The last Travel Library of the year is a suitably seasonal cold & frosty one – it’s called Frigid Women by Sue & Victoria Riches (affiliate link to bookshop.org, not to Am*zon) and it’s the story of the first all-woman expedition to reach the North Pole. Sue Riches was the speaker at the Trefoil Guild AGM in Portsmouth in June and as she talked, I quietly slipped my phone out, on my own up in the gods where no one could see me, and ordered the book. It then took until December to read it but I flew through it once I did. I’m glad I left it too, because it’s the perfect winter snow-themed book for a December Travel Library!
The expedition took the form of a relay – five teams of four women with two guides, who walked legs of about two and a half weeks each before the next team was airlifted in and the previous one airlifted out. This took place in 1997, so women going on an exhibition was already something of a novelty and it meant they had more difficulty getting sponsorship than they probably would even today. Victoria’s employer gave them a big grant but the big name sponsor was McVities, on the grounds that if they took their biscuits with them, they could have the first Penguin at the North Pole. Bonus: it turns out Penguin biscuits remain very edible when frozen. They also had a penguin mascot that got handed from one team to the next and the teams were named Penguin [Letter]. Sue & Victoria ended up on the same team, Penguin Charlie, the third team.
You don’t actually get out onto the expedition until halfway through the book. The first half covers the idea of the expedition in the first place, the selection process and the training and preparation, from hiking weekends on Dartmoor to first experience of ice and pulks at base camp. 21 women were picked from the original application list over two gruelling selection trips but Sue and Victoria seem to have been the ones who captured the media’s imagination. A mother and daughter team was already something exciting but Sue, in her early 50s, was the oldest woman on the expedition and that was exciting too, so the preparation and training also featured a lot of interviews and photoshoots. A good handful of the women have gone on to gain a certain amount of notoriety as polar explorers and have continued to do expeditions and big challenges since then but the idea of the Penguin expedition was really that these were ordinary women doing something extraordinary. There’s a list near the beginning of the book of who all the participants were and what they were doing at the time, which extended from students to journalists to chiropractors to film producers to mothers of triplets to the Queen Mother’s great-niece. None of them knew anything about the Arctic or expeditions or large-scale challenges.
Once they’d been selected, there was the matter of training and gelling as teams and figuring out how everything was going to work. As one team departed for the actual start of the expedition, another team was arriving at basecamp in a relatively tame part of the Arctic where they could start getting used to the cold and the terrain because no matter how well you train back home in the UK and for how long, you can’t do without the basics of training on actual ice. So as Penguin Alpha were setting off, Penguin Bravo were in the middle of their ice training and Penguin Charlie were just arriving to start theirs. Training involved a year or so of a lot of walking, a lot of gym and a lot of dragging car tyres around fields to get into practice for pulling the sleds. Although the planes could airdrop supplies, each team had to carry everything they needed for their two and a half week stint, which meant a lot of weight on those sledges. One thing that concerns me a bit is that they literally carried enough for their leg and if the weather wasn’t suitable for the plane changeover to bring in the new team and take out the old one, or they couldn’t find a suitable spot for an improvised runway, they didn’t have a whole lot of extra supplies for unplanned extra days. In that event, they’d airdrop a box of supplies but I can’t help thinking that if the weather wasn’t good enough to take off, surely that means no emergency supply drop.
Anyway, Sue and Victoria wrote the book the expedition, which mostly means their own leg with very little detail about the other four legs because they weren’t there, they don’t know exactly what went on for the other teams. They were on Arctic sea ice, which meant that although it was more than thick enough to walk on safely, give or take where it broke apart, it was nonetheless a lot of ice floating on a sea and that meant it drifted on ocean currents, so the plan to just keep walking north got derailed pretty much every day by having to walk mostly back to the west to keep on track and avoid ending up in Greenland. 1997 doesn’t sound that long ago but being able to pinpoint their location via a GPS was revolutionary technology back then. They communicated with home from basecamp via letters and with the teams on the ice by occasional radio check-ins. I know even today you’re not going to be casually WhatsApping or posting daily Instagram stories from the 87th parallel but I think kit and supplies and communication would be very different today. I remember 1997. It feels very weird that it’s almost 30 years ago and how much the world and exploration has changed.
The cold was a problem, of course. It took three hours to set up their tent for the night every day and at least two hours to get ready to go out again in the morning. They were wearing a lot of clothes and had to balance not being cold with not sweating when they started moving because sweat was actually their biggest problem – makes your clothes damp, that makes them freeze and so on. Ice ridges, where the sea ice collided with another piece of ice and pushed up ridges like continental plates pushing up mountains, were a problem, especially towing a large and heavy sledge behind you. But the biggest problems were “leads”. This is the open water formed when the ice splits up or moves apart. A lot of it is semi-solid and if you’re careful, you can walk on it. Sometimes it’s not solid enough. People put a few feet in the sea when a lead breaks open but there’s quite a nasty incident towards the end of their leg where both Sue and Victoria end up swimming. Boots come off, skis come off, sledges end up in the water and somehow, despite being in the Arctic Ocean, none of it manages to sink to the bottom and all they end up losing is three ski poles and a huge chunk of confidence, which makes the next few days a lot more psychologically difficult than the rest – and which they’re subsequently not allowed to talk about in case it scares the family and friends of Penguins Delta and Echo or causes a media frenzy.
Other than that, Sue and Victoria are quite stoic narrators. There are mentions of “clearing the air” and of disagreements and a hint of someone losing their temper and yelling at someone else but these are very much “stiff upper lip” kind of women who gloss over things like that. This is not TOWIE, where the fights and the drama are the main event. No, we shall ignore any personal problems between team members, or we shall put them aside and remain friends and good teammates.
They talk about the work of getting camp set up and taken down as being something you just don’t want to do after a day of walking across the Arctic but it becomes routine – or at least, the book makes it sound like it becomes routine and it becomes a fact of life. A lot of it is very “fact of life”-ish. There’s no cheap melodrama here, no unnecessary emotion or struggling. In fact, the hardest bit sounds not like spending two and a half weeks trekking up the Arctic but like not upsetting the reserve, Sue Self, who has to go through all the training and preparation and spend weeks at basecamp just in case but never actually gets to go on the expedition herself. They don’t want to talk too much about their experience when they get back in case she feels left out, they have trouble bonding as a team during their ice training because Sue is always around and they don’t want to make it too obvious that they’ll be leaving her behind and so on. I was hoping to discover that she’d gone on to be a notorious explorer since then but I can’t see anything.
They also gloss over the fact that they don’t actually get to go to the North Pole. Penguin Echo, the fifth team, get to do that last bit. I suspect the other sixteen were all deeply disappointed but they keep making the point that it’s a relay and a group expedition and that Penguin Echo couldn’t get to where they did without the efforts of the previous teams but wouldn’t you be a bit disappointed, just a bit, if you were part of a successful North Pole expedition and didn’t actually get to go to the North Pole yourself?
I did very much enjoy this book. I found it very readable but yes, kind of old-fashioned, in that between the kit and the attitude – I could imagine a similar book being written by the likes of Shackleton or Scott (that’s a compliment, if a kind of backhanded one!). I don’t think either Sue or Victoria have gone on to do much more epic exploration but their big adventure changed their lives and although Frigid Women hasn’t inspired me personally to do a big expedition, polar or otherwise, I’m very glad I stumbled upon it and read it.
I Am A Polar Bear 