The Horizontal Everest: Extreme Journeys on Ellesmere Island
By Jerry Kobalenko
Penguin, 277 pages, $35
Over the past 15 years, Jerry Kobalenko has put in more than 5,000 human-powered kilometres on some 20 expeditions exploring Ellesmere Island, one of the most inhospitable corners of Canada's arctic regions. That's no mean accomplishment, considering that the 198,300-square- kilometre island has been called a place with the highest misery-per-visitor ratio in the world.
For Kobalenko, who lives in Banff, Alta., Ellesmere is an obsession -- its austere coast, untrodden glaciers and ice-covered land "framing stories never told." It is also a place where he can "expend energy in floods" rather than in the meagre and measured daily doses needed for survival in Western society.
"To me, the cold of Ellesmere Island was invigorating, its solitude lyrical," he writes. "Its historic tragedies had a reality that current events did not. Here the ice age is still lived, shaggy relics called muskoxen pawed for dark lichen, and the last camps of explorers stood as if freshly abandoned, the inhabitants swallowed up moments before by some arctic Bermuda Triangle."
In fact, the heart of Kobalenko's book are accounts of his following in the footsteps of the many explorers and expeditions that have come before him to occasionally succeed, but more often flounder in disaster, on the island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Sometimes with a partner, but mostly by himself, Kobalenko spent weeks walking and pulling a sleigh with his supplies through a landscape and under conditions most of us would do anything to avoid. He writes of dangerous encounters with polar bears, temperatures that dip to minus 58 Fahrenheit, the necessity of consuming 7,000 calories a day, covering 20 to 30 kilometres into the teeth of hurricane-force winds, and surviving a plunge through ice into barely liquid water.
Interwoven with accounts of his own adventures and journeys are stories about the expeditions of early white explorers like Robert Peary, George Nares, Otto Sverdrup, Fitzhugh Green and George Rice, among others. They came for glory, scientific discovery and the holy grail of the North Pole. They left behind stone cairns, camp foundations, ancient garbage and often the ghosts of their comrades.
Perhaps no account is more horrific than that of the disastrous U.S. expedition led by Adolphus Greely. Kobalenko visits Pim Island, off the east coast of Ellesmere, where Greely and 24 men were forced to winter in 1884 under an overturned boat, trying to stretch 40 days of food over eight months. Only six of them survived a nightmare that included feet falling off from frostbite and gangrene, cannibalism and an execution.
Bumbling British sledding expeditions come off particularly badly, as caricatures of what not to do, in Kobalenko's retelling. "Despite their toughness, the British are famous in the polar regions largely for glorified tragedies of their own making," he writes. "They are the ultimate gentlemen amateurs. It is as if they go off deliberately unprepared, in order to test their boyish mettle. No dogs, no Inuit helpers, no skis or snowshoes, only ponies, manpower, thousand-pound sleds, and naval issue clothing. No experience preferred."
But there is much in the book about the sorry state of modern arctic exploration and commercially motivated expeditions that flood into Resolute Bay every March on their way to set some sort of record -- any record.
"Rather than set new limits on human prowess, the professional arctic plodder now has to rely heavily on the Gimmick," Kobalenko writes. "In the footsteps of X, or the 150th anniversary of Y, or the first of an infinite number of increasingly meaningless distinctions -- the first all-Turkish team, the first to do the North Pole, the South Pole, and Mount Everest in a single year, the first breast cancer survivor . . . anything with enough contemporary sizzle to raise the money needed to pull it off."
Kobalenko, who finances most of his own journeys through the sale of photography and articles sold to magazines like National Geographic World, Outside and Condé Nast Traveler, seems content to scrape together enough funding to indulge his own passion for Ellesmere.
Every second adventurer in the Arctic seems to feel obliged to crank out a book about his exploits. What distinguishes Kobalenko's The Horizontal Everest is his ability to write well. His descriptions of the stark beauty of the island's landscape, and the fauna and flora that have adapted to its extreme conditions, are often lyrical.
Flying back south at the end of his last expedition to Alexandra Fiord, he looks out the Twin Otter's window at the awesome vistas of his favourite place: "As we flew west across Jokel Fiord, the evening light modeled the world below. Nunataks erupted like cold stone meat from white bones, the Stygge Glacier was a symphony of ice, I could hear it. It ended in the living ice cap, which spread on toward infinity, a choppy white sea interrupted by pools of unimaginable calm."
Kobalenko almost makes you want to go there.
Laszlo Buhasz is a Globe and Mail travel writer who has suffered from frostbite once and would prefer not to again.
