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Poles apart: The first diabetic to walk to the North Pole has turned his gaze to the south
Monday, July 16, 2001 By Deborah Mendenhall, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
At first, the cracking sounded much like a shotgun going off as the large ice pans began to shift. It's a common sound at the North Pole, where the ice floes constantly drift, collide and form mountainous masses only to separate and drift again.
Will Cross and Jerry Petersen may be back from their trek to the North Pole, but another group of Pittsburghers is still confronting Arctic weather this July.
A team of roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University are on Devon Island, a Canadian island above the Arctic Circle, to test a solar-powered robot. Thus far, the Carnegie Mellon team has found Devon to be unseasonably cold and wet, with snow still covering about 40 percent of the ground last week. Daily Internet reports on the mission's progress are filed at the team's Web site:www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/sunsync/.
At this time of year, the sun never sets on Devon and the robot is designed to move in 24-hour synchrony with the sun so that it can keep its solar cells bathed in light. It's a technique that NASA might use to power some robots sent to explore polar regions of the Mars and the moon.
Devon Island's terrain and typically cold, dry summer weather roughly approximate some conditions on Mars, so the space agency uses it to test equipment and methods being considered for extraterrestrial missions.
But the sound grew familiar to Will Cross, 34, of Morningside, and Jerry Petersen, 36, of Jefferson Hills, who on April 11, began a 100-mile trek across the Arctic ice cap to the North Pole.
Adventurers and experienced mountain climbers, the men were there to train for a 730-mile South Pole excursion they planned for the fall. They wanted to learn how Cross, who has diabetes, would react to a high-fat diet, to strenuous exercise and to frigid temperatures -- all factors that pose increased health risks to diabetics.
The sky was brilliant blue and glittering snow spread before them one April day as the men pulled 100-pound sleds up a mound of ice blocks and jagged peaks that had formed in an earlier collide. The gun shot sound became a loud rumble, and the men realized that the ice pan they were walking on was about to crash with another.
They had only moments to figure out which section of nearby ice was more stable, and jump there.
"When the pans collide, there is so much friction it sounds like freight trains crashing," said Cross, a Pine-Richland School District teacher. "You can't tell if the ice is pushing up, or if the ocean is pushing up. We had a split second to throw off our stuff and dive off the ice, then we watched water from the ocean come firing up where we had been standing.
"We were lucky."
Safely back in Pittsburgh and recalling that trip, Cross and Petersen said they thought they would be in the final preparations for the autumn excursion by now. But instead, they have postponed it for a year while they spread the word about why they're going.
Cross, who has had diabetes for 24 years, and Petersen, whose father died of diabetes in 1992, are hoping to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Association.
"I'm itching to go," said Cross. "But even though we are ready, our goal is to raise money for juvenile diabetes research and we just need more exposure."
Now that they have proven that they can handle the physical demands of trekking to the South Pole, two Pittsburgh men are raising money to finance the expedition, as well as to raise money for diabetes research.
Expedition leader Will Cross said he and partner Jerry Petersen had planned to leave for the South Pole this fall, but will delay that adventure until November 2002 because it has taken them longer than expected to get contributions.
Contributions only trickled in to the Web site, www.curewalk.com, during a North Pole training mission in April, Cross said. A New York publicity firm has been retained to publicize the trip,.
In addition, the men are still looking for corporate sponsors, having raised only about $100,000 of the $400,000 needed for the Antarctic excursion.
The men hope to raise research money for Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes which occurs when the pancreas can't manufacture the insulin that helps cells process glucose, the sugar the body needs for energy.
It differs from Type 2 diabetes, which often begins during adulthood, in which the cells of the body do not use insulin effectively.
At the South Pole, the team will travel on skis or walk while pulling 150 pound sleds over some of the most rugged terrain in the world. The trip is expected to take about 60 days.
While the training mission won't immediately precede the South Pole trip, it served its purpose. Cross became the first diabetic to walk to the North Pole. And his body withstood a 6,000-calorie-a-day diet of chocolate bars and cheese and walking eight to 10 hours a day in average 30-below zero temperatures while pulling a 100-pound sled, all of which could prove deadly for people with diabetes.
Examinations and tests showed that Cross performed as well as Petersen, said Bret Goodpastor, a University of Pittsburgh exercise physiologist who monitored the men's diet and exercise.
On April 11, the men flew from Pittsburgh to Oslo, Norway, where they boarded a smaller plane and flew north to Spitsbergen Island. The next day a helicopter took them to the edge of the permanent ice pack about 100 miles from the pole.
Before they left, both men said they were concerned about running into polar bears, which are known for their aggression. But while they didn't see one bear, they faced other hazards.
More than once the men trekked all day only to end up at a dead end of sorts: at a "lead" or open ocean that separated the ice pans. Instead of circling back for miles to find a path across firm ice, they often camped at the edge, hoping the lead would freeze over before morning.
Usually it did, but the new ice would be the consistency of gelatin and the ocean could clearly be seen churning beneath, Cross said. The first step was to set up a haul line on the stable ice that would be connected to the men.
"We put our skis on this delicately frozen lead and watched the air bubbles come up," Cross said. "Then we slid our sleds carefully, every move so delicate but quick and we stayed with the rolling motion of the Jello. If you don't go with the movement of this rolling ice, it will cover the back of your skis and you're going in."
"The stuff is like concrete," Cross said. "Once you are in, it sucks you under."
Neither Cross nor Petersen went into the water, but an English member of another excusion group crossing the ice with the Pittsburgh men did fall in. The man was rescued, warmed up and changed into dry clothes, but lost three toes to frostbite after he returned to England, Cross said.
Repeatedly, the men had to negotiate the mountains of jagged ice left after ice pans collide.
"When the ice packs smash into each other, they create massive chunks of rubble and high cliffs. We had to pull our sleds to the top of those heaps, then bounce them down without having them run over us," Cross said.
Because the polar ice cap is always shifting, the men didn't know if they would reach the pole. But on April 20, they did.
Before the private Russian helicopter arrived to pick them up, Peterson telephone his girlfriend, Melissa Corcino, 32, and ask her to marry him.
"I thought, this could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing, but I'll never have the chance to do this again," said Peterson, a programmer and machinist at the Petersen Machine Shop. "So I went outside and wedged myself between two ice blocks and called her on the satellite phone.
"I said, 'I'm on top of the world, will you marry me?' She immediately said, 'yes.'"
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