Get Away

The great polar explorers Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen
go where they’ve never gone before—your backyard. So this
is the Next Frontier: the web, schoolkids, and Lake Superior

I’m shivering uncontrollably and I think I might puke. Gray waves roll and swell on Lake Superior, a stiff cold wind blows from the east, it looks like rain—or maybe snow. Even in late May, the North Shore doesn’t want to warm up.

I’m with Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, who are paddling along in sea kayaks, making their way from Grand Portage, which they left 10 days ago, down to the port of Duluth, which they’ll reach in about two hours. There is a heavy swell on the lake, it’s true. But with the wind at their backs, Bancroft and Arnesen are actually surfing the four-foot waves, their kayaks carving the crests and their paddles barely dipping for balance. They make it look fun and easy. Frankly, I’m having a hard time keeping up with them, even though I’m in a 30-foot fishing boat. I’ve asked the captain to stop talking about the various colorful episodes of seasickness he has witnessed.

Bancroft and Arnesen are toiling like this because they’re on a new expedition, hoping to kayak most of the way from Lake Superior to the St. Lawrence Seaway. I’m toiling like this because it’s a rare opportunity to accompany the world-famous explorers in action. For the first time in their professional careers, they’ve decided to undertake an adventure through well-known, well-charted, and fully settled territory. In fact, for the next six weeks, they’re going to have a hard time finding a place to camp that isn’t someone’s front yard, and one of the more serious dangers they’ll face is the possibility that too many people will approach them with coffee and donuts. How did two of the world’s most accomplished polar explorers end up in this absurd situation? There’s only one way to find out—ask them.

Later, I’m waiting in Duluth’s stunning Great Lakes Aquarium, under a 50-foot glass-encased waterfall. (We parted ways earlier; I found a cheap, warm place to have a little breakfast and settle my stomach. They paddled.) Ann and Liv have a scheduled appearance here, where they’ll meet a group of fans—eco-groupies, I guess you’d call them—who have gathered in the lobby in little huddles of polar fleece and hiking boots. When Bancroft and Arnesen stroll in, there’s a round of applause. In person, the great explorers strike me as precisely what they are: gym teachers who have given up coffee and gone on permanent sabbatical. Even at the age of 46, Ann Bancroft practically vibrates with nervous energy. She is short (around 5’5”) and solid and looks like she prefers her oatmeal straight. Undoubtedly when she was a young turk working the climbing counter at Midwest Mountaineering on the West Bank, she was perceived as an adrenaline junkie—someone not really happy until she’s logged a dozen miles on the trail, maybe put up a new line on the climbing walls of Taylor’s Falls. With age and experience, she has become a person with zen-like focus and unseen reservoirs of energy. Like the great cyclist Greg LeMond, she has used maturity to her advantage, recognizing the value of pacing yourself for the long haul. Patience is an acquired skill, and it’s one of Bancroft’s secret weapons that put her beyond the reach of most world-class endurance athletes. She’s incredibly centered, like a small, powerful catapault waiting to be triggered.

Liv Arnesen is the perfect professional complement to Bancroft. She’s a tall, slightly stooped, 48-year-old Norwegian, with weathered skin that betrays the fact that she’s spent far more time outside than in. She has long arms and fingers, and looks a bit trollish. Paradoxically she seems less high-strung than her American partner, but at the same time less patient. It suits her personality that she was the first woman to ski solo to the South Pole. She carries herself with stoic self-assurance, she has the air of a woman who would prefer not to talk but to do—and involving anyone else in the doing is an automatic liability.