Wow! This place is truly incredible.

I’m writing this in bed at 11.15pm at the end of our first full day and am doing so with sunglasses on, 24 hours of sunshine is just one of the things we are getting used to.

We stepped off the plane at Union Glacier into howling winds, walking like mummies in our many down layers leaving not an inch of skin exposed to the biting winds.

However, that wasn’t what was most startling.

The sheer beauty of this place is breathtaking. The snow glistens in the sunlight and dances on the wind, mountains in the distance one way and uninterrupted views to the horizon the other. The remoteness and natural beauty is incredible.

However practical matters beckon, we are holed up in the base camp here and have spent the day organizing our cache drops for resupply, our pulks (sleds), putting up our tents and sewing in washing lines etc. Tomorrow we’ll take the pulks out and do a short loop on the skis to shake out any gear issues. We’ll likely fly in a little ski-equipped Twin Otter plane to our expedition start point on the Filchner ice shelf on Friday morning.

Mood in the camp is great, Alan, Andrew and myself are all itching to get going but understand the importance of preparation. Now to get some sleep if only I could find my eyemask.

Richard

The team is now all together in Punta Arenas, Chile.

We plan to spend today, unpacking, checking and re-packing our gear with last minute dashes to buy anything missing. Andrew however will be hanging out waiting for his bag to catch up with him having been lost en-route from Boston.

COMING VERY SOON will be a new look website, with all new blogging and tracking features, at that time this will be the main place to come to donate, read our updates, and follow us on Antarctica.

In the meantime, there are quite a few updates beng posted to our facebook page!

Will update you all further soon.

Andrew recently had the opportunity to meet with Steven Rothstein, the President of the Perkins School for the Blind. The Perkins School is located a short distance from Boston and was established 180 years ago, making it the oldest school for the blind in the United States. Its distinguished graduates include Helen Keller, her instructor Anne Sullivan, and the manufacturer of the first Perkins Brailler.

Polar Vision is headed to the South Pole. But our primary mission is raising awareness for visual impairment and overcoming the challenges accompanying visual impairment. To that end, we met with Steven about setting up a series of satellite phone calls with Perkins students while we’re in Antarctica.

This wasn’t a first for the Perkins School. Previously, a blind oceanographer named Amy Bower who traveled to the South Pole conducted calls with Perkins Students (read about her being named an “Unsung Hero of Massachusetts”)

Now, a few Perkins Students will get assigned some reading about the South Pole (sorry, kids), and then they’ll be able to speak with Alan several times during our trip.

The Polar Vision team is so grateful to the Perkins School for giving us a chance to engage with their students. We’ll continue to send updates on this!

Well you all knew it was coming, but here is your chance to show your support for the Polar Vision expedition and our charities and donate!

The success of the charity fundraising is really important to the whole team and so we hope that you will get behind us and tell your friends, family and wider networks so that they can support us too!

We really do feel like this is a team effort so we’ve come up with ways in which you can choose to engage with the team. To raise money we are ‘selling’ things like Postcards from the Pole, Calls from the Continent and the chance to ‘own’ a day of our expedition! Alternatively, you can just choose to donate.

We want to reiterate that through corporate sponsorship, private donors and our own funds our trip costs are fully met! Therefore all proceeds from money donated through the website will go to our charities, Sightsavers International and Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Polar Vision is a registered 501c3 non-profit, so for US taxpayers, all donations are tax deductible. If you’re not in the US, you can still donate in US dollars as long as you have a visa or mastercard, though you may get charged a small foreign currency fee by your bank. Sorry about that.

There are links to our Indiegogo page (our fundraising partner) all over our website, but if you want to donate right now (and why wouldn’t you?) you can go here.

All contributions, big and small are welcome. It costs over $42,000 to raise and train a guide dog but Guide Dogs manages to give them to the visually impaired for free. Yet it costs only $10 for an operation to relieve the pain of trichiasis (a condition caused by parasites where the eyelid curves into the eyeball).

Just to remind you, we are undertaking a challenge that most of us would find very hard to do but given Alan’s visual impairment this really is a unique opportunity to be part of something special. We most likely won’t find ourselves at the Pole again, and it would be an honor for us to make you a part of our expedition.

We hope that you will be.

Sincerest thanks from the whole Polar Vision team.

Here at Polar Vision HQ, we love good news and our latest piece is to announce our guide for our expedition. We are delighted to confirm that we will be spending our time on the ice under the very capable guiding of Hannah McKeand.

Hannah is a native of the UK who has over 10 years of experience in Polar travel. Her love of travel at the ends of the earth extends beyond travel by land- she’s circumnavigated Antarctica in a sail boat (something often attempted, but not accomplished until 1981).
Ours will be the biggest expedition Hannah has led. She’s been working closely with the team over the past few weeks as we design our final fitness programs, build a nutritional breakout for the sixty days of the expedition, and procure the last pieces of equipment needed.

Now, in mid-September, we are in the final stages of our fundraising, planning, and preparation. In almost exactly 60 days we will fly to Chile, where we will spend approximately a week waiting for weather conditions to become optimal before our flight to our Antarctic start point.

For now though, perhaps we should let Hannah introduce herself…:

—

Hello!
I’m Hannah McKeand, and I am very excited to have just become a member of the Polar Vision team.

I work as a polar field guide and have skied to the South Pole more times than anyone now; I’ve guided a last degree and completed four full trips from coast to pole, including two as a guide and one solo expedition when I set a speed record for the journey. Aside from my Antarctic resume, I live between Norway where I spend some months each year working as a cook and pursuing my passion for snow-kiting, and Salt Lake City, Utah, where I have just bought a little house to be close to the mountains for rock climbing and skiing.

Travelling on Antarctica is an absolute passion for me, I never fail to remember what an honor and a privilege it is to be a visitor to biggest, most pristine wilderness on earth. On my first Journey to Antarctica, looking for an answer to the question “why am I doing this?” on a 56 day journey from coast to pole, I wrote one day:

“Today, for what seems the first time, we come up onto an open plain, free of undulations and nanutaks. The horizon bends around us with the curving earth, apparently as far away as it is possible to see, and the sky, blue and mottled with childlike waves of little cloud, seems unfathomably, unfeasibly vast. I feel both humbled and liberated by the sense of space, and although we are at the top of nothing, there is a sense of being in some high place; a feeling I have only had at the tops of mountains; the feeling that here is something sacred and that one should walk with reverence. And indeed, I look forward up the line at my friends bent into their harnesses, some tired, some in pain, and I think ‘pilgrims’, and in this high place the answer comes to my questions and as with all deep truths, it is so simple, so elegant, that I wonder that it took so long in coming.

I was too busy looking inside myself for the answer instead of looking out. I thought this journey was primarily about me, some inner need or disquiet driving me to this extreme, but it’s not so. Of course there is an inner journey, a course of personal discovery, the extent of which I will probably only fully know when I return to the world outside, but the true motivation behind coming here or going anywhere that fights your presence, is to pay homage to that place itself. Only by climbing the mountains or stepping out across the deserts or setting our sails at the empty oceans can we allow the wild places meaning in our lives and acknowledge their existence in our world. They give perspective to our values and make us readdress our responsibilities both global and personal. As long as those few men and women who are able continue to seek out the wilderness and honor it with their pain and resilience and courage, and deliver their discoveries to the world with passion and respect and integrity, with wonder and reverence and joy, and if they speak well and people listen well then perhaps there is some hope, hope for this little blue world.”

Seven years on from that time I still feel the same way, the fierce land of ice has become more familiar and comfortable, somewhere I feel welcome in when I return, but still somewhere genuinely awe inspiring. I feel so lucky to be in a position to be working there each year as a guide now and helping people to achieve their goals and learn to love my favorite place on earth as much as I do.

I’m so pleased to be getting to know the Polar Vision team at the moment, they are a truly exceptional bunch of guys and I can’t wait to meet them face to face in Chile at the beginning of our big adventure.

http://www.hannahmckeand.com/