The meeting had a slightly larger audience than during the summer which was very welcome with such a prestigious speaker. Helen Turton was known to quite a few of the audience as she grew up in Hope before her polar adventures began. However, many of us were amazed that Win Hill and and the surrounding hills could be the stimulus for a career in polar expeditions.
Of course it was not just the local hills that helped shape the leader that Helen was to become but parents that gave her the opportunity and upbringing to value the great outdoors.
Helen was generous in praise of her dad and also in waiving the fee for the evenings presentation and the club will be donating the sum to the Ashgate Hospice that looked after him so well.
Both Helen and her brother had been introduced to the hills and to photography during her upbringing but this was further stimulated by an experience of down hill skiing at a relatively young age. This further stimulated a desire to head toward that bit of the Geography Atlas she had noticed that was called The Arctic
The next step in the story involved playing the flute at a wedding in Canada which in this all too short summary lead to a guided trip into the arctic. There she met her future business partner and gradually her future career took shape.
(I’m not sure that I’ve got this series of events in the correct order or given them the right emphasis but it was hard to take my eyes off the sequence of images to make any coherent notes.)
Helen has a love of snow many of us share but not to the same extreme.
The two images above show the arctic runway (constructed each season) and the Russian Antinov cargo plane which brings in the supplies. The runway is created out of the ice by fairly old but robust Russian bulldozer type vehicles (see below) that try and create a “fairly” flat strip out of the ice which as the trekkers soon discover has many pressure ridges and potential sections of thin or recently refrozen ice called “leads”.
Helen recounted a trip when they had trekked north with her group for 8 hours then camped, eaten and slept and that whilst sleeping the ice had drifted and they were further south than the previous day. This kind of experience requires mental resolve but also a specific set of skills that the company tries to impart to all the participants, whether private or military. Erecting tents in an arctic storm may require an ice wall to be built to shelter the process and within each tent will be a sump into which the cold will sink. Other skills like cooking safely inside the tent are obligatory and Helen was very clear that her “be bothered” mantra and the accompanying attention to detail was essential to ensure the safety of every trainee and trekker. Unfortunately the window of opportunity to reach the north pole is shorter now due to the effects of global warming and when it is deemed unsafe to stay longer “everyone” must be extracted with or without the equipment or on one occasion a helicopter that sunk below the ice!
The south pole is very different to the arctic as the latter is a frozen sea and Antarctica is a continent that is very high, very windy and both cold and “dry”. The audience found it hard to imagine how cold, dry and windy it was, despite the detailed description Helen gave. It helped a little to hear that a fully charged camera battery that was being kept warm deep within the outer clothing would still only give maybe 20 seconds of video before dying.
Antarctica also has breath taking scenery and penguins rather than polar bears. It is also very strictly controlled due to the Antarctic Treaty that came into force in 1961. This has lead to much scientific collaboration between nations as well as environmental protection. Sadly it has become an incredibly expensive place for a private individual to go, Helen told us that she had been to the south pole twice but the sums of money and sponsorship required have made it an almost impossible expedition for anyone but the rich elite.
At the end of her presentation there was an opportunity for members questions which elicited further revelations about the joys and hardships of polar expeditions. Inevitably eating and going to the toilet featured but also the information that $100,000 was probably the baseline cost for anyone wanting to visit the south pole.
As our chair, Roger, could not be with us Ian gave our hearty thanks to Helen for a wonderful evening of stories and great images. Her detailed and humorous accounts had held us enthralled and a little in awe of the dedication, joy and expertise that was so clearly in evidence.