THE WHITE DESERT PT2
In last month’s issue, part one of this story explained the purpose of the expedition that took me to Antarctica.
Expeditions 7 was an adventure dreamt up by Greg Miller and Scott Brady, a pair of Toyota Land Cruiser fans whose aim was to explore every continent on the planet; this was the sixth of the seven, and to make it happen they enlisted the expert help of Arctic Trucks. Arctic or, in this case, Antarctic. Either way, it was cold. Cold and unbelievably uniform.
Crossing a continent is one thing – doing it when all around you is unrelentingly white, now that’s a whole new kind of endurance. The minutes, hours and days were starting to meld into a cyclical and never-ending dream of drive, refuel, eat, sleep and drive. When the sun was directly ahead of us it was midnight. When it was at our ‘six’, it was noon. A blurry moment later, it was directly ahead again.
For those of us who live outside the polar regions and have regular periods of darkness, adjusting to continuous daylight can wreak havoc both physically and psychologically. This falls into the realm of a circadian rhythm sleep disorder. After 20 or 24 hours of consciousness, though the body becomes exhausted the mind finds it difficult to shut the system down. In a world without night, do you awake at 0500 hours to have an omelette or a cocktail?
Nonetheless, I was becoming semi-acclimated to the routine, catching some shut-eye while bouncing over February 2024 I Overlander 4x4 45 sastrugi and listening to unending rounds of Eric Clapton Unplugged. Our expedition leader, Arctic Trucks’ Antarctic workshop manager Gísli Elísson, is exactly the man you need out here in the crevasse-riddled wilderness – but I think this was the only album he possessed…
Read the full article in the February issue: https://shop.assignmentmedia.co.uk/issue/4X4202402
