In 2018, Colin O’Brady became the first person to walk across Antarctica by himself with no resupplies. He’s now written a book about that trek, The Impossible First. In an excerpt, we learn about one of the times things didn’t go as planned. It was that one time O’Brady varied his routine in setting up his tent, skipping the part about anchoring it to his sled. The wind gusted and pulled a stake out of the ice, and he could envision it blowing away completely.
I had no backup tent. No rescue party could ever make it through a storm like this, with zero visibility and rugged, uneven terrain that would prevent a plane from landing. I’d grow sleepy, then increasingly irrational, and finally I’d just lie down, thinking that the ice was a nice place to rest. I’d die alone, in the cold, my body temperature falling.
It wasn’t the fear of death that really got to me—it was the realization that I’d never make it home. I’d never get back to Portland; never walk along the Willamette River holding hands with my wife, Jenna; never laugh around another campfire at the Oregon Coast with my parents and the rest of my family; never again smell the deep, peaceful aroma of a damp, bark-lined forest trail in the Cascade Mountains.
My hands were now everything. They gripped the edge of the tent as my airborne home yanked and jerked over my head. I knew everything depended on what happened in the next few seconds—on how long I could hold on and what I did or didn’t do.
We know he made it back to civilization in one piece, but that moment was still terrifying. Let’s assume it was the last time he didn’t anchor his tent to his sled. Read the book excerpt at Outside Online. -via Damn Interesting
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Read more about O’Brady’s adventures in our previous posts.
Source: neatorama