AGM Talk — A race to the South Pole on skis — Tess Burrows

Reporter: Andrew Walker

In keeping with the nature of the club, the last few AGM talks have been very much along the theme of snow and mountains in faraway places. We have had skiing in Antarctica and Greenland, Everest, and a cruise around the South Atlantic and Antarctica. This year, Tess Burrows capped all that with a talk about her journey on skis to the South Pole with her partner, Pete.

Some of you will remember Tess from the lobby of the Langham Hotel in Tignes last March, where she was promoting her charitable causes and her books.

Via Bedales, Edinburgh University and Australia, Tess (who now lives in Haslemere) returned to the UK with three sons (and has more recently added 5.5 grandchildren), and resolved to do something to make the planet a better place for them. She has focussed on Tibet, and has so far raised about £180k for projects there, and several more thousand pounds for DSUK. Among the patrons of her charity, Climb for Tibet, are the Dalai Lama and Joanna Lumley, so she’s got friends in proper high places.

Over the years Tess has collected tens of thousands of peace messages, including an earnest message from one young girl that she is going to do everything she can to help “global warming”. She has taken peace messages to significant geographical and spiritual points around the world, including the furthest point from the centre of the earth (which isn’t Everest), the nearest point to the sun at the turn of the millennium, the tallest mountain (which also isn’t Everest, but a mountain which has its base at the bottom of a deep ocean), and the magnetic North Pole.

To continue completing the set, Tess then set her sights on the South Pole, by way of a race, billed as “the toughest race on earth”, with Pete; a couple of pensioners battling some of the most ferocious conditions on earth, with a dangerous mix of cold, wind, altitude and unforgiving terrain.

Training started at Tooting Bec (where else?) with a 24 hour run round a track, from midday to midday, which helped with mental strength and attitude. There were many further challenges, which would daunt many an indomitable spirit, such as jumping into a frozen lake fully dressed wearing skis, dragging tyres on long country walks to get used to pulling a pulk (the sledge containing all your food and equipment), and the long and arduous, but also spectacular, South West Coast Path. At the end of all this, Tess felt she was the fittest she had ever been, although Pete needed some medical treatment first.

They flew from South Africa into the Russian Novo base at the edge of Antarctica. The race was a multinational affair, recorded for TV, with contestants including James Cracknell, Ben Fogle and a blind Irishman who later carried the 2012 Olympic torch through Dublin.

Anybody who has ever read any descriptions of the expeditions of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton and others will be in awe of the adversity they faced, especially as they had no contact with the outside world and had by modern standards quite basic equipment. Few people now would undertake such an endeavour, and while the 16 racers did have vehicle backup support, and weren’t walking the whole distance from the sea to the pole (and back), they still had to drag their pulks, and the backup support didn’t always work.

And there was the weather to contend with, because Antarctica doesn’t bestow favours just because you’re getting on a bit. And on the important subject of knowing which direction you’re heading in, that modern invention, GPS needs batteries which quickly fade in those temperatures, so other means of direction-finding have to be found which would work throughout the day and not just for a brief spell before the battery fades, based on wind direction or the position of the sun. Even the compass, that ever-ready and reliable direction-finding device of normal locales (and even if it’s a southern hemisphere compass; yes indeed, look it up), gets messed up because the magnetic south pole is a long way north of the geographic pole.

We were treated to descriptions of daily necessities and rituals (don’t ask the obvious question – you’ll have to work it out or look it up, but part of the answer is “very quickly”), as well as the battle between getting warm and getting fed at the end of each day’s walk. And because there was no guarantee that the backup would be able to reach them within 24 hours, they were completely and utterly dependent on each other, and had to constantly check each other for any warning signs.

At the end of each day it took around four hours to thaw enough ice for the fluid requirements, the needs increased by the altitude and the dry air, before trying to consume as many calories as possible, although it was nowhere near what they had burnt.

Tess explains the race in detail in her book about the race (Cold Hands, Warm Heart). Both reading the book and during her talk I was I was in awe at what she and Pete had achieved. On arrival at the pole, the first thing Tess wanted was a visit to a warm loo at the US Amundsen-Scott station.

Within a few days Tess managed, after some initial reluctance, to get the base to accept her peace messages, and they had a ceremony to mark the event while the occupants of the base were asleep, during which she left a reminder of why they had come, hidden from human sight.

The South Pole was the fifth of six notable points on the earth’s surface which Tess has visited, since when she has completed the set by adding Kilimanjaro, creating a symbolic peace star across the planet. She continues her work, and last year cycled with her 13 year old granddaughter to COP26 in Glasgow to present 3,000 climate action pledges to world leaders.

All in all, Tess portrayed a tale of something that appeals to me in my daydreams but which I would never do. I was somewhat in awe of what she has done, and indeed continues to do.

In addition to Cold Hands, Warm Heart, which I found to be a terrific read, Tess has written a number of other books, which some club members have read and enjoyed, and some suggested they would make great Christmas presents, for example “Soft Courage” for children and aspiring young adventurers. If you would like to buy any of her books you can do so from her website. As she explained, buying directly from her website means that charities such as DSUK benefit, which is not the case if you buy from Amazon.

To find out more about Tess, her charity, her peace messages, and to buy her books, go to her website www.tessburrows.org