What did you do on your summer vacation? Jade Hameister, a 14-year-old from Melbourne, Australia just skied to the North Pole. She set off in early April from the Russian ice station of Barneo, skiing 150km southwest to the North Pole. The expedition was meant to take 21 days but Hameister and her team had to finish in 11 due to bad weather and a seriously depleted ice cap that many scientists are blaming on global warming.
“Because of the many challenges you face [in the polar regions] – compression sickness, dehydration, the cold – the greatest challenge of all is, probably, the mental side,” Jade said. “You can deal with the cold, you can deal with being uncomfortable, but the effort required to deal with all of those at once can be mentally draining.”
But she managed, becoming the youngest person to ever do so. But the expedition was not without its hardships. Accompanied by her father, Paul, an expeditionary himself having climbed the seven summits, Eric Philips, the first Australian to ski both the North and South Poles, and Peter Nyquist, a filmmaker who’s making a documentary on the teen, the young Hameister powered through a bout of frostbite suffered to her legs and bottom while she was peeing through the ice as well as a loss of feeling in her hands. She skied for 10 hours a day, pulling a 110-pound sled the whole way.
And this is just the start of the Hameister’s quest. The Australian, who’s sponsored by the Australian Geographic Society, is going for the “polar hat-trick” where she will attempt a Greenland Crossing and a trek to the South Pole by December 2017. When it’s all said and done she’ll have spent some four months on the ice and traveled nearly 1,250 miles under her own power.
She summed it up pretty well on her Instagram account, with maturity well beyond her 14 years: “You have exactly one life in which to do everything you’ll ever do. Act accordingly.”
Follow Hameister’s adventure’s here.