The Red Bulletin May 2019

Leo Houlding
350km to the mountain’s base and the
edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, before a return
journey of almost 1,500km back up to the
South Pole and then out across the wastes
to the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf.
However, man-hauling a pulk filled with
food and supplies could mean progress
as slow as 1kph, and take at least 100
days to cover the distance. Houlding had
little more than half of that time before
the Antarctic summer and its 24-hour-aday
sunshine ended and travel became
lethal; violent storms shorten the window
drastically. Looking for a high-speed
solution to tackling the long-distance
polar mission, he turned to extreme kiteskier
and alpinist Jean Burgun.
“It’s like riding a
motorbike. Just a
tiny throttle input
and you’ve got
an unbelievable
amount of power”
Wind of change
Norway’s Hardangervidda plateau is
famed for its polar weather conditions.
It’s here that Houlding trained with
Burgun. During several expeditions,
they worked to pioneer an extreme,
high-performance kite-skiing set-up,
combining new high-aspect-ratio kites
– the kind used to race hydrofoils at
up to 95kph on water – with the stiff,
heavy skis used by FIS World Cup giantslalom
athletes.
These powerful kites are rated to the
rider’s weight, but Houlding planned to
drag a 200kg sled behind him – the bigger
the load, the bigger the kite. Launching
one of these overpowered beasts in
a 32kph wind is like lassoing a hurricane,
but, once underway, the sensation is
sublime. “It goes quiet because you’re
travelling with the wind,” says Houlding.
It would transform man-hauling hours
into minutes of cruising, but this highreward
combo came with high risks,
too. “It’s like a motorbike,” he says.
“Just a tiny throttle input and you’ve
got an unbelievable amount of power.”
He discovered just how much power
during a spectacular crash on the journey
to the Spectre.
“I suddenly found myself 6m in the air
– if I hadn’t had a 200kg sledge, it would
have been 20m – the rope went tight and
I managed to land on my skis, which
exploded off, and I came tumbling to
a halt. Then the pulk came flying past
me at 25kph. I was lucky to walk away.”
High-speed tumbles weren’t the only
challenges, however. When Houlding,
Burgun and kite-skiing cameraman Mark
Sedon were dropped off near the South
Pole on November 20, 2017, they were
soon camped in the teeth of the worst
storm they’d ever seen, delivering
temperatures as low as -40°C, with 80kph
winds. “Wind-chill temperatures were
MARK SEDON
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