The Red Bulletin May 2019

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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. <strong>The</strong>se 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. <strong>The</strong>n 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 58
Houlding and his team kite-ski from the South Pole and into the Transantarctic Mountains on the firstever unsupported expedition to climb the world’s most remote summit
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UK EDITION MAY 2019, £3.50 BEYOND
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The Red Bulletin May 2019

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