Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 03/00) - Two women will begin a 100-day, 4,000- kilometre journey across Antarctica this November, aiming to become the first females to cross the southern-most continent.

Polar explorers Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen have begun training for the Antarctic journey on Great Slave Lake, testing equipment and their skills in conditions here, to simulate those down there.

Bancroft, from St. Paul, Minn., and Arnesen, from Oslo, Norway, are no strangers to polar exploring. Arnesen is the first woman to ski solo to the South Pole and Bancroft is the first woman to reach both the North and South Poles.

The two discovered a shared interest in teaching and traversing Antarctica and went from there.

"The polar community is a very small one," Arnesen said. "I knew about Ann and I knew that she had been to the North Pole before, so I wrote her after I went solo and that's how she got my address."

Bancroft had no sooner finished her first expedition to the South Pole, when she started to think about returning.

"When I came back in '93, I knew I was going to go back again, somehow," she recalled. "It was a matter of paying off the debt from one expedition, before the next one began.

"So, when Liv had contacted me, I thought, 'Wow, this is a pretty remarkable, self-reliant woman who is going to go solo to the South Pole,'" she said. "So I kept her name and number and when I cleaned up the debt from the last expedition, I faxed her.

"She said she wanted to do this crossing with one other woman and she wanted to incorporate what we were doing, with students globally."

The two teachers met and realized they had much more in common than a passion for adventure.

"When I first met Ann we realized we shared similar interests from since we were kids," Arnesen said. "We both have this longing for wide-open spaces, hard work and bad weather."

"We used to read these books -- we're still reading them -- about places like here," Bancroft said.

"We're still reading stories about Hornby and Helga Ingstead, who were up in this region in the late 1800s, so those stories really fed our young imaginations," she said. "That romanticism of the North and far-off places and adventure have never seemed to diminish with our age.

"We're in our mid-'40s and we're still hungry for it," she added through a smile.

A world-wide classroom

Through the use of satellite phone and Internet, the pair will be in touch with millions of students from all over the world, providing the kids with frequent updates on the expedition.

Bancroft says the adventure will serve as a practical aid to students in the global classroom.

"As teachers, we can use our adventures as a tool to spark an interest in the kids," Bancroft said. "When we navigate, we use math and to dream about these places, you have to have a love of geography and literature and history, so it's a very natural progression into the classroom for both of us."

The idea, Bancroft says, is to instil a sense of wonder and adventure in the children, to push them to the limits of their dreams.

"We're very realistic that we are not going to have too many polar explorers come out of the whole bunch, but what we hope is to nurture that ability that we all have, of dreaming; of pursuing things that really drive us passionately -- we want to keep that alive in kids for as long as we possibly can."

Millions of children from 35 countries around the world will be able to tune in to the Internet, monitoring the progress of the two adventurers.

"They are fascinated by adventure," Bancroft said.

"They can be a part of it and they can be a part of the struggle as well," she added. "Their excitement is contagious. The last time we went, I could feel those kids out there pulling for us."

"One of the things we were up here doing is seeing if our technology equipment is going to function in the cold and being bumped around on a sled and just the rigours of outdoor life," Bancroft said. "Can a laptop survive that?"

"It's a harder test on equipment on Great Slave than it is in Antarctica because it's more humid up here," she explained. "Antarctica is very dry -- it's a desert."

Sailing over snow

As well, they tested their laptop computers, freeze dried foods and new sails -- parachute-like nylon sails that will pull the women and their gear.

"There are a lot of lines on these sails and the wind can very easily make a salad of all the lines," Arnesen said. "So with the wind here, we had good training for that."

They had both used previous designs in ski sails, but found the new rectangular sails easier to control and harness the wind.

"We had a sail called an 'upski,' which looked like a big parachute billowing in front of us and you could really use wind that was behind you -- it was very limited," Bancroft explained. "Now the technology of sails has changed, where we can capture wind that is coming at an angle and we can tack to some degree.

"In six or seven years, we have seen a huge change in the way in which we can utilize wind," she added.

Now they have tested their equipment here, the two will chase the winter wind to Norway for further tests and more practice with the new sails.

"We know how to pull sleds -- we can pull," Bancroft laughed. "Our focus up here is really to get to know those sails, to untangle the lines in a high wind, with cold fingers; to know that piece of technology as well as we know the rest of our gear."

The energy requirements of such an expedition demand high-calorie diets, which posed a problem at first, for the explorers, but Bancroft says they have adjusted their intake to meet their needs.

"What we read about all the time is men and there is a huge disparity in calorie intake with what men need and what women need," she said. "While men are consuming about 6,000 we're down at around 4,500."

"On my first expedition in Greenland, I thought, 'How is that possible, to eat that much?'" Arnesen laughed.

"We have to eat a lot of fat, that's the hardest part for me."

To begin the day they usually start with oatmeal, dried fruit, milk powder and oil to boost the fat content, nibbling on nuts and chocolate along the way.

Meal time is also the only time the two actually share any conversation, Bancroft said.

"It's also the only social time of the day," she said. "When we're skiing, we're single-file and we don't talk for anywhere from eight to 14 hours."

"I think I just focus on enjoying my time out there," Arnesen said. "It's at the end of the trip when I start thinking about good red wine, cheese..."

"And salad," Bancroft adds.

Finding the funds

Financing an expedition of this magnitude requires a full-time staff, Bancroft said.

"It will cost anywhere from a million (dollars) to a $1.5 million," she said. "We have nine people working for the project in Minneapolis. From technology, to marketing, to education -- it's huge."

The marketing team has sought out sponsors in companies interested in women's issues, education, adventure and some who want their products to be tested in the far-reaches of the world.

The pair say they haven't come close to running out of ideas or challenges and plan to follow their dreams and compass needle North again.

"We were talking last night about coming back to do the Thelon," Bancroft said. "You don't have to be a kid to keep on dreaming -- we're doing it and we continue to do it."