the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

., .,- till "'" • .. ascending 170 feet so fast." Bozhok paused, swallowed, and was silent. When his friends hoisted Rozhkov out ofthe water, there was bloody foam coming out of his mouth and nose, the result of an inevitable embolism caused by his rapid ascent. The first civilian to dive at the pole had become the first person to die there. "The autopsy," Safonov said, "concluded he died of a simple heart attack. We knew he had had heart problems and the film showed he was kicking his feet while he was going down, as if he was trying to slow his descent. We think the general stress may have caused his heart attack, but at the time we wondered if the mysterious light might not have been a nuclear submarine whose sonar would have killed him." Bozhok might have been saved by the shelter the ridge provided and the sub crew might have turned off the sonar after seeing Rozhkov in their periscope. When the drama unfolded, I was a few miles away on my own expedition. I had been dropped at the pole by a Russian helicopter and for eight days we had ridden the polar treadmill by ourselves, drifting away from the pole as we slept, skiing all day to reach it. Usually, the ice over the Arctic Ocean drifts a couple of miles a day, but at one point, it almost stopped, affording us a two-day rest. And every day the pole was a different place. It's the ultimate "There is no there, there." We called our adventure the First Expedition to Nowhere. The following year, 1999, I returned to the pole to parachute over it from 12,000 feet as part of my research for a book I was writing about the rediscovery ofthe pole by adventure travelers. Thirty of us took off for the pole from Murmansk in a huge Il-76 cargo jet. I was tied to a Russian professional instructor, my back against his chest, and with over 4,000 jumps to his credit, I felt completely safe. We lined up in two files and when the siren sounded, we trotted aft and hurled ourselves from the open cargo bay into the white void. After a few feet, we were hit by the surprisingly gentle 200-mph airstream. We turned in mid-air and I caught an unforgettable vision of the plane seen from perhaps 20 feet below. We dropped in free-fall for about a minute (we were too clumsy in our polar clothing to attempt any skydiving maneuvers) and then the tandem-master opened the chute. It was bright and sunny when I took off my goggles, and after the roar of the plane and whoosh of the 130 mph-air, the silence was delicious. The ice stretched into infinity, broken like a jigsaw and crisscrossed by cracks ranging from jet black (open water) to gray (young, thin ice) and infinitely varied, creamy ridges. There's nothing quite as pure anywhere else on Earth. We took three minutes to descend, made a perfect landing in the packed snow and soon were toasting vodka and taking pictures before helicoptering to the base camp. Safonov, too, was back, leading a team of eight Russian divers and three fore igners. "We felt we owed it to Andrei (Rozhkov) to complete the job and prove it could be done safely," he told me. He invited me to watch the second dive, which took place two days later. When the helicopter dropped us off at the pole, we found a convenient lead (an area of open water created when the pack ice split up). It was 30 feet wide, looked just like a river and zig-zagged into the distance. It was -7.6°F outside and -20°F in the water. I crouched on the edge and looked down. Tiny bubbles trapped in the greenish ice shone like miniature light bulbs. The Russians set up a tent and lit a stove inside it. I took a walk along the side of a lead and soon spied a black head in the water. It was a seal and it was looking straight at me. I stopped. We stared at each other. Then it slowly dived and I hurried closer, the snow crunching under my feet. It popped up again and I froze. We did this again and again until I got to about 30 feet from the sea, and then it dived and simply disappeared. On my way back to the tent, I climbed up to the top of a lO-foot ridge and looked around carefully. I knew that where there are seals, there may be polar bears. Polar bears tend to stay away from the central Arctic Ocean in April because there is little open water and therefore few seals. But young bears sometimes get lost and wander too far north and a hungry polar bear will attack

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