorite: “If you live to 82, you have 30,000 days, so you owe it to yourself to live each one to its fullest.”
In 2017, after Horn completed a daring, 3,100-mile solo kite-ski crossing of Antarctica, Ousland called with congratulations. Horn promptly invited him on his next adventure: a traverse of the Arctic ice cap on skis.
After they hung up, Ousland considered the prospect. It would be perilous, he was sure of that, even more so with rising temperatures weakening the ice sheet. And there was the matter of age, with both men now on the far side of 50. Ousland’s biggest history-making trips had been decades earlier. Yet all his life, he’d dreamed of “a classic north pole expedition where we sail in with boats,” like the stories his father read him.
To give themselves the best chance of success, they’d timed the trip at summer’s end when the ice sheet shrinks to its smallest extent, but from the outset the men were stunned by the fragility of the ice beneath them. Spreading their skis wide to disperse their weight on ice that bowed beneath them, they moved as quickly as their elephantine sleds allowed.
In extreme cold-weather environments, adventurers cite the maxim: Get wet, you die. They’re referring to sweat, which can freeze to skin, or perhaps to a spill from a water bottle, which can cause flesh-killing frostbite. The Arctic elevates this danger to an almost absurd level: The mortal threat of submersion looms constantly underfoot.
“When we did our first trips, the ice was three or four meters thick,” Ousland says. “But now we were skiing just a little crust basically, with 4,000 meters of sea underneath our feet.”
In places, the ice offered a gin-clear view into the void. Ousland says, “Sometimes we couldn’t even stop, or we would have gone through.”
Not long after leaving the sailboat, Pangaea, the men came to a channel of hissing green-black water, 100-feet wide. They would have to cross it.
Thirty years ago, these fissures, called “leads,” were small and sporadic enough simply to ski around them. But as temperatures rise, leads have grown larger and more common. Over the years, Ousland has devised new ways to adapt, including by donning a waterproof body suit of his own creation, climbing in the icy water, and swimming across—or as he describes it, “thinking like a polar bear.”
With the ice sheet now even more riven with leads (some a quarter mile across and 40 miles long), Ousland needed a new strategy. He found it in small, one-person, inflatable boats called packrafts. Primarily used by summer backpackers in temperate regions, they had never been tried in the Arctic, so Ousland cold-tested them in the freezer of an ice-cream producer in Oslo.
Climbing from the ice’s often unstable edge into the unsteady packrafts and paddling while pulling the heavy, but buoyant, gear sleds across open water proved effective, if nerve-jangling. Wind and waves lashed the vessels; capsizing could be fatal. The proliferation of leads, a dozen or so a day initially, shocked the men. Worse, the frequent crossings slowed their pace to a mere three to five miles per day, less than the half the 11-miles-per-day pace they were counting on.
Their ultimate success hinged on a simple equation: They had food—mostly oatmeal, nuts, and dried meat, individually bagged by Ousland—for 85 days, 10 more than they expected to need. That was their window to cross the Arctic Ocean.
“Time was our biggest enemy,” says Horn.
Being in a hurry is easier said than done when you’re towing hundreds of pounds of food, stoves, 56 liters of fuel, spare skis, a tent, sleeping bags rated to minus-40, and a single nail, a seemingly odd choice that would prove crucial later in the trip. Even selecting a safe place to sleep was time consuming—and critical. More than one polar adventurer has been swallowed by the frigid sea in the night, never to be seen again.
After finding a solid floe to camp on, Ousland hand-bored ice screws at the tent’s corners and set trip wires around its perimeter that would trigger a deafening explosive shell. This was the plan to deter the giant white carnivore that roams here and leaves patches of blood-stained snow wherever it dines.
“Polar bears will eat you if you let them,” Ousland says. “If you just sit there, they will come and they will eat you. Which is an honest thing. They are hungry.”
After encountering more than 50 polar bears in his journeys, Ousland has developed a suite of strategies to repel them. He and Horn carry bear spray and flare guns, which typically scare them off. If that fails, Ousland incorporated a holster for his .44 Magnum on the waist belt of his sled harness (along with knife sheaths and personal flotation devices he sewed into the harness’s shoulder straps).
Once in the tent, it could take an hour to brush the day’s accumulated ice off clothes and gear. To keep their sleeping bags from absorbing perspiration, which could accrue into pounds of ice, they lined them with custom-made plastic sacks that Horn likens to body bags and Ousland describes as “a big condom.”
Every morning, Horn spent 30 minutes scraping ice off the tent walls from the night’s respiration, a frigid, tedious task that he came to see as another step on his extreme quest for enlightenment. “I hate this job,” he told Ousland. “But at the same time, I like it. Because I have to learn to like what I hate.”
Eleven days after setting out, the men caught their last glimpse of our planet’s star as its final molten flicker melted into the horizon. The sun would not rise again in the Arctic for six months.
Now they skied through an extended sunset, the ice’s rosy glow cooling into a million shades of blue and shadow, the colors of cold and night. Temperatures plummeted, yet fragile ice still slowed their pace.
But something else was now impeding their progress: The ice plates they were skiing on were drifting backward. Ousland had hoped to gain two to three miles per day thanks to the ice drifting in the direction they were headed, but now the men found themselves being blown the wrong direction. Ousland had planned their route to capitalize on two predictable Arctic Sea currents, the Beaufort Gyre and Transpolar Drift. But now, with its lack of submerged mass, the thin, light ice was more susceptible to wind. Suddenly those currents, used by explorers since the 1800s, weren’t so predictable. During the day, the wind blew the plates in reverse as they skied atop them. They even lost ground while sleeping.
On a dimming day in mid-October, shortly before reaching the North Pole, Ousland and Horn switched on headlamps that they would not turn off in any waking hour for the remainder of their journey. Their life was engulfed in darkness, their headlamps—and the 22 pounds of batteries they carried to keep them burning—became indispensable extensions of themselves.
With the disappearance of light, something shifted in the men’s minds. They instinctively switched to what Horn calls, “survival mode.” During the day, they rarely spoke. They didn’t say much in the tent either. As Horn wrote in a social media post, “We are not here to talk, we are here to ski across the Arctic Ocean.”
“On expedition, we become like the elements,” Horn says. “We become like the world we evolve in. Børge and I become like the ice.”
They’d been skiing for an entire month without seeing a trace of humanity when the lights of an airplane blinked across the starry canopy. They watched in silence as it flew above the pole, turned back the way it had come, and disappeared into the night.
Who was up there? Were they enjoying a glass of wine and a meal in unimaginable warmth? Did they have any idea there were two men down there, skiing across the abyss?
The men did not appreciate the plane’s presence. “You have to be focused on what you are doing and not be distracted,” Ousland says. This is why he limits calls with his wife and daughter to once every couple weeks. “I want to be in the ice mentally ... it’s about safety.”
Yet it’s also something more, he admits. “It’s a little bit difficult to suddenly be ‘home’ speaking to my wife and my daughter. I picture myself back home instead of on the ice, and maybe I start questioning myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Which raises a good question: Why were they doing this?
“That is the question I get most, but I can’t answer it myself,” Ousland says. “I never ask ‘why’ to myself. I ask ‘how.’ If I feel like I can do it, that for me is enough motivation.”
As they neared the North Pole, the ice finally thickened and there were fewer leads. They should have been making good time, but each day the winds continued to blow the ice backwards like a treadmill under their skis. The last degree of latitude, from 89 to 90 degrees north, or 69 miles, took the men 11 days. It was the longest Ousland had ever taken to travel one degree.
When they reached the pole, Horn took a picture to commemorate the moment. It shows the light of two headlamps in the dark. Horn broke out tiny bottles of Armagnac and “Mike Horn Cake,” a rum-soaked fruit cake created for him by an admiring three-star Michelin chef.
They’d been skiing for 36 days and weren’t yet halfway, but they’d reached a psychological tipping point. As they hooked up to their sleds the next morning, a couple hours later than usual, they said, as they would every day in those subzero mornings, “We’re going home.”
For most adventurers, simply reaching the North Pole in these conditions would mark their greatest accomplishment—indeed, skiing to the North Pole is considered by many the most difficult expedition in the world—but for Ousland and Horn, the hardest part lay ahead. Though a week behind schedule, they were confident. They had 49 days of food in their sleds when they set out on the morning of October 18.
Adding an additional hour of skiing to each day, they charged ahead, reaching 89 degrees, then 88 degrees, in five days each. At each degree they celebrated with Mike Horn Cake.
The darkness was total now. Under an overcast sky, Horn clicked off his headlamp and held his hand in front of his face. He couldn’t see it. It was as if they’d ceased to exist.
When the clouds cleared, the icy world was revealed in starlight. They followed Jupiter arcing across the southern sky, adjusting their bearing as the Earth spun beneath them. The moon rose and cast a cold glow across an empty world. Ousland described it as “Day One on Earth.”
The wind was strong when they came to the largest lead yet, the far side lost in blackness. Normally, the first to cross would take a rope to the far side and then pull the gear sleds, lashed together, across the open water. This way, only one person was in the water at a time. But the lead was longer than their 350 feet of rope, forcing them to cross simultaneously, a much more precarious maneuver.
“Polar bears will eat you if you let them. If you just sit there, they will come and they will eat you. Which is an honest thing. They are hungry.”
ByBørge Ousland
Børge Ousland, a legendary Norwegian polar explorer, and Mike Horn, an adventurer, attempted to ski across the entire ice cap of the Arctic Ocean in 2019. They faced extreme cold, ice fractures, and frostbite, and almost died in their quest to witness the melting Arctic.
- Aaron Teasdale
Børge Michael Jangaard Ousland (født 1962) er en norsk polfarer og eventyrer som er kjent for sine ekspedisjoner til polarområdene. Ousland vokste opp på Nesodden og er utdannet dykker og jobbet i perioden 1984–1993 som metningsdykker i Nordsjøen. I perioden 1989–1991 var han tilknyttet Marinejegerkommandoen.
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Jul 17, 2019 · Norwegian legend Børge Ousland, who navigated unknown landscapes in 1997 to become the first person ever to cross Antarctica alone, has a message for would-be record breakers.
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Jul 3, 2019 · Børge Ousland is a Norwegian adventurer who has skied solo and unsupported to the North Pole and across Antarctica. He is now leading the Ice Legacy Project, a quest to document the decline of the world's 20 largest ice caps by traveling across them.
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