‘Plan for the worst’ is fine advice, easily given – and easily ignored. For most people, who go through life without a serious ‘worst’ in sight, that might barely matter – but if you’re walking hundreds of kilometres north of what most people consider the north pole, where shifting pack ice makes every step dangerous, it’s critical. Jim McNeill, though, is an expert – with almost 35 years’ experience in the world’s most inhospitable environments, he now makes a living from teaching and equipping other people to survive in extreme environments.

The push to make it to the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility is the one that’s occupied most of his thoughts since 2001. Defined as the furthest point from land on the Arctic Ocean, it’s almost impossible to reach by plane: reaching it on foot, covering more than 350km of treacherous ground once you’ve hit the ‘normal’ north pole, seems barely possible.

And yet, that’s McNeill’s aim. He’s also planning to take a team of near-amateurs to do it: emulating Ernest Shackleton's Golden Age of exploration when volunteers came from all walks of life, not knowing when they’d return. He’s had no shortage of interest – but even with hundreds of volunteers to choose from, how to do you prepare for a trip that’s never been done?

Q: Was that a scenario you’d rehearsed?
A: ‘Oh yes, absolutely. I’m one of those people who gets on an aircraft and knows how to get off it whatever happens to that aircraft. It’s having an appreciation of the risks you’re taking and managing those risks to best effects, mitigating them with your skills and experience.’

Q: Now you’re bringing that sort of training to other people – what benefits do you think it gives them?
A: ‘For me it’s a number of things. From my very early days I’ve enjoyed passing on skills and meeting people, but having a skill-set that you can utilise for the betterment of others, whether they’re in a rescue situation, or working as a firefighter, or just happening to be on the scene of a traffic accident, is a huge thing. From an Ice Warrior point of view, it’s about giving them the skills to live and work in some of the most extreme environments in the world. And that’s very fulfilling: seeing complete novices coming into the process and then changing a huge amount as they build up these skills and use them as they experience dear old mother nature.’

Q: Why do you recruit beginners to exploration?
A: ‘It’s partly so that they can bring an engagement in global change back to whatever their own life situation is. A lot of what I do is data gathering for scientists to get a better finger on the pulse of the planet. It’s not for us to judge, but it is for us to bring the attention of ordinary everyday people to the changes that are occurring in the world right now and the reasons that there might be a harsh summer or a cold winter, and why they might occur to a much more catastrophic extent in future.’

Q: And part of the trouble, of course, is that those weather conditions only make your job harder?
A: ‘The sea ice is breaking up. Nobody’s done the journey from land to the north pole for some years now – the last people to do it were incredibly lucky because of the weather. It’s a testament to how things are changing: when I first started doing this in 1984, the sea ice would freeze once and for all, and you’d get a fairly predictable weather pattern, but that’s completely destroyed these days and all sorts of weather prevails. If we’re lucky we’ll get a sharp year and get there next year.’

Read more about Jim and the 2019 Ice Warrior expedition at Ice-warrior.com

Words: Isaac Williams