Jacob Myers’ Surreal Journey to Antarctica
My journey to Antarctica was slotted to be about 55 days, but when you zoom out from the actual time I would spend in the field, there was nearly four years of preparation, training, fundraising, and incredibly methodical gear testing that went into the whole project. From the porch of a remote wilderness cabin during my time working in wilderness therapy, I was finishing a book by my now-mentor in the field, Louis Rudd, and I spoke with interest to my co-instructor about the idea of me making a bid at skiing to the South Pole solo and unsupported. Imagine my surprise when everyone at camp that night launched forward with enthusiastic support for the endeavor. I hadn’t even run my first ultra by this point, and the thought of taking on something as massive as a Coast-to-Pole journey seemed intimidating, but with all the support I was receiving, I couldn’t help but start laying down a roadmap that would get me there eventually.
On my first expedition in Norway, I was introduced to Expedition Foods as well as two other food companies that folks in the adventure space were using for their journeys. The qualities I was looking for from my nutrition were threefold: 1. Easy and fast to prepare 2. Flavorful but not overwhelming 3. Dense in calories. Not that everyone else hadn’t provided such things, but Expedition Foods’ history in this space and the ease with which I could get down a few thousand calories every evening at dinnertime made them a clear winner for me. In the following years I brought them to the rugged Northern Rocky Mountains, the extreme cold of the Yukon, and eventually, with much excitement, Antarctica.
The ever-contrastive sense of peace and danger, fulfillment and loneliness, and, dare I say, immense strength and crippling weakness is a daily experience in Antarctica, especially when alone. I have tried for a year now to describe what it’s like skiing atop an ocean poised high above the Antarctic bedrock with nothing but whiteness in every direction and the brutally cold headwinds smashing against my face as I inched ever closer to the Polar Plateau. It is a desert in the truest sense. A vast, life-devoid expanse where no living things are welcome, and yet I was granted time and space to explore the surface of the White Continent just as I was tapping into some great internal expanse as well. What Antarctica gave me I will hold on to for the rest of my life, success or otherwise.
I hope everyone can find their own thing, their own “South Pole” of sorts, so that they too can experience that kind of surrealism.
Jacob Myers
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