Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: And how was it different then on the South Pole trip with an all-women crew?

SPEAKER 2: With an all-women's crew, you don't get that because everybody's small. You're all women. So there aren't those subtle gender conditioning attitudes.

SPEAKER 1: I suspect that the, if you will, gendered assumption about how four women doing this trip together would work together, is that it would be a much more supportive, caring. I mean, this is the stereotype.

SPEAKER 2: Sure.

SPEAKER 1: Is there any truth to this kind of idea, or is it as well a cartoon of what that kind of expedition was?

SPEAKER 2: It certainly didn't hold true very well for our group. And the best example of that is that we went on several training exercises and our first long one, which was 35 days up in the Northwest Territories on a lake called Great Slave Lake, we went up.

We had known each other now for well over a year in putting this project together. We had done smaller training exercises in various parts of Western United States, et cetera.

We got up there, we didn't talk well, we didn't communicate well, which is what women are said to do so well together. We existed. We did our concrete work of pulling sleds, cooking in 50 below weather, making water from ice, doing all of those things, our navigation.

All the concrete elements to an expedition we did very well because we were all very well-versed at that. We were pretty much experts at what we were doing. We did not like each other at the end of this trip. And I would say that at that point, as the leader of the trip, I knew we were in great jeopardy of making it across Antarctica.

SPEAKER 1: So why was that?

SPEAKER 2: I think it's a lot of different elements come into it. One, you've got the environment. You've got a face mask on. You ski in single file. It's cold. You're exhausted. You're pulling these sleds. So it's not a conducive environment to chatting.

I think the other element that people don't look at is that outdoor people tend to be pretty introverted. So here's another element that isn't lending itself to communication.

But I think, thirdly, there is somewhat of a myth involved in our gender. I think women have an easier time talking about feelings, et cetera, in part because we are socialized that it's acceptable for women. I mean, men get a bum rap in this regard.

What I discovered on the North Pole trip in regard to that was that the men would come to me with their feeling kinds of issues and with their physical ailments. So they felt safer in sharing them with me. In the process of that, and I find that irritating, of course, because I'm pooped and I don't want to deal with that.

SPEAKER 1: You're not Florence Nightingale.

SPEAKER 2: No. And it's like, why are you talking to me about this problem? But what I discovered out of it and what I'm able to do in looking back is that I realized that they had the same issues I had.

We had the same loneliness issues. We had the same issues of fear, a fear of failure as individuals. I'm not holding up my end of the deal. I felt like I was alone in that as the only woman, and that's part of my societal conditioning.

SPEAKER 1: So what was your objective in creating the all-women's trip on the gender issue?

SPEAKER 2: It wasn't so much a gender issue. It goes more back to your question of, did you want to do a first? No women group had ever gone to the South Pole and no group ever had skied from one end of the continent, from one ice shelf to the other pulling sleds--

SPEAKER 1: Of any gender.

SPEAKER 2: Will had just done it with an all-male international group on dogsled. So I knew dogsleds could be done. Snowmobiles have been done, airplanes have been done, but pulling your own supplies had never been done before.

And so that was part of the challenge in putting an all-women's group together. It would allow for me to forge a first in a world where there are very few, as you have pointed out.

SPEAKER 1: And now that you look back at it, you had an objective sort of going in. And oftentimes, when anyone engages in a huge enterprise, the objective going in is very different from what they come away with, what it actually meant afterwards. What did it actually mean afterwards, do you think, in that regard?

SPEAKER 2: The realistic crass answer to that is that that's what you hope generates sponsorship.

SPEAKER 1: It's the shtick.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it's--

SPEAKER 1: The conceit.

SPEAKER 2: This society doesn't like second place or they're not very interested in supporting things that have already been done. So you look for things that haven't, and you need financial help, you need backing. So if you're going to do this and do it on this scale, you look for those angles as well. But when you actually get to skiing, it loses all significance.

SPEAKER 1: So what ended up being the lesson from that, if you have a kind of summation paragraph to say about that experience?

SPEAKER 2: Well, the interesting thing in terms of gender is that I'm more motivated now to blaze trail in terms of women's issues and gender in relationship to what I do because of what I experience when I try and go out and do these things.

And I guess what I'm saying is that when we went down as an all-women's group, people did not take us seriously. Number one, we didn't get corporate backing. We were a grassroots funded expedition.

And my peers, my male peers who do on this scale are amazed that we had no corporate support in terms of dollars. We wore no patches on our sleeves, those kinds of things. I mean, they were amazed by this.

SPEAKER 1: And you couldn't get it because you were--

SPEAKER 2: Well, for a variety of reasons, we didn't get it. And so we went with just a tremendous amount of people behind us, average people.

SPEAKER 1: Now, the other thing, one of the other things that's different about the all-women expedition as well as opposed to the trip to the North Pole, your objective was to cross the continent and you didn't make it.

SPEAKER 2: And we didn't make it.

SPEAKER 1: And in preparing for this interview, I read one article by a local columnist who said, a man, who said, it took a woman to make that kind of decision to quit.

You made it to the South Pole. You were the first all-women's group, you were the first woman to make it to both poles, but you didn't achieve the objective of the expedition. And this columnist thought that a man would have kept going.

SPEAKER 2: We set out to go across the continent. There was another expedition, two men, who were doing virtually the same sort of thing. We were doing different routes, but they were pulling sleds, and they too had the objective of going across the continent.

And we were both actually going for a ship at the other end of the continent that would be in a place called McMurdo Sound. On February 17th, we both start off at the same time. But what happens is we get in trouble in Punta Arenas, Chile.

We're both stuck there because the plane, the only plane that can fly us to Antarctica first has a mechanical problem, a fuel leak. And we had to wait for six days for a part to come from Miami. Then when the part is put into the plane and we're all ready to go, Antarctica decides to have lots of storms and we cannot fly because of weather.

So we are stuck in Punta Arenas, Chile for 13 days. That puts us 10 days behind our schedule before we begin. Like the North Pole trip, we have a tight window of opportunity in which to do this traverse.

If you're not off the continent by mid-February, ship or no ship, whatever your contingency plan is, you're stuck there because the weather turns dramatically. It starts to get dark. Winter returns full bore very quickly. So we all start off with a 10-day deficit to our overall plan. We do not make this 10 days up by the time we get to the South Pole.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

[CROWD CHEERING]

- All right. Congratulations.

[END PLAYBACK]

SPEAKER 2: So the decision that I make for our expedition is probably the most difficult decision of my life, and that's to sit at the South Pole on January 14th, knowing we're 10 days tardy, knowing that we have absolutely no possibility of making that ship on the 17.

To take me to McMurdo, I know I can get there by pulling sleds if I can get a flight off. And this is where the glitch is. The flight is going to cost $350,000 to come and pick us up.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- The traverse is a dim hope. We don't want to set out from the pole, any one of us, and be reckless. It really involves more people than just ourselves. If we were to only get partway, it would mean a plane. And in this place, everything is very dangerous.

[END PLAYBACK]

SPEAKER 2: So I decided to turn around at that point and to set aside my devastation for the victory of for four of us getting to the pole. And it was not easy to get four of us. We had one very ill injured team member that almost was evacuated out.

So we were feeling pretty triumphant that the four of us started and finished that juncture and made history in doing that. But it's taken me two years to really feel OK about this decision.

SPEAKER 1: And do you think, as the columnist suggested, that it was a decision that a--

SPEAKER 2: A woman.

SPEAKER 1: --a woman would make and not a man? Did you remember that column? Did you see it?

SPEAKER 2: Oh, yeah. Because I was so isolated, I had no idea if this was a good thing or a bad thing. And, of course, we came home and people were overjoyed with the decision. They didn't look at it as a failure.

It was really me internally looking at it that way in a lot of ways and struggling with that issue. But the public seemed to be overjoyed at that decision that we were all coming home safely.

SPEAKER 1: So what about the column?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I don't know. I don't really know the answer to that. I know that the men's group that was doing exactly what we were doing went on.

We greeted them at the pole. Our third day at the South Pole, we watched them arrive. We watched them for about eight hours from dots to becoming two men. We had tea with them at the South Pole. And he said, well, we're going to go on even if it means using our emergency insurance money for an evacuation.

SPEAKER 1: And did they make it?

SPEAKER 2: No, they did not. They made it all the way down to the ice shelf, but they had several hundred miles to go.

SPEAKER 1: And they ended up having to be evacuated.

SPEAKER 2: Well, that plane came in and got them to the tune of--

SPEAKER 1: $350,000.

SPEAKER 2: Yeah, but they had sponsors to help them get out of that jam. And I just sat and watched them go into dots in the other direction. Tears were flowing down my face. It was very hard to watch them leave.

I mean, every fiber just about of my body wanted to put my skis on and go out into that white. But I knew I was also making the right decision for our group and who we were as an organization. This trip was not about the four of us. AWE was about 250,000 school kids and countless, thousands of supporters. It was their trip, too.

SPEAKER 1: How did the other members feel about your decision to turn back?

SPEAKER 2: That was tough because I was actually requesting that two of them go back at the South Pole. So they really weren't included in the McMurdo equation or the traverse--

SPEAKER 1: Even if you were going to go on.

SPEAKER 2: Even if we were going to go on, I was asking them to go back. And one team member had been quite ill and injured. And we were both talking about the debt and the followers and the time frame and all the issues when we laid them all out on the table together, but I knew it was my decision.

SPEAKER 1: You never asked for a vote.

SPEAKER 2: I didn't really need to. I didn't feel. She agreed. And we were anguishing over this together. For an explorer or an adventurer who on a trip like this, the things that turn you around are running out of food, bad weather, and injury or illness. We didn't have those things. We had money. And so it really was a struggle for us.