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Now safely back in the UK, Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley have been reflecting on the expedition and are even beginning to cast their minds forward to future plans.
“I feel burned out, - you could even say char-grilled”, Hadow joked leaving the studio where he and his colleagues had just recorded a television interview with Sir David Frost. “For me though, the expedition ended when we climbed into the plane and left the ice. That was the point when the responsibility and hardship melted away”.
Ann Daniels reveals that for her, leaving the ice was difficult. “It was hard to say goodbye”, she says, casting her mind back to the middle of last week when 2 twin-otter planes landed alongside the team’s final camp to carry them and all their equipment away. “So many thoughts were in my mind. There had been so much planning, so much expectation and so much hardship. After 74 days it was hard to process it all being over. I wondered - will I ever be back here?
Unlike Hadow, it was well into the flight that Daniels’ mood lifted. But now back home she’s already looking forward to developing her work with The Corporate Athlete – a company that works with business to ensure employees are performing at their best and reaching their full potential. www.thecorporateathlete.net
Each of the team spoke of having a ‘relationship’ with the ice. For Martin Hartley, the early few weeks of the Survey were particularly cruel. “Getting frostbite a matter of days after we set off was personally very difficult”, he says. “It was so painful and I was without doubt in danger of losing my toe”.
The team began to look for a suitable runway for a plane to land and fly the team’s photographer to Canada for emergency medical treatment. As with each of the re-supply flights, finding an ice-pan sufficiently long, wide and deep for a runway can take some days and it was during this time that Hartley began to reflect on the reality of leaving the expedition.
“In the end, however bad the pain was, I realised I would be more unhappy to leave than to stay”, he reveals. “That’s even if that meant losing my toe”.
As it turned out, having made the decision to battle on, constant redressing of the toe and good nursing from Daniels paid off. The toe is saved and although ‘not very pretty’ in Hartley’s words, it is healthy.
Hartley, whose career as a polar photographer was inspired by a Captain Scott picture book that he treasured as a young child, applies the same determination to taking photographs.
“I’m driven to get the best shot”, he says, admitting when pushed that he doesn’t know where that drive comes from. “Maybe I’m driven by demons, I don’t know. There are certainly easier ways of making a living”.
Hadow emphasises how the three needed to respect and work with the ice in order to stay safe and make progress.
“The ice is so many things to an explorer”, he explains. “It’s both a friend and an enemy – blocking your way or granting you passage north as it chooses”.
Daniels, as navigator, spent all the team’s sledging hours way out in front of her colleagues. “The ice protected me while I waited for the boys to catch up and when we ate our snacks”, she says, adding (and perhaps only half joking), that “the creaking and groaning of the ice made it seem as though it was talking to me, – when I was long bored of talking with Pen and Martin! It was very comforting.”
The three explorers, all of whom have impressive track records in the high arctic, are unanimous in their opinion that the Catlin Arctic Survey was unique.
“In the past, it’s been about personal achievement”, says Daniels. “This time it was about the science and the contribution we’re making to research into global warming. I suspect this is one of the reasons why we functioned so well together as a team. Something more important was at stake than me, or Martin or Pen”.
The Catlin project will continue – the priority being to ensure that the data so painstakingly collected is interpreted by the Survey’s scienists.
Pen Hadow and Ann Daniels are established speakers on the international circuit, with clients that have included M&S, BP, BA, IBM, Vodafone, NatWest and Bank of America- both are now available for bookings. For further information, call Mary Nicholson on +44 (0)1364 631270, [email protected]
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