Discovery Channel Magazine. Solo feats – Felicity Aston

Discovery Channel Magazine, September 2013

Some go solo by necessity; some do so by choice. But either way, the world’s great solo adventurers tend to prefer solitude, the feeling of being responsible only for themselves. Not so Felicity Aston, the first woman to ski alone across Antarctica, and the first person – male or female – to do so under her own muscle power. She never wants to go solo again.

That’s not as much of a surprise as you might think. Aston is renowned as a leader of teams – the more unusual and fragmented, the better. Until her record-breaking crossing of the continent last year, she was best known for having assembled a team of mostly inexperienced women from a range of Commonwealth nations and succeeded in getting them to ski from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole. This was no mean feat: two of the original team had never seen snow before the expedition’s first training trip. Capable, smart and articulate, she is a natural leader.

So why go solo? “It was a very personal thing,” she explains to Discovery Channel Magazine in the un-Arctic surroundings of her parents’ garden in Sevenoaks, Kent. “It was curiosity, to sum it up in one word. Like everyone else, I’ve read stories about Robert Swan and Ranulph Fiennes going off on their own, and what was going through my head was: would I be able to do it? It was about having the confidence in your own abilities to go out there alone, where there is no-one to fall back on.”

“It was,” she adds, “horrendous. It’s fantastic to have had that experience. But I don’t think it’s one I will repeat.”

You wouldn’t think anyone in their right mind would repeat it. On January 22 2012, she completed a 1,744 kilometre crossing from the Ross Ice Shelf to Hercules Inlet via the South Pole, taking 59 days. The physical challenge in itself was immense: not just the effort of skiing so far, but to do so with two heavily laden sledges (she received two resupplies on her journey, the first of them at the Pole), with an ascent of the Leverett Glacier amid the Transantarctic Mountains right at the start when those sledges weighed 85 kilogrammes. People often don’t realise the South Pole is at 2,835 metres above sea level; all of that height had to be ascended by Aston and her sledges, a relentless uphill slog on her skis.

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