Tom Avery’s first adventures did not involve forging through the ice of the Arctic Ocean.
Before the British explorer became one of only 41 explorers to travel to both the North and South Poles on foot, Avery grew up in the tropics of Rio de Janeiro.
“It probably all started there in a foreign land,” the 33-year-old said.
Living amid jungles and rain forests, Avery would spend hours flipping through maps and travel journals of Victorian explorers who traveled to ice-capped playgrounds in faraway lands.
“I just wanted to be like them,” he said recently at the National Geographic Society, discussing his own ascent into the history books.
His 413-nautical-mile trek in 37 days and 22 hours netted him “the fastest surface journey to the North Pole” in the 2009 Guinness Book of Records.
Avery winded around ice crevices and navigated through blinding blizzards to show the possibility that U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Robert Peary had completed the controversial quest a century ago. Using the same techniques and equipment, Avery and his four-man team re-created the “unadulterated adventure” in 2005, shaving four hours off Peary’s time.
“It was all about scribbles in journals and secondhand conversations that Peary might or might not have had — this to me what was it was all about,” he said of using the notes to match the trip, from the sleds to the Canadian Inuit dogs that dragged them.
He dumped a career in accounting to teach skiing in the Swiss Alps, looking for his own adrenaline-inducing adventure.
Avery dared unknown territories in the Eastern Zaalay Mountains of Kyrgyzstan and led 12 expeditions through perilous terrains, including those in the Andes, Tanzania and Patagonia.
The globe-trotter deals with the life-threatening discomfort, because they are “minor compared to the experiences you have.”
Avery scampered across ice bridges and used kites to harness the Antarctic winds on skis to reach the South Pole gift shop in 2002.
But it wasn’t until his North Pole mission, with Prince Charles backing the team, that he accomplished “the biggest thing I had to do in my life.”
“You can feel the ice kind of bending, flexing with every stride,” he said of traveling across the eggshell surface with 600-pound sleds. “The Arctic Ocean is a living, breathing thing.”
Avery accounted his North Pole travels in his book “To The End of the Earth.”
While back in London with his wife, Avery pays the bills through motivational speaking. He also raises money for The Prince’s Charities, serves as a Royal Geographic Society fellow and will be an ambassador of the 2012 London Olympic Games.
He hopes to one day face his ultimate challenge: climbing the Olympus Mons on Mars, the tallest volcano in the solar system.
“I guess that’s going to take awhile,” he said.
