BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Reaching the end of the Earth has become almost routine these days: One hundred years after Norway’s Roald Amundsen beat Britain’s R.F. Scott to the South Pole, more than 30 teams are trying for it this year.
Some will kite-sail over the vast Antarctic ice and snow. Others will drive in from the coast. A wealthy handful will be dropped off one degree north of the South Pole, for relatively leisurely guided treks of about 70 miles to the pole.
But Felicity Aston has been there, done that. Weather and her own considerable stamina permitting, the 33-year-old British adventurer will only pause at the pole long enough to pick up more food and fuel.
Her plan is to keep on skiing, by herself, all the way to the other side of the frozen continent — and become the first person using only muscle power to cross Antarctica alone.
If she manages to complete this journey of more than 1,000 miles in late January, she would also set a record for the longest solo polar expedition by a woman, at about 70 days.
“This is my first solo expedition, the first time I will have spent this length of time without company,” she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s part of the challenge of the expedition, to see how I’ll cope with it.”
Aston spoke from Punta Arenas, Chile, where she was boarding a charter flight Friday after losing a precious week waiting for weather to break. From a base in Antarctica, she will take a second plane to her starting point at the foot of the Leverett Glacier, where the Ross Ice Shelf meets the rocky coast.
She tweeted from the base camp early Saturday: “at the basecamp on union glacier in my tent. first night on the ice. great to be here.”
Already, she was getting her mind set on what would be a grueling routine.
“Your life reduces to eating, sleeping and skiing. It’s a form of meditation. You get into a rhythm, and all you can hear is your own breathing, your own heartbeat, the sound of your clothes and your skis. It’s kind of an altered state,” she said. “A trip like this is all about keeping going — the stamina, endurance, keeping going day after day after day.”
Aston, whose trek is sponsored by the Russian software company Kaspersky Lab and makers of the equipment she is using, has plenty of experience in long-endurance expeditions. She spent nearly three years as a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey and in 2009 led an all-woman group from the coast to the South Pole.
Her long list of travel adventures includes skiing across the Canadian Arctic, crossing the Greenland ice sheet and trekking over Siberia’s frozen Lake Baikal. She also has run across Morocco’s Sahara Desert and tracked jaguars in Paraguay.
“I’ve been preparing for 10 years, and only now do I feel capable of this,” she said.
Well-prepared
The 5-foot-11 Felicity Aston weighs about 170 pounds and will haul up to 187 pounds of gear on a sledge. It includes freeze-dried food, fuel and a camp stove for melting snow.
She’ll also bring a solar recharger and two MP3 players — one has music donated by her friends, everything from peaceful ska tunes to heavy metal and “fluffy pop songs”; the other has mostly audio books from her father on “the whole of British history . . . 300 hours of it!”
Antarctic Treaty rules require private support teams to be able to pull people out in a pinch, and Aston is carrying two Iridium satellite phones and a GPS beacon to keep in touch with her team.
