Sir Ranulph Fiennes on extreme cold

Ranulph (Ran) Fiennes has been described by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s greatest living adventurer. He was the first person to visit both the north and south poles by surface means, the first to completely cross Antarctica on foot, and has made the furthest north unsupported polar expedition and the first and longest unsupported of the Antarctic Continent. At age 65, he climbed Mount Everest.

Sir Ranulph took time out of his busy schedule to talk to Peter Moore about his book, Cold, his latest expedition, The Coldest Journey, and his biggest regret as a polar explorer.

How did you get into exploring?

It was when I was in the army, during the Cold War. I was stationed in Germany, along with French and American troops, facing the might of the Warsaw Pact armies across this line, the Iron Curtain. We spent month after month, year after year, waiting for them to attack, and they didn’t. As you can imagine, it was very boring for the soldiers so they, naturally, took their aggression out on each other and started beating each other up.

The officers were tasked with stopping this happening and they started taking us out on ‘adventure training’ – canoeing, skiing, climbing, that kind of thing. I did that for about five years in Germany, expeditions or adventure training. So, when I got thrown out of the army for not having been to Sandhurst, I suddenly found myself, after eight years in the army, with no job. So my wife and I thought we could turn that adventure training into some form of making a living.

Did you get any advice?

I was lucky enough to meet Chris Bonnington who had already started doing something similar. He’d also been a tank officer, and had turned climbing into a living for his family. What Chris had realised was that no one will pay you to plan, organise and mount an expedition, but if you get it sponsored, you don’t have to pay for it. And if it’s successful, you can make a living from it by spending the next couple of years lecturing and writing about it. So that became our policy too.

What first drew you to cold places?

It was tied into making a living as an explorer. You don’t get sponsorship unless there is a chance of breaking some world record or to be the first to somewhere. If an expedition does something that has proved impossible to predecessors, like getting to the North Pole without support, then that’s what you want to go for. Unless you were a climber or a sailor, the polar areas were an area you could concentrate on at that time.