An Arctic Dogsledder Takes on Challenging New Terrain—Antarctica

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When I was a 14-year-old girl in California, I wrote a letter to an Antarctic expedition team, offering my unpaid services as a dish-washer in exchange for a spot on their next voyage. I hated washing dishes, but that didn’t matter. I would have done anything—schlep gear, clean toilet buckets, dig a fresh snow cave every night. I wanted, desperately, to be a polar explorer.

While I never heard back from that particular expedition, I did find my way to lands of ice. Four years later, I moved to the Norwegian Arctic to become a dogsledder, and I’ve been mushing dogs in the frozen North ever since.

Antarctica began to seem like a distant cousin. We had kinship, but I figured we’d never meet.

Until this September, when I received an invitation for the inaugural “Sail and Fly the Drake” trip with Lindblad Expeditions on the National Geographic Explorer, an Antarctic sea voyage whose novel proposition is that one need only sail the tempestuous Drake Passage once. After ten days of cruising Antarctic waters, dodging icebergs, and spotting elephant seals, the cruise’s 140 passengers could toss their Dramamine, catch a plane from the gravel runway at Frei Station research base, and fly straight back to Chile. I read the invitation twice, stunned; I’ve never responded to an email so fast. It was as if, decades later, my teenage manifestation had finally come true. I spent the next six weeks dreaming of penguins (penguins!) and overthinking how many hand-knit sweaters I could fit into one checked bag.

The ship departed in November from Ushuaia, Argentina, a metal-roofed town packed with souvenir shops and patrolled by fat stray dogs. Guests convened at a hilltop hotel that looked from below like a prison, but revealed, under its brutalist facade, ornate glass-walled ballrooms and a soaking tub in every room. After a buffet of Dungeness salad, smoked salmon, and a dozen varieties of pastry, we met our expedition leader, a British former science teacher who would be navigating our route in real-time. His name was Michael Jackson, a fact that seemed to weary him greatly. Unfortunately for Michael Jackson, nobody called him anything but his full name for the rest of the trip.

The next day, we left port. My room aboard the National Geographic Explorer—a former mail ship from Norway, repurposed for the other pole—had a large window, blackout curtains for the bright night, a zodiac-shaped stress ball, and a bottle of Champagne. Our Drake crossing was mild, as far as Drake crossings go, and I slept through most of it, aided by antihistamines. I woke occasionally to shuffle down the bucking hallways at mealtime for spaghetti with butter, the only food I could stomach.

Thirty-six hours later, we entered a new world. White specks on the horizon grew to surround us with grotesques of ice. People ran to the deck, gasping. What looked like a school of flying fish turned out to be penguins, leaping from the water in successive waves. The cold air felt good on my face. Familiar. Like home.

This was real. I was here. And I was overwhelmed by an unexpected feeling.

Failure.

I’m used to traveling by dog. Fighting through blizzards, breaking trail on foot, sleeping tentless in the snow. At the end of each trek, whether it’s 40 or 1,000 miles, it feels like my team and I have learned something intimate about the land we crossed—and like we earned that knowledge, and our presence, with each hard-won step.

I’d expected that if I ever made it to Antarctica, the journey would be similar. But now? I’d napped in crisp sheets; I’d drunk Champagne. I had a zodiac-shaped stress ball. I had been–for lack of a better word–soft. To be clear, I felt no judgment for my co-passengers; the only failure on the ship, in my mind, was myself. I’m proud of my skills as an adventurer. How could I enjoy Antarctica unearned? I may have been in the footsteps of Amundsen and Shackleton, but I felt nothing like them at all.

It occurs to me now that maybe reaching Antarctica was so emotional for me that my brain reverted to a more familiar space–self-criticism–rather than overload. Either way, I saw the irony even then. There may be few self-judgments more absurd than struggling to appreciate some of the greatest scenery on earth because you’re disappointed in yourself for not dogsledding to the South Pole—which you’ve never tried to do, and which is also illegal.* I took a slow breath, unwound my self-absorption, and peered down at the leaping penguins, pledging to see the trip not for what I wasn’t but for what it was.

And what was it? A luxury science camp for adventurous nerds, set in a landscape so stark that it might have been the moon. To give a sense of my fellow passengers, I’ll share my favorite riddle, which—prior to this trip—no one had ever guessed right:

You take five steps south, five steps east, and five steps north, which brings you back to where you started. What color is the bear?**

When I posed the question to guests in the ship’s lounge—who were overwhelmingly science, ethics, and environmentally minded—the answer was so obvious to them that they didn’t realize it was a riddle. (“Not to sound like a jerk,” one woman told me, as we shuffled down an icy hill, “but I have a Nobel Peace Prize.”) Whenever we went ashore, guests scrubbed their boots conscientiously, careful not to spread germs or seeds into the sensitive environment. And on day six, when Michael Jackson announced on the intercom a surprise polar plunge, almost everyone jumped in the sea.

Antarctica draws a certain kind of collector; I heard the phrase “my seventh continent” a lot. But while the trip may have started, for many, as the final box on a checklist, it quickly became an almost spiritual endeavor. Each day we stood for hours in clumps on the punchy snow, watching penguins, who also stood in clumps. We leapt from our dinner seats to see whales, and also cool chunks of ice. In the evenings, we gathered for lectures from the trip’s naturalists, who taught us about krill, igneous rocks, and the fork-shaped teeth of a leopard seal.

The trip’s guest speaker was Robert Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds. He had oval glasses and a kind voice. Birds have feathers, he told us all. Birds can fly while they’re asleep. Birds have a specialized gland in their forehead that removes salt from their blood.

But my favorite of Sibley’s pronouncements—which he declared almost sheepishly, referencing a quote from his latest book—is that to understand what it’s like to be a bird, it’s important to know what it’s like to be a human.

What it’s like to be a human.

Of course. It seemed so clear, as soon as he said it; to imagine having wings, you’d have to first see the absence of arms as a neutral, not a lack. I tried to imagine being a penguin: the water seemed frigid to me, but to them, it must feel just right. The guano in their colonies must smell pleasant, comforting, rather than the barnyard stink that hit my own nose. Their experiences of the weather, the smell, and the sea were the default; mine were the exception. I was the visitor here.

I think that shift in perspective is what I’ve always loved about wildness, whatever its form. Nature reframes our human-ness as one of many options, and our dearest truths as subjective. I could imagine myself a failure for not testing my endurance, or even a success; either way, it wasn’t true. It was just a feeling, less real than the ship’s cold railing in my hands. (Another shift in perspective, albeit less sophisticated: here at the “bottom” of the earth, some lizard-y part of my brain expected to be upside-down. I got a kind of vertigo when I thought about it too much—so I didn’t.)

“You’ll come for the penguins, and stay for the ice,” the crew had told us, and for me, this held true. My favorite moments of the voyage arrived while sitting by the library windows, at the very top of the ship. Icebergs swirled past in slow motion. The ice wasn’t white; it shone blue, gray, and brown, with glacial teal glowing from beneath. It rose and fell from the water like breath, revealing carved-out belts of deeper blue. I sipped a cappuccino with crushed sugar on top. I didn’t wish I were tromping through snow. For those moments, like so many moments, life was as good as it gets.

*Sled dogs have been banned from Antarctica since 1994, to protect wildlife.

**White. You’re at the North Pole.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler