I open my inbox this morning and find an email called “North Pole 2010”, informing me that a friend of mine has decided to go to the North Pole. Below you can find part of the email he sent. Good luck, Ed!
“As some of you will already know, alongside developing Trigga and becoming a father, I’ve spent the last year on an intensive endurance training programme in preparation for an unsupported attempt to reach the North Pole in May. When you receive this email I will be about 12 hours away (Wednesday 28 April) from departing for Resolute Bay, the most northerly Inuit settlement in Canada. From Resolute, I will dropped off on the ice to begin what will be a long journey to the Pole on foot. I hope to have reached it by mid-May.
I will be skiing and walking across the ice, pulling all of my kit on a pulk (sledge) in what is one of the harshest climates on earth. More people have climbed Everest than have successfully reached the North Pole.
The biggest challenges are going to be the physical endurance, the cold, polar bears — and missing my wife Dilek, and our baby daughter Thalia, who was born in February.
I will be skiing between 12–14 hours per day, in temperatures ranging from minus 20 to minus 60 degrees, depending on the wind chill. And the proposed route cuts across an area which is home to 80% of the world’s polar bears, including one stretch called “Polar Bear Alley”.
I want to use this expedition to raise money for two inspiring Global Angels projects to help children which, having just become a father, really inspired me — a special equipped holiday home in the UK for children with life threatening illnesses and an orphan home and school for street children in Sierra Leone. I have inserted details of these projects below.
100% of the money I raise will go directly to these two projects — I am paying for all of the costs of the expedition myself. If this email and these projects also inspire you then it’s easy to help make a donation via the “Support Ed Now” button on http://www.globalangels.org/pages/10120/Fundraising.htm.“
