Chasing Nansen's Ghost

Surprise vistor: A young polar bear eyes the unfamiliar sight of a tent on a remote Russian archipelago. When he came closer, Borge Ousland and Thomas Ulrich scared him off with pepper spray and gunshots in the air.

Two adventurers set out across the Arctic in the footsteps of Norway's pioneering polar explorer. Article by Peter Miller
Photographs by Børge Ousland & Thomas Ulrich
"I think I see land," he said to Børge Ousland, with whom he had spent the past six weeks chasing the memory of two famous explorers across the Arctic. Beginning at the North Pole, the pair had skied 600 miles to this spot off the northern coast of Franz Josef Land, the remote Siberian archipelago where Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen had sought refuge after their own attempt to reach the Pole in 1895.
Like many Norwegian boys, Ousland was raised on bedtime stories about Nansen's exploits. Years later these tales inspired him to make the first unsupported solo ski trek to the Pole, one of 14 visits as a professional adventurer and guide. Now he and Ulrich, a mountaineer and photographer, were following the same harrowing route Nansen and Johansen had taken 112 years before—something no one else had done. TheTamshee says: If you are interested in polar expeditions, detailing the adventures of daring , some would say fool hardy charactors then click Continue »

Polar Saga 1893 - 1896

1,000 Days in the Ice, Norway's Fridtjof Nansen was a pioneer of polar exploration.
Article by Hampton Sides - writing for the National Geographic. The Tamshee really enjoyed reading this article on the exploits of the true pioneer of polar exploration. To survive so long in such a barren wilderness was a remarkable feat of endurance.
Photograph by Fridtjof Nansen
Photograph courtesy National Library of Norway Picture Collection
Out in the cold fjord, on a spit of rocky land just a short ferry ride from the city center, Oslo has created a kind of national cemetery for famous ships. It's a Norwegian thing—what other country would build public crypts around its most beloved boats and enshrine them for the ages? Out here on the Bygdøy Peninsula, visitors can spend days rambling through splendid museums that house ancient Viking longships, 19th-century fishing vessels, even Thor Heyerdahl's famed balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki.
But the most striking of Oslo's nautical temples is a pointy glass-and-metal structure that rises from the waterline in the shape of an enormous letter A. Inside, basking in the filtered light, sleeps a sturdy wooden schooner, built in 1892, called the Fram.
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