Alex Hibbert takes Wolsey brand on Arctic expedition

Polar expedition leader Alex Hibbert and team are at Qaanaaq in Greenland, at the start of their epic 210 day polar expedition called the Dark Ice Project.

Before Alex left for Greenland, the Wolsey team and their PR company, Purple PR,  kindly arranged a leaving event for Alex Hibbert at their West End Store in Brewer Street.   

Alex Hibbert said:

For me, the Dark Ice Project has been taking a number of years of my life up and so it is quite a big occasion to now be about to set off.

What I can’t do is carry on without saying that two of my teammates are here, although unfortunately one of our team mates (Anastasia Kim) is still stuck in Russia but we have James (Wheeldon) over there and also the tall leggy blonde at the back, Anders (Rasmussen). And so they are going to be heading out on the ice with me in just a few days.

And so, what we are going to be doing?  Most of you are quite aware of what I have been doing over the last few years.  We are going to be exchanging one thing, which is permanent ice caps with lots of crevices in, for sea ice and that brings with it a whole load of different challenges.

So instead of walking on a solid bit of ice, we are walking on a frozen skin which is going all the way over the Arctic Ocean but it’s not just that, the actual route is going to be far more complicated.  We are not just going from the edge of land to the North Pole.

Alex Hibbert outside the Wolsey West End store in early December 2013

So the main plan for Dark Ice is to be the first expedition in history to ski unsupported to the North Pole in winter.  Not only are we going to be doing that, we are trying to add a few different things into the mix too. There is only one route which hasn’t been done yet.  So people have skied from Alaska, Canada and from Russia all the way to the North Pole but no one has ever even tried from Greenland, and there is a very good reason behind that, and that’s because it’s the most difficult route and has the most technical ice on the coast, and so that’s our first plan.

Secondly, we are not starting from the edge of the Ocean.  We are actually skiing from an Inuit settlement in Qaanaaq, which is in Greenland, all the way up the Nares Strait between Canada and Greenland to the edge of the Ocean and then skiing from there, so that adds another 400 miles before we even start the expedition. The total expedition led will be 1,800 miles because not only are we going to the North Pole, our plan is then to turn round and ski all the way back again. So it’s all, I would say, the most difficult parts that you can do on a Polar expedition all lumped into one journey.  So that’s the plan.

Just to show you a little but more detail of what the initial phase is going to be, essentially the positioning.  We will be starting from Qaanaaq village, then skiing across all of the frozen sea between the two land masses.  Now there are two small depots, which we laid earlier this year, in the sovereign region down by Qaanaaq, the idea being that we can lighten our sledges a little bit for the first 100 miles or so before we take on the rest and shoot all the way up the Nares Strait up to the top of the waterway.

When we get there, the plan is to lay a depot ourselves on the edge of the ocean, and of course that’s the furthest North we can do that.  You can’t lay food or fuel on moving sea ice – you can only do it on land.  And so the main depot will be up on the edge of Arctic Ocean. From then on nearly 500 miles across the Arctic ocean and then all the way back again to that point the plan then will be to come via the Greenland icecap once the sun has come up.

One of the key things to remember, yes it’s the Dark Ice Project and its starting in winter, but also its going to be spanning 210 days, so it’s not just Winter its Spring and part of Summer too, so it really is epic in what it’s trying to achieve..

Things have changed a great deal over the last 100 years, and this is when Wolsey were still supplying expeditions with their underwear and all the basic things needed to keep warm and I think it’s awesome that over 100 years later, they are still making some of the best gear possible, and I am pleased that I will be wearing some of their base layers, keeping nice and warm and comfortable as we are travelling to the North Pole.

Things are very different and these are the kinds of things that we wear, not pretty but it does the job very well. One of the main challenges that we are going to have is very limited power.

Alex Hibbert gives talk at Wolsey Store

Of course we can’t see anything and so we have to use very large amounts of batteries, nearly 2000 lithium AA batteries, to use in our head torches to see where we are going. So just seeing 30 yards ahead is going to be tough.

These guys (polar bears) are not as friendly as they look, as you can imagine.  There are rather a large number of them in the Nares Strait and become less frequent in the Arctic Ocean, so in the initial phase there are going to be a lot of them, and the key is to not look like a seal, which is quite difficult when you are in a sleeping bag.

We want to try and keep away from these guys. In order to minimise that Polar Bear risk we are taking the fifth member of our team, and I am sure most of you know Dave the dog, but the idea is that he’s going to be accompanying us, he’s not going to be hauling anything, in fact we are going to be hauling his food, rather than the other way round.  And the idea is he is going to be accompanying us and sleeping outside our tent in the evenings, and if there is a polar bear approaching we get an early warning and can do something about it.

The hope is that we don’t have any major problems along the way. We are definitely sharing part of the world with the most active man predator you can imagine, and they do actively hunt humans so we will have to keep looking over our own shoulders as we go along.

The idea of 24 hour darkness is probably alien to most.  This is Qaanaac village last winter when I was there preparing for the second phase. This is at midday, so the sky is actually darker than it appears there, so absolutely no idea of where the mountains are, which makes navigation very difficult indeed, but the biggest challenge, I think is the fact that we are walking on frozen ocean.

Not only are we going to be dealing with the cold, the storms and the polar bears, we are going to have to move from ice flow to ice flow and I am afraid the only way we can do that is to swim, climbing inside large rubber suits, jumping in the water, and getting across to the other side.

Luckily our sledges float like boats. We haven’t quite worked out how we are going to get Dave across the water. Dave does not like water, but we will try and achieve some kind of way of getting him across, most likely someone sat on a sledge and holding onto him and trying to get him to the other side.  Dave is going to be worth his weight in gold and definitely worth the 100Kg of food we are going to have to haul to keep him going throughout the whole thing to allow us to sleep well at night, which I think is going to be a real bonus over that number of months.

So just to finish off, as I said I wanted to keep it as brief as possible, I would like to quickly thank some of the people who have been supporting Dark Ice over what’s now been a number of years, and those supporters have been with us for a very, very long time.

Dominic Preston from Vermillion Films, there and Eddie Bocquillon from Aspen Fuel for supplying all of our stove fuel, which will keep us nice and hydrated, enabling us to have hot meals and everything like that, and Ian somewhere as well, who actually made a donation very early on, and enabled the trip to pick up right at the beginning.  It’s very hard to get traction for a big expedition like this, and those early supporters really are very much valued.

Finally Wolsey I want to thank so much firstly for allowing me to do what I do for a living.  It’s very, very hard to achieve that and the support of those with similar values is very, very special.  I am really excited to be part of the team, and to be creating some absolutely amazing garments over the next few years, which will have that real technical side to it as well as looking and feeling amazing to wear.  So thank you very, very much for that, and a quick final thanks to Chris O’Donoghue from WSM, who actually introduced us, first of all, must be a few months ago now, when I was basically out in the Arctic and was told about this fantastic brand that has been supporting polar expeditions since the year dot and they want you on board, and I am very, very glad about that.

Thank you very much guys.

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To keep track on progress please visit http://www.darkiceproject.com/ and click on to  ‘Tracker’ or read the blogs.

Also follow Alex Hibbert on Twitter https://twitter.com/alexhibbert

For further information, please contact Tina Fotherby, tina@famouspublicity.com

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