LR: I’ve heard other polar explorers talk about portaging, or ferrying the load, as an option. I thought, I’ll try it out. I should’ve kept either the tent or the sleeping bag, and just left one of them, so if I lost the tent I would have had the sleeping bag and vice versa, but I left both, marked them with my GPS and my spare ski, and set off with about 40 days of food in the pulk, a satellite phone and down jacket.

Visibility was all right at that point. You could see a mile on the horizon, and the pulk felt fantastic. It was easy to zip along with half the load, and quite quickly went two miles ahead. And I went back, picked everything up fine. Went forward.

Then did it again.

It started to get quite blustery. The wind was building 30 to 40 knots, visibility coming right down. I stopped again at two miles. The first time I’d just followed the ski tracks straight back, piece of cake. This time, the wind and the spindrift had already filled in my ski tracks. I was literally down on my knees trying to look, thinking, “I can’t believe I can’t see my tracks.” I was actually amazed it had gone so fast.

I couldn’t retrace my track. I went back on the compass bearing. Visibility was like 10 meters. I was thinking, “This is getting quite dangerous now.” I’ve got no tent and no sleeping bag. I’ve literally got a down jacket and I’ve got some food. I’ve got a sat phone, but nobody is coming to get me in these conditions. It could be a couple of days in this sort of thing.

Without my tent and sleeping bag, I’m instantly in a survival situation, and I was conscious as well that the winds were really strong. There was a ski sticking up, but if that fell over, the whole thing could have been buried. It took me a long time to do the two miles. I was scanning and looking. I’d almost gone past it, which would have been fatal, but by pure luck, I turned my head toward a gap in the spindrift and saw a black shadowy sort of shape. Instantly turned, skied a couple hundred meters, stumbled across it. Relief.