Polar pioneer

That was one Monday Felicity Aston looked forward to — a day she is unlikely to ever forget.

She dreamt of red wine and a hot shower as she waited for her plane to pick her up that January morning, at Hercules Inlet, (located geographically at 80 degrees south on the Ronne Ice Shelf) in the Antarctic. She would have fulfilled her dream the day before, had not the weather played spoilsport, preventing her aircraft from landing.

That morning she tweeted, "Woken to the wonderful realisation that I don't have to jump out of my sleeping bag and rush over the horizon today."

For the last 59 days, this woman from Kent, United Kingdom, had been skiing alone across 1,744 km in Antarctica scripting her place in the annals of history as a pioneer among women. But not before braving stormy weather, sub-zero temperatures, frostbite, crevasses and loneliness. Keeping her company all day long was just the sun overhead.

That Monday evening, her tweet read, "The plane is on its way so these are my last moments alone in Antarctica. I feel both excited and extremely sad."

This was not her first journey into Antarctica, though. She was only 23, and went on to work here for more than two years as a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey. She was back in 2009, leading a team of eight women from ordinary walks of life and hailing from countries as far as Jamaica, Cyprus and India. On that journey, Aston had been overwhelmed by thoughts of imminent death; her sledge was jammed in ice as the others moved ahead, oblivious of her predicament.

All this before she decided to go solo. So how did she prepare for this expedition?

"I did low-intensity exercises to increase my stamina and endurance," reveals the adventurer who has raced in the Canadian Arctic and walked on frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia. "Preparing mentally with a sports psychologist, I learnt various techniques for coping with stress and loneliness."

And then last November she flew from the UK to Punta Arenas in Chile and took a four-hour flight to Union Glacier, a base camp in Antarctica. Her paraphernalia included a tent, sleeping bag, stove, fuel, two plastic sledges, rations, medical kit, maps and compass, GPS, spares and repair kit, a multitool, watch and spare clothes. "Food had to be lightweight yet contain all nutrients I needed," Aston says. On November 25, she blogged from Ross Ice Shelf, at 85 degrees south: "I'm alone and looking at a big white horizon on one side towards the North and to the South, this wall of mountains, absolutely spectacular. It's really calm, sunny, warm, for my first night on the ice. I can't wait to get started in the morning on my journey to the South Pole and the opposite side of Antarctica."

Every morning, Aston was up by 7. "After breakfast I'd ski in 90-minute legs, taking a short break between each one, and for about 10 hours a day," Aston recalls.

By 7.30pm she would pitch her tent before making her daily call to the base camp. "Then it would be a matter of melting snow to make drinking water for the next day and also to pour into my packet of dried food. Post dinner, I would be doing repairs to the kit and be asleep by 10.30pm."

How did she navigate en route? Aston explains, "I relied on GPS for navigation but the trouble is that the handheld units work on batteries and these run down quickly in cold temperatures. So I would use GPS in the morning to fix my heading but then use my compass all day. I would use GPS again in the evening to pinpoint my position and to work out how far I had skied. Navigation was difficult on days which were particularly overcast. I depended on my compass then to keep skiing in the right direction. It was easy to get disoriented."

She carried a Yellowbrick tracker in her sledge, which automatically transmitted her location every eight hours to the base camp. If the camp failed to hear from her in 24 hours they could track her on the basis of her last location. For communication, she had an Iridium satellite phone. "But it's not a smartphone. I couldn't see the re-tweets and had no access to Facebook or internet. Every day I would call the camp and give them my position. I made the first call to my home-support person, Stephanie, after a week of being alone. I was struggling to speak as I tried not to cry."

Naturally there were bouts of loneliness.

"I first got dropped off on the side where there's not much activity in terms of people skiing to the poles. It did feel isolated, remote, and being on my own was something I didn't expect to struggle with. Every morning when I opened my eyes, I wished I could quit. But I knew that I had no choice but to keep going. I would never have this opportunity again. I'd never forgive myself. I owed it to my sponsor, Kaspersky Lab, and everyone who supported me. Soon I got into a routine. That seemed to carry me forward and distracted me from emotional lows. Some mornings I would get over it with positive thinking. Other times I would have a good cry." Not to forget her MP3 player and Agatha Christie audio books offering solace too. "Towards the end Stephanie began texting me replies to my tweets. I would read them in the morning before I left, which was hugely motivating."

Mention cold weather and Aston says, "The cold is the obvious danger. You can never let your guard down for a moment and always have to think about protecting yourself from injury." The coldest days were at the highest altitude when the wind was strongest. When she reached the South Pole, it was -36°C. At 3,500 metres, the highest point on the route, "my breath froze, forming icicles on my mask and giving me an ‘ice beard'. Towards the end of the journey, at close to sea level, I could happily ski in thermals."

There was the 24-hour daylight, and her tent was good at trapping the sun's heat: "Even though it is cold, the sun is strong. The brightness of the sun was the same in the middle of the night. This meant no stars, sadly."

She continues, "What makes temperatures so punishing is the wind, but as soon as I crawled into my tent I would be completely protected, though there were days when the wind blew violently beating about my tent."

Inside were two small stoves which pumped out the heat when lit. "It was a matter of getting into my sleeping bag quickly. I even filled a bottle with hot water to use it to warm my sleeping bag so that it wasn't cold when I got in."

Among dangers lurking on this icy continent were crevasses: deep cracks in the ice that are not visible as they are covered with snow. "You don't know they are there until you are falling through it. I worried that if I fell into a crevasse it would be quite a long time before anyone came looking for me."

Surreal moments meant staring from her tent door at a panoramic view of the Thiel Mountains that stretched along the horizon where the icy landscape kissed the azure sky. Another wonderful moment was pitching her tent among sastrugi: snow formations sculpted by wind, some of which are tiny and others really tall. "It was like having an elaborate garden for the night or a moat. Though they were great to look at, they were exhausting to ski over and, in bad weather, totally invisible. I'd be left stumbling around in the dark!" Once the sastrugi were gone, the snow was covered in bubbles of frost resembling a carpet of diamonds.

Flora and fauna? "I didn't see a bird or a bug or a patch of moss throughout the journey. I was the only form of life in the entire landscape." After resting a day at the Pole, Aston moved on to the other side, eventually reaching Ronne Shelf.

"Most people seem to find Antarctica a spiritual place in some respect," she says. "This is because we come face to face with our insignificance in the scale of the universe and our own vulnerability. It is a place where all material possessions are stripped away and we return to the basics.

"For me, every expedition is a reminder of what is important in my life and a reaffirmation that it is loved ones and time spent with them that is important. I did feel that there was some protective force watching over me. I chose to attribute it to the thoughts and prayers of all those people following my progress. My expedition was certainly the most profound experience and one that has touched me deeply," says Aston, whose book, Call of the White, is an account of her earlier expedition to Antarctica with a group of women.

"I discovered that I am not a natural soloist! I understood the true value of having a team around me by being alone. I discovered that I am not brave or courageous but that I do have a stubborn tenacity to keep going," Aston says. "But I don't think I am special ... we all have this same ability to persevere. It's just that we don't all get to realise it by skiing across Antarctica!"

Mythily Ramachandran is a writer based in Chennai, India.