Shadows on the Wasteland

When Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dr. Mike Stroud ended their journey on foot across Antarctica in February of 1993, they were frostbitten and close to starvation. They had made the first coast-to-coast crossing of the continent, unsupported by men, animals or machines, and were too weak to continue over the floating Ross ice-shelf to open water. Ninety-five days earlier they had begun, pulling nearly 500 lbs each of essential food and fuel on sleds, and on the way they endured windchill temperatures as low as minus 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Mike Stroud, doctor, nutritionist and survival consultant to the British Ministry of Defense, is no stranger to the Polar regions. He was a member of the In the Footsteps of Scott expedition and has made several attempts with Fiennes to reach the North Pole from Canada and Russia over crumbling sea ice. But this record-breaking trek across Antarctica represented a physical and psychological challenge that has been likened to the first conquest of Mount Everest. In the tradition of the great expedition memoirs of Hillary, Scott and Byrd, Stroud’s book is a compulsively readable account of what happens when habits and fears, compassion and resentments, fortitude and physical limitations are magnified in a struggle to conquer the most hostile landscape on the planet. Stroud’s chronicle of the 1,350 mile traverse at the South Pole is as moving as it is surprising, revealing a no-man’s land of the mind, a territory where psychological as well as physical stress interact to provide a challenge greater than the brutal landscape and unpredictable weather alone. Few will fail to be gripped by this exciting account of what is perhaps the most celebrated Polar trekof our time.