We followed her exploits, along with teammates Pen Hadow and Martin Hartley, as part of the Catlin Arctic Survey Team this past spring, and now Wide World has a good interview with Ann Daniels, in which she discusses the expedition, her day-to-day roll on the team, and why the team didn’t end up reaching the poll, amongst other things.
You probably remember that the Catlin team set out from the Canadian side of the Arctic with the intention of heading to the North Pole, stopping to take measurements of the ice in order to judge the overall health of the icecap. The teams high tech scientific equipment was touted early on, as they were suppose to use ground penetrating radar to take their measurements. But Ann says that the radar didn’t really work until they neared the end of the journey, which meant they had to take a lot of manual samples, using drills to pull out cores from the ice. This caused them to slow down greatly and in the end prevented them from completing the journey to 0º North.
Ann had been planning to make a solo journey to the Pole, but gave up the opportunity to join the survey team. She now says that she would consider going after that goal again in the future, but it won’t be next year, as she’ll be still wrapped up in the data from this year’s survey, and won’t have the time to prepare or to raise the funds she needs. To date, no woman has made that journey solo and unsupported.
Good interview and Ann is definitely an interesting person. I hope she gets to go after the solo expedition at some point.
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