![]() ![]() In the final months of 2018, people around the world were captivated as the 33-year-old O’Brady raced the 49-year-old Briton Louis Rudd to complete what they both called the “first-ever solo, unsupported, unassisted” crossing of Antarctica. ![]() And in the “off the map” location he describes above, O’Brady was in fact on a graded and flagged vehicle route used frequently by wealthy tourists where a call from his satellite phone could summon rescue by ski-equipped Twin Otter airplanes within hours. None of the polar experts O’Brady mentions consulting before his trip considered his journey impossible. Safety managers for ALE, which has helped organize and plan expeditions to many remote areas of the continent for 35 years, deny saying he couldn’t be rescued. It’s a riveting description, but like other critical elements in his book and promotion of his Antarctica expedition, key details do not withstand scrutiny. “With my next steps,” O’Brady states, “I’d be on my own in a way I’d never been before.” While skiing across Antarctica, American Colin O’Brady, the self-proclaimed first person to ski alone and unassisted across the frozen continent, came to what he describes in his new book, The Impossible First, as “a hellish stretch.one of the hardest places on the continent to get across.” A polar wind he estimates at “fifty or even sixty miles an hour” lashed him as he entered a precarious area that was “off the map-unreachable and inaccessible.” Potential rescue aircraft cannot land here, he explains, because the terrain’s jagged, wind-whipped ice formations “made landing impossible.”īefore he began his journey, O’Brady writes, safety managers for the company that would rescue him in an emergency, Antarctica Logistics and Expeditions (ALE), ominously told him of this area, “If you call for help in here, you won’t get it.” This perilous reach of Antarctica was one of many reasons no one had achieved this crossing before, he writes. ![]()
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