Page 12 - Army Mountaineer Winter 2022

GUESTWRITER
JACO VAN GASS:
SON TOP OF THE WORLD
all started to fade like a dream I had just woken up from.
Getting back to civilisation did feel amazing. Every time I go on an expedition it’s the same – after weeks spent living in a tent you really do appreciate the finer things in life. Standing under a hot shower was incredible and our hotel beds felt like the softest things in the world. We couldn’t wait to have proper food either, and the burger and beer I had that evening were probably some of the best I’ve ever tasted. Longyearbyen didn’t have a lot in the way of broccoli, though, so I would have to wait another few days before being able to satisfy that particular craving.
We spent four days in Longyear- byen before flying back to London via Oslo, during which time we all became desperate to get out. Having reached the Pole and gone through the strange emotions that accompanied it, we wanted nothing more than to leave the Arctic behind us. We were simultaneously exhausted and feeling like we had to blow off steam, which resulted in some pretty wild evenings in the whisky bar and long days spent in bed. Oslo was a much better place to be and on the night we spent there I finally got my broccoli along with a beautiful piece of salmon. It was one of the greatest meals of my life. Everything in Oslo seemed so much brighter. We had finally left the world of whiteness behind and it was hard to take in all the colours. I remember being particularly struck by how green the trees were and also by what I could smell. In the Arctic it was so cold we had lost almost all sense of taste and smell, but on the streets of Oslo I could smell a woman’s perfume from six metres away. Every meal was intense and even the airport blew me away with the sheer number of people around us. My brain struggled to cope with the sudden change: for two weeks we had been the only twelve or eleven people in the whole world.
Jaco’s book, Unequivocal, is available from all good bookshops.
outh African-born Jaco van Then, exhausted but elated, we set up our Gass came to Britain at the age tents to spend a final night on the ice.
of 20 and joined the Parachute
Regiment before losing his left arm in Afghanistan. As a keen adventurer he has reached the North Pole and taken on Everest. Here he shares an extract from his book Unequivocal, sharing how he felt on reaching the North Pole
We reached the North Pole on Saturday 16 April, having covered 165 miles in twelve days. That day we woke up knowing we had the final ten miles to walk, but aware that anything could go wrong. Not knowing exactly where the Pole was probably helped us – we could almost pretend that it was just a day like any other. Only Inge, who was holding the GPS reader, actually knew its location, and he called out when we had about a hundred yards to go. We had never planned it this way, but the six of us fanned out to walk the last steps next to one another, rather than in single file. As Inge watched the reading on the GPS monitor he shouted, ‘Eighty-nine point nine nine nine nine nine... ninety point zero. We’re there!’ It was an amazing moment.
Because the Arctic ice is constantly moving there is nothing to mark the geographic North Pole – no flagpole or statue or giant research base. Our North Pole was nothing but a patch of snow and ice, and yet that was what made it so special: it belonged only to us. No matter where that piece of ice drifts to, it will always be our North Pole and no one else’s. We were on top of the world in more ways than one. After a rocky start we had made it to the Pole in unexpected time. We celebrated with lots of photographs – each of us had brought various bits along, like Steve’s Welsh flag and my Parachute Regiment one. I had also been given a fold-up dartboard by Gary Palmer, a friend of John McDonald’s who ran the company Target Darts, so Steve and I set it up and had a quick game at the Pole. We stuck a ski pole in the ground, all put our hands on it and ‘ran around the top of the world’ as fast as we could, and rounded off the day by opening a bottle of whisky and a box of cigars.
The sense of achievement was unreal, but at the same time I felt a great sense of loss. The North Pole was all I had worked for, such a big part of my life, and to a great extent my sole purpose over the last few months. I knew I would be going back to London to continue the process of leaving the army, and I wondered what exactly it was that I was going home for. I’d be living on an army base that wasn’t even mine, alone in a room on a block where I knew no one else. Before, I’d spent hours every day dragging tyres through London parks, but to work on my fitness now I could just go to the gym. There was no need to fill my days with what I’d filled them with until now. As proud as I was of our achievement, when I thought about the future I was overwhelmed with sadness that the expedition was over. The strange mix of emotions was made even worse the next morning when a Japanese team suddenly skied on to the Pole, closely followed by the helicopter that had been sent to take us back to Barneo.
Although we were all quite pleased to see the helicopter – we were tired, cold and desperate for proper food and clean clothes – it had brought along four rich South Koreans who climbed out, had their photos taken at the Pole, and promptly got back in again. Having just man-hauled a tonne of kit and equipment for over a hundred and fifty miles, we could hardly believe our eyes. The past twelve days seemed all the more unbelievable when the helicopter took off and we found ourselves flying over the ice we had just crossed on foot. Again I was struck by the incredible scale of the Arctic: with the open-water leads criss-crossing through the snow, it looked like a giant maze. I found it hard to believe that just the day before we had been down there somewhere, trying to find a way through the rubble fields and hauling our pulks over high pressure ridges. Throughout the half-hour flight to Barneo and the plane journey back to Longyearbyen, it
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