Eyewitness Voices: North Pole Expedition Team on Climate Change Impacts ...

I rediscovered this interview in 2011 when the eight of us from our successful 1986 North Pole Expedition where each of us spoke about the impact of climate change in the world's we individually work in, or have worked in.

30 years ago, Steger and Schurke led historic dogsled trip to North Pole

It is so easy to recall the start of our expedition to the North Pole on March 8, 1986. Eight team members, one woman,  seven men, and 49 huskies.   Sam Cook published an article two days ago on 8 March, 30 years to the day after we left for the North Pole. Thank you Sam for such a good article, published below:

Ely polar explorer Will Steger says he has trouble reading “North to the Pole” these days. The book, co-authored by Steger and expedition co-leader Paul Schurke of Ely, was written after their team’s successful 55-day dogsled expedition to the top of the world in 1986.

  

Monday marks the 30th anniversary of the eight-member Steger International Polar Expedition team’s departure for the pole from northern Canada.

Reading the account of the trip is almost too painful for Steger, now 71.

“It was so difficult,” Steger said in a recent interview in Duluth. “It was moment-to-moment all the time. There was a specific time, about 30 days in, that I thought we weren’t going to make it. I actually thought I had made a mistake on the logistics.”

But after negotiating 40-foot-high pressure ridges of ice, leads of open water and temperatures that plunged as low as 70 below zero, six members of the original team reached the pole on May 1, 1986. Navigating entirely by sextant, the team became the first dogsled expedition confirmed to have reached the North Pole without outside support or resupply. National Geographic magazine chronicled the trip in a cover story later that year.

The expedition, conceived in a tent on one of Steger’s previous Arctic trips with team member Bob Mantell and based out of Schurke’s garage in Ely, captivated Minnesotans. The team built its sleds in the Ely Memorial High School shop. At fundraisers, Minnesotans bought “Zap to the Pole” buttons, named for one of Steger’s polar huskies. In those pre-Internet days, Minnesotans waited with anticipation for periodic media updates based on radio transmissions from the team.

When the team returned to St. Paul by charter aircraft after the expedition, four Twin Cities television stations ran half-hour special programs on its historic accomplishment.

Minnesotan Ralph Plaisted’s team had reached the pole by snowmobile in 1968. But no other expedition has captivated Minnesotans as Steger’s did, said team member Ann Bancroft of Scandia, Minn., the first woman to reach the North Pole.

“Timing is everything,” Steger said. “The pole was still new to exploration, and we took on this challenge that everyone said was impossible. It was real homespun, is what it was.”

The dogs were a big part of the appeal, Bancroft said. So, too, was the epic struggle of the team in the early days of the trip, with brutally cold weather and nearly insurmountable pressure ridges.

“We had all these turning points that could have turned the other way, and the thing would never have happened,” Steger said. “But we had this great magic that was with us. Minnesota caught the fire of that magic.”

Springboard to success

The expedition’s success launched the careers of several team members, including Steger, Schurke and Bancroft. Steger and an international team went on to complete a dogsled crossing of Antarctica in 1990. He traveled by dogsled across Greenland and made several other successful Arctic expeditions. In 2006, he founded Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy (formerly the Will Steger Foundation) to educate the public about climate change that he had witnessed in the Arctic and elsewhere. All of that was made possible by credibility he had established on the North Pole trek.

“It basically made my career,” Steger said.

Schurke, 60, and his wife, Sue, used the polar trip as inspiration to start their Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge and Wintergreen Northern Wear businesses in Ely in 1989, both of which are still operating. Schurke subsequently made five more trips to the North Pole with clients on shorter expeditions and has traveled widely in the Arctic.

“The North Pole trip defined my life and my livelihood,” Schurke said. “Tackling a monumental challenge was daunting and fearsome for us. But our success is now the quiet voice I hear, every time I face new challenges, that says, ‘Yeah, you can pull this off, too.’ ”

After becoming the first woman to reach the North Pole, Bancroft used her experience to complete several other major expeditions and to devote her life to empowering women. In 1993, she skied to the South Pole, and later skied across Antarctica, gaining her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She had been an elementary schoolteacher before the trip.

“That trip gave me the platform from which to speak about things that are important to me,” said Bancroft, 60. “It took me a while to figure that out when I got back — the whole ‘first-woman’ thing. Then I thought, ‘I can’t squander this opportunity.’ I didn’t go back to the classroom. I made my classroom the outdoors.”

We had a reunion in 2011 to celebrate 25 years since the team reached the North Pole: Left to right: Will Steger,  Brent Boddy, Richard Weber, Bob McKerrow,  Paul Schurke, Bob 'Iron Man' Mantell, Geoff Caroll and Ann Bancroft

Steger expedition team members plan no gathering to mark the 30th anniversary of their North Pole trip departure. Steger will depart Monday on a 50-day, 350-mile solo trek by ski and canoe-sled from Ontario’s wilderness to his homestead near Ely.

The same day, Schurke and a team from Wintergreen will start a dogsled and ski trip across the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Traveling over the pack ice on the Arctic Ocean has become more and more difficult for recent expeditions. Although several more teams have reached the North Pole — including the Northland’s Lonnie Dupre, Eric Larsen, Tyler Fish and John Huston — a warming climate has melted much of the polar pack ice floating atop the ocean.

“Actually, almost all the expeditions I did in the polar regions, you can’t do anymore,” Steger said. “Now you can’t reach the pole by dog team ever again because of the water on the Arctic Ocean.”

Physical toll

Challenges the Steger team encountered on its 1,000-mile zig-zag route to the pole were monumental. Team members Mantell, then from Ely, and Bob McKerrow of New Zealand both were airlifted out — Mantell with frostbitten feet and McKerrow with broken ribs suffered when a sled careened into him. They flew out on chartered planes that came in to take out sled dogs that no longer were needed as loads diminished.

The team started the expedition with 49 dogs, and 20 reached the pole. No supplies — or even notes from loved ones — were brought in by those chartered planes.

On day 38, Bancroft fell into the ocean as she approached a lead.

“I shivered for three days,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of dry clothes. I was really vulnerable. The team kept me safe and warm and moving.”

Do or die

At one point more than a month into the trek, the entire team could see that it would have to make faster progress or risk running out of food.

“We made a plan that we had to get to a certain point,” Steger said. “We had 17 days of food, and if we didn’t make it to that point, the others agreed they’d be flown out, and Paul and I would go forward.”

That prospect caused predictable dissension among team members. In one team meeting, characterized in “North to the Pole,” Canadian team member Richard Weber is quoted as saying, “The plan stinks. No way will I get on that plane.”

“Three or four days later,” Steger said in his recent interview, “we hit good ice, and all of a sudden we were in the game again.”

Each team member has images that remain from the arduous trek.

“I never remember being cold,” Schurke said. “We were working so hard that we were often too warm and worried about sweating out our clothing systems, even at minus 70. Mostly I remember the beauty of the frozen sea and the poetry that our New Zealand team member Bob McKerrow often shared during tent time. An experience that was probably pretty brutal now just seems ethereal and sublime.”

Bancroft, too, recalled a sublime moment.

She was riding a sled with Steger near the end of the trip after shuttling part of their load ahead.

“The sled no longer has handlebars,” Bancroft said, “It’s evening. We’re not with the rest of the group. The dogs know where to go. We just hopped on this sled, which is really rare. We’re leaning on each other, back to back, bumping along in our sealskin pants. I just felt like a little Inuit woman, this bony back next to mine, this canopy above us. In all of that work, you have these little moments, a little bubble of loveliness. I’ve got a treasure trove of those.”

Bob McKerrow, 66, Aid Worker New Zealand

 This is a blog by men, for men, and for the women and men who love them. It exists for itself and of itself, as a testimony to remarkable men that have been in my life, and have influenced the man I am. I, and the other authors, hope that any man or boy, young or old, will come here and find inspiration and wisdom, and grow to be "a good man". On this blog you will find examples of how you can be, pitfalls you might avoid, culled from hundreds of years of cumulative experience of "being a man".

This blog has been over two years in the making. I finally found some impetus to kick its ass out the door this week. As I was applying some finishing touches I got a text saying one of the best people I have ever known, was dead. This project is dedicated to the memory of Blair Sheridan, 3 Dec 1964 - 30 Sept 2014: musician, friend, father, man, 

This is the link to Joe Lowry's blog 'How to be a man.'

 

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Blessed, Amongst Women

Bob McKerrow, 66, Aid Worker

New Zealand

 

It took me a while to find a picture of Bob that exemplifies this larger-than-life man as I know him. He's a polar explorer, writer, manager, humanitarian, bon-vivant... but most of all he loves life with an infectious enthusiasm. 

I find being a man is a mixture of roles: protector, provider, clown, outdoor educator, trainer to my children and wife (I have seven children), sensitive to all the females in my life, and a good friend to my mates.

The biggest influence on me was my Mum. She was the one that really shaped me and led me to humanitarian work. Eileen, was born deaf, as was her younger brother Ray, and in those days, anyone born deaf was considered deaf and dumb. But my Mother was a bright woman, she enjoyed Shakespeare, read poetry and she taught me to sew and knit, and to write well.

I loved my Mother dearly and was horrified by children’s cruelty towards her. I remember older kids throwing clods at her and then as a five year old, running down the road chasing after them and trying to knock the shit out of them, but often they would knock the shit out of me. I learned that being a boy (man) was defending yourself and other less fortunate. Bloody knees, black eyes and continuous cuts and bruises were my medals of honour.

When you have a disabled member of your family, someone you love dearly, and people discriminate against them, you grow up with a huge awareness of discrimination and where it occurs.

For me, being a man, is knowing where you come from and drawing strength from that. Explorers, surveyors,  blacksmiths, ploughmakers, shoemakers, labourers, clerks, sailors, miners, bushmen, and strong sensitive woman linked me through the past 150 years across the water to the highlands of Scotland, to the rivers of Prussia, the theatres of England.  My Auntie spoke of having Maori blood  through the village of Colac Bay in Southland and my family tree shows I am related to Buffalo Bill Cody and Charles Laughton, the Shakespearian actor. Perhaps, the most famous connection is to King James V, from whom the McKerrow historian says we have descended, albeit from the wrong side of the blanket.

Thinking of my heritage make me feel strong in the many difficult situations I have had to face. These have included Taleban soldiers threatening me with rifles, thieves in Colon Panama trying to knife me for my money and the cold barrel of an AK 47 pushed against my temple at night in Vietnam. I find my background gives me the cool-headedness to look them in the eye and ‘be a man.’  I find antagonists back down when you stand up to them. I suppose I have never been afraid of men particularly when comparing them to my tough Father. He was a strict disciplinarian and used to bring out a WWII German belt and beat us very hard if we misbehaved. But he was also an excellent handyman and I recall many happy days helping him do repairs around the house,  grow vegetables, cut hedges, lawns and resole shoes. He had two books on how to repair motor cars but being a labourer with five children, a car was beyond our family finances. 

 I go to my diaries from my early 20s and this is what I rediscover.

“For nearly two years I had been a part of all male mountaineering expeditions to Peru, Antarctica, and between times, on all male trips to Mount Cook and Fiordland.

“After nine months in Antarctica I looked in the mirror, and I realised a man without a women around him, is a man without vanity. Winsome, how I loved her. I wrote hundreds of letters to her during that dark, long winter’s night. She was at the airport with her new boyfriend to greet me when I returned from Antarctica.

Mountains and women – they were, and are, a huge part of my life. Brasch, our great New Zealand poet said “Man must lie with mountains like a lover, earning their intimacy in a calm sigh” . In “Leaves of Grass” Walt Whitman’s says “ A woman contains everything, nothing lack, body, soul.”

The a close relationship I had with my Mum, with two older sisters and my Nana (and the distant one I had with my Dad) convinces me that women were the one who encouraged me, gave me my reference points in life.

Why was I spending so much time with men ? Was I having to prove myself? Well I had proved I was physically capable of climbing some of the highest mountains in the world, running marathons, and surviving a year in Antarctica with only three other people.

Yet I felt at a cross road. There was something compelling about leading a life of an itinerant mountaineer, explorer or traveller. I cast back my mind Peru to 1968 and the poverty that moved me so much . My first adult poem was prompted by the injustices I saw throughout Peru in 1968. I flirted with Marxism, read Nietzsche, Che Guevara.  Thoughts from Bolivian diary by Che  Guevara swirled in my head. In New Zealand Norm Kirk was emerging as a national leader, an engine driver who was about to railroad our country away from the clutches of racist conservatism. Being a man was being aware of the wider world around me.

These were heady times.  The music -  Dylan, Joan Baez, The Beatles, Joplin, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. The Vietnam war was becoming ugly - why the hell did New Zealand have troops there? Protests were strong.

During these weeks of running and frequent bouts of drinking at the Captain Cook pub, I came across an advert in  December 1971 in  the Otago Daily Times  wanting personnel to work in South Vietnam for a “ New Zealand Red Cross Refugee Welfare Team”. They wanted nurses, an agriculturalist, water-sanitation special, rehabilitation guidance officer, and a mechanic. Shit, this was for me. I could travel and do something structured for the people like those I saw in Peru.

Chris Knott and I had just got back from our miserable trip to Fiordland and we were together licking our wounds. We had miserably failed to climb Mt Tutoko and after a week of torrential rain we almost died of exposure and later were swept away when a swollen river picked up our tent as we slept.

The doorbell rang, and there at the front door was the telegram man with a message for each of us, inviting us to go to Wellington, for interviews for the New Zealand Red Cross Refugee team to South Vietnam.

A few weeks later I was elated on receiving news I had been selected to go to South Vietnam.

Chris missed out. He was to go back to England and spend the next three years working for the British Antarctic survey. I was the lucky one to have broken out of the mould being set for me to continue the lonely life of an adventurer

Defending my Mum on a number of occasions made me realise at a young age that discrimination is to be found everywhere, and that committed and motivated people were needed to stand up against it. That led me to the Red Cross, at the age of 22.

I wanted to be the protector, rescuer and change agent for all these people brutalised by uncaring soldiers in war, and to change the minds of the uncaring bureaucrats who were designated to care and help them.

Forty one years later I am still  working for Red Cross.

Scott Base huskies to live in Minnesota

 An important article from "Antarctic"Pages 11-12. Autumn, 1986.

Scott Base is without huskies for the first time in 30 years. The remaining 14—11 males and three bitches — have been presented by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to the Steger Outdoor Centre in Ely, Minnesota.

In the 1985-86 season the DSIR decided to phase out the huskies over the next few years, the main reason being growing opposition by conservationists and United States and New Zealand biologists to the killing of Weddell seals in the McMurdo Sound area to provide part of the huskies' daily

diet. Other reasons were that the huskies had been displaced from their traditional role by motor toboggans, over the years

many had become unhealthy because of inbreeding, and with age others suffered from osteo-arthritis and gastro-enteritis.

When Mr R. B. Thomson, director of the Antarctic Division, announced that the remaining huskies would be allowed to live

'our their natural lives as far as possible, there were 18 — enough for two teams — at Scott Base. Since then four have died. Their

health and condition had been checked last year by a Christchurch veterinary surgeon. One was put down because of age, one died in June after an operation in February, and two were put down because of bad health.

After months of negotiations which began last year arrangements were made for the 14 huskies to spend the rest of their lives in the winter snow of Minnesota. Mr Thomson announced in November that the huskies had been presented to the Steger Outdoor Centre which maintains big kennels at Ely and has been breeding polar huskies there for 20 years. Winter camps are organised at the centre for young people, many of them physically handicapped.

Mr Thomson says that dog teams are used by the centre as a principle mode of transport. This will mean that the New Zealand

huskies, which will provide additional stock for the centre's breeding programme, will be introduced to a new environment. At Ely, population slightly more than 5000, snow lies for a minimum of seven months a year, making the climate suitable for breeding and training huskies.

Huskies at the Ely kennels have regular veterinary checks and usually take part in one extensive expedition a year. In the northern summer of last year centre huskies were used in an expedition led by Will Steger and Paul Schurke which reached the North Pole with dog sledge teams. A New Zealander, Bob McKerrow, now director of the New Zealand Outward Bound School,

who wintered at Vanda Station in 1970, was also on the expedition. He did not reach the Pole, being injured when a sledge rolled on him before the last stage.

A trans-Antarctic expedition in 1989 is now being planned by the Steger Outdoor Centre. Some of the New Zealand huskies could take part in the crossing but would not return to Scott Base. The journey will start

from the other side of the continent and end in Australia's Antarctic territory. Of the 14 huskies at Scott Base four will be more than eight years old by the end of January, three will be more than seven, six, and five years old, respectively, and one will be more than four years old. Three huskies will be more than three years old, and the youngest trio will be two years and one month old. Early in February the 14 were brought to Lyttelton aboard the United States cargo ship Green Wave. Then they were flown from Christchurch to Minnesota.

Reference: "Antarctic"

Pages 11-12.

Autumn, 1986.

Beating wild weather in Sri Lanka

Photo: Contributor/IRIN

Drought has take its toll

COLOMBO, 9 May 2013 (IRIN) - Planners in Sri Lanka should do more to mitigate the effects of extreme weather in order to help those most likely to be affected, experts say. 

According to Sri Lanka’s Disaster Management Centre (DMC), in 2012, 1.2 million people were affected by drought and over half a million by floods, while in early 2011, floods affected over a million and displaced more than 200,000 - a trend expected to increase in the future. 

“There is nothing to indicate that this trend will slow down. All the signs are that it will increase,” Bob McKerrow, head of delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Sri Lanka, told IRIN. 

In 2012, the island nation experienced two dramatic back-to-back weather events. Between January and October, the island’s Northern, Eastern, Southern and North Western regions suffered a severe drought. A mid-year forecast by the Socioeconomic and Planning Centre of the Department of Agriculture released in August 2012, when the drought was at its worst, warned of a loss of around 23 percent of the seasonal paddy harvest due by September. 

The drought was only broken by the onset of heavy rains in the first week of November, made worse by Cyclone Nilam which struck Sri Lanka and southern India on 1 November, killing 45 people, temporarily displacing 80,000 and resulting in damage to over 10,000 houses, DMC reported. 

According to an assessment by the ministries of economic development and disaster management, and the World Food Programme (WFP) in January, around 20 percent of the island’s main paddy harvest of around 2.6 million tons was lost to the floods. Of the 550,000 people affected by the floods, some 172,000 - 31 percent of surveyed flood-affected households - were severely food insecure, while 44 percent were borderline food insecure, the report said. 

Photo: Contributor/IRIN

Tens of thousands were affected by flooding in 2012

Sixty-seven percent of the surveyed flood-affected people had also been affected by the drought, the report noted. 

Migration up 

At the same time, Sri Lankan officials report that with extreme weather events increasing in frequency, people are increasingly migrating to cities in the hope of securing a stable income. 

“We have seen that when the harvests fail, the migration to nearby cities increases with people looking for temporary income,” Sarath Lal Kumara, DMC deputy director explained. 

Regional experts say the situation in Sri Lanka is not dissimilar to what is happening elsewhere in the region. 

“If one asks, ‘is displacement by weather-related events a serious issue in South Asia?’, then the answer is `yes’,” Bart W. Édes, director of the poverty reduction, gender and social development division at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), told IRIN, noting the risk of increased migration. 

“Combined with large and growing populations living in vulnerable areas - and a forecasted increase in extreme weather events - South Asia is likely to confront continued environmentally driven displacement and migration,” he said. 

Need to build resilience 

IFRC’s McKerrow said humanitarian agencies should look at increasing community resilience against natural disasters as a core requirement when carrying out projects in vulnerable areas. 

The SLRC is currently building around 20,000 new houses in Sri Lanka’s former northern conflict zone, the same region hit by severe drought and multiple floods in 2012. 

“Wherever we build houses, we now look at two main things - either to control flood water or to provide water where there is not enough,” McKerrow said. He said the requests for such work had come from beneficiary surveys. 

Kumara, the DMC deputy director, also noted that preventing victims of natural disasters from abandoning their homes was increasingly featuring in policy discussions among government and humanitarian agencies. 

ADB’s Édes said policy planners should look to increase income generation opportunities, as well as build safety and early warning capacities in vulnerable regions. 

“The aim should not be to stop human mobility, but rather to reduce the number of situations where people move because environmental factors force them to.” 


To read full story, here is the link.
IRIN Asia | Beating wild weather in Sri Lanka | Sri Lanka | Environment | Food Security