There are moments when you are very exhausted, when you become almost detached from yourself. You go through a sort of discomfort barrier and from that moment on it's almost delicious. You just plod on endlessly, almost timelessly.
That is how the leader of the British Trans-Arctic Expedition, Wally Herbert, describes the experience of sledging. A few weeks ago he and his three companions completed the longest sustained journey in the history of polar exploration, a journey right across the broken, shifting sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to Spitzbergen. A sledge journey longer than those of Scott or Shackleton, Nansen or Amundsen. A journey of 3,620 miles.
Filmed partly by the BBC and, during the journey itself, by members of the crossing party, this is the story of that journey from the early days of preparation in London in the winter of '67 to the final scramble to make landfall in May this year.
Commentary spoken by Glyn Owen
(Colour)