Get Away

As Ann and Liv greet fans and conduct TV interviews, I find myself standing next to Charlie Hartwell, a 30-something dad in chinos who’s a part of Bancroft and Arnesen’s official entourage. He tells me that the company over which he presides, YourExpedition, was established mainly to act as the corporate arm of Bancroft Arnesen Explore, to do the dirty financial and legal work it takes to support the women on their various trips. Many of these expeditions can cost in the high six figures, and today’s serious explorers must be just as good at arranging financials as tying knots. Hartwell, a former executive at Pillsbury, met Bancroft in 1998 and says he was instantly smitten by the explorer, her special talents and her vision. He and Bancroft established the company first to fund Arnesen and Bancroft’s now-famous trek across Antarctica in 2000. Now, Hartwell says, the company is evolving into a broader “motivational” company, which continues to fund Bancroft and Arnesen’s adventures while also managing their sponsorships, speaking schedules, and so on. It turns out that a big part of what modern explorers do these days is share their stories with others, moving between the wastelands of the natural world and the corporate meeting rooms and classrooms of the civilized world.

Whatever the 14 employees of YourExpedition do, they seem to be doing it well. Out of a dot-com loft in a downtown Minneapolis warehouse, the company secured $1.5 million for the Antarctica trip alone, and Hartwell has reportedly drummed up close to $3 million more. YourExpedition’s success has been gratifying, since one of their main motives was to overcome a nettlesome injustice of the outdoor adventure business: Male explorers seem to have no problem finding money for their trips, while women tend to encounter nothing but stingy indifference. Hartwell, Bancroft, Arnesen, and their team developed a strategy to team up with companies that specifically wanted to reach women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s—women the same age as Ann and Liv. Though YourExpedition mainly aims to reach women and girls, Hartwell says a funny thing happened on the way to the South Pole: Men came along for the ride. “Our audience is about 60 percent female. But it’s an adventure event in the outdoors and the men get really interested too.”

To see Ann and Liv in action is to see modern explorers fully spiffed in high-tech gear, prominently displaying their sponsors’ logos and trademarks even in their street clothes. On this trip, Pfizer patches adorn their fleece vests, some pharmaceutical is emblazoned across their backs, they wear Volvo baseball caps. Even more than pro athletes, Bancroft and Arnesen are beholden to the commercial endorsement, to the media moment, to the placement of “impressions” for their backers, which they get from articles like this one. (Unlike pro athletes with their millions, explorers are essentially self-employed.) But later, when I press Ann on the subject, probing her for disingenuousness—I’m wondering if she’d be happy to don her skis and parka and be free of all the hoopla, if only she were independently wealthy—she seems sincerely interested in working with major corporations. Particularly the ones that want to reach the same people she wants to reach. “This is really more than branding, or sponsorship,” she says. “These are partnerships.” She points out that Pfizer, one of their biggest sponsors, is aggressively trying to reach women in their 40s and 50s, to encourage them to be active and health-conscious.

So what exactly are Ann and Liv trying to do with this relatively civilized tour of the Great Lakes—where there are no records to set, no honors to claim? They say they want to meet the unwashed masses, to encourage them to stay active as they reach middle age. They say they want to promote childhood reading. They say they want to encourage women and girls to follow their dreams. But most importantly, it seems as if Bancroft and Arnesen are trying to repay a debt of gratitude. The explorers are still visibly astonished at the impact their Antarctica trip had on people around the planet. “When we came back and read all the emails, and people were sending us their dreams, we realized maybe that’s the next thing, maybe we should do something very different, just an ordinary trip somehow and get connected with people,” says Liv. “We got 35,000 emails from the Antarctica trip, that’s why we wanted to make this trip.” Ann adds that they had expected about a million school children to follow them across the continent, but about three million people of all ages did, from 150 different countries. That’s quite a fan base for a couple of self-described introverts who like nothing better than the wide open (uninhabited) spaces.

In many respects Antarctica 2000 was the vanguard of modern exploration. Fully wired to the Internet, logging in daily with a PowerBook and a satellite phone, the expedition had an educational component that connected it to the global information economy. Others have attempted equally web-savvy trips, but never with the same educational mission and impact. None have been as open and as inviting to an international audience as the Bancroft Arnesen polar expedition. For some reason these former schoolteachers continue to capture the imagination of adults and children all over the world. Reading through their journal entries from the Antarctica crossing (still archived on the web at yourexpedition.com), it’s easy to see why. Instead of egoistic bravado, they encountered each new day of their expedition with the same wonder and anticipation as their audience. This may well represent a new model for exploration and adventure—the opposite of traditional male ego-trips that so often end in hard feelings at best, and dead team members at worst. The instantaneous communication also adds to the drama. In the old days of great explorers like Roald Amundsen and Robert Peary, the world waited for months to find out if they’d even survived, much less gained their objectives. Today, anyone on the planet with a phone line can follow along in real time. What’s more, they can send their own personalized emails of moral support, and they just might get a response.

It’s interesting to consider that Ann Bancroft has eclipsed her mentor Will Steger as one of the world’s premier polar explorers, and that this happened at precisely the same time the Internet became a global reality. Steger is alive and well and living in relative isolation near Ely. Word on the trail is that he never had much time for people, and couldn’t stomach the idea of spending most of the year schmoozing with corporate lackeys and Madison Avenue sharpies, giving motivational slide-shows at suburban sneaker stores. As his star fades, explorers who are willing to run the public gauntlet for sponsorships, funding, and autograph-seekers become more relevant. Bancroft and Arnesen have easily evolved into this kind of meet-and-greet role for three reasons: They are women, they are educators, and they are on the web. They’ve effectively proven that women are just as capable as men in professional exploration, measured on precisely the same criteria. (Is there a more straightforward measuring stick than survival?) More than that, they may be better suited to the other element of modern exploration—connecting with people. If the next frontier of exploration really is an educational mission to reach women, children, and corporate boardrooms with a message of empowerment, then who better to undertake such an enterprise than two women who are former classroom teachers?