Adventurer Erling Kagge opened his March 30 talk and slide show at Pierson College by quoting Walt Disney: "If you can dream it, you can do it."
It's a befitting motto for Kagge, who is the only human to have stood at the "three Poles" -- North, South and the tip of Mt. Everest -- reaching them all by foot, and conquering them all within the space of four years. Skiing to the Earth's extremities had been Kagge's dream since childhood. It is an ambition, he said, that was partly inspired by the example of fellow Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who in 1911 became the first person to reach the South Pole.
A lawyer by training, Kagge was a university student when he began warming up for his first polar adventure in 1990. "Victory awaits the one who has made the best preparation," he said, explaining that it is painstaking preparation, rather than luck or physical fitness, that is the most important factor in reaching one's goal and, equally important, surviving to tell the tale.
A major part of preparing for a journey to the North Pole is choosing the right gear, said Kagge, showing a slide of one of the custom-made boots he wore to the North Pole. To emphasize the importance of proper footwear, he followed up with a slide of the blackened frost-bitten toes of his fellow explorer.
Also vital, he noted, is choosing the right food to bring along, a task that requires a thorough understanding of nutrition, metabolism and human physiology. According to Kagge, a person skiing to the North Pole needs 6,000 calories a day. Balancing the caloric value of food against the calories required to transport it was a particular challenge, he said, so he consulted with nutritionists to choose just the right amount of fat and carbohydrates to last the months-long trek. The food they recommended, he reported, "doesn't taste too good."
Training for the North Pole adventure posed its own set of problems, said the explorer. Because there is no snow in Oslo during late spring and summer, Kagge could not train with regular skis. Instead, he practiced on short roller skis, dragging a large rubber tire (as he later would drag his supplies).
Even with all this preparation, there were unforeseen problems on the actual trip to the North Pole, said Kagge. At one point, he and his companion encountered a hungry polar bear, which charged them, forcing the explorers to shoot the animal. In that desolate landscape, Kagge noted, the poor bear had "nothing to eat but explorers." The adventurers were also plagued with headaches, which made getting up in the morning especially onerous. The companions goaded each other on by repeating that their trip was only of limited duration. Having soon exhausted every topic of conversation, they trudged on in silence, getting hungrier the closer they got to their goal.
Being the first to reach the North Pole -- ahead of teams from Canada, Britain and Korea -- the Norwegians signaled their arrival by beeping the airplane they had arranged to pick them up. When they spotted a lonely plane circling overhead soon afterward, they were not surprised. However, it turned out to be a U.S. Navy plane that was reconnoitering for Russian submarines. As soon as the misunderstanding was cleared up, Kagge asked the American pilot to throw down some food and something to read. One of Kagge's slides shows him warmly bundled in his tent reading the National Enquirer.
Kagge wasn't back in Oslo long before he began making plans to go to the South Pole -- this time, solo. "Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, sunniest and highest continent," he said, noting that each of those conditions posed a separate set of challenges.
After two years of training, which included purposeful fattening up, he was deposited on the icy, southernmost continent on November 18, 1993. The pilot of the plane that took him there insisted that Kagge take along a two-way radio. Kagge begrudgingly agreed, but "outsmarted the pilot" by leaving the radio on board when he baled out. The pilot, he later learned, was not amused.
What first struck Kagge as he gazed out at the Antarctic landscape was how relentlessly monochromatic it was. "Everything was white and flat," he recalled. As he trudged along, however, he began to perceive peaks on the horizon and to recognize a whole rainbow of "whites," whose colors depended on where he stood and the angle of the sun.
Without a companion to talk with, he developed ways of coping with, even enjoying, his solitude. "I am very good at daydreaming," Kagge said, remarking that he focused his fantasies on "figuring out solutions to problems." He also learned to appreciate the awesome, palpable quiet of the Antarctic. "You can both hear and feel the silence," he said.
Kagge kept to a strict daily routine on his journey. The only time he altered it was on Christmas Eve, when he varied his diet with a traditional white Norwegian Christmas pastry and read about the birth of Christ in the Bible. He arrived at the South Pole not long after New Year's.
The glory of being the first man to go entirely alone to the South Pole did not satisfy Kagge for long. He set off for the Himalayas in the spring of 1994. Though he took the "easiest" path to the peak of Mt. Everest, the 8,500-meter trek -- most of it a do-or-die obstacle course of snow and ice --was anything but easy, he said. In fact, having expended the major portion of his energy on the first leg of the climb, he seriously considered turning back. The danger of the climb became clear, he recalled, during his descent from the peak, when he saw the bodies of less successful explorers littering the path.
When asked what his next adventure might be, Kagge quickly responded, "To make a child. That is the fourth Pole."
He ended his talk on an inspiring note. "Not everyone can do what I did, but I recommend to everyone to find their own South Pole."
-- By Dorie Baker
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