LEWISTON — They left
Canada on March 4 and arrived at the North Pole on April 25, skiing 480
miles across the Arctic Ocean.

“It’s a tough trip,” Tyler Fish said with a grin to a standing-room-only audience at Bates
College on Saturday night.

In 2009, Fish and John
Huston made the first unsupported American cross-country ski
expedition to the North Pole.

Fish, who is from
Minnesota, graduated from Bates College in 1996 and was a member of
the Outing Club. The club contributed to the journey that led him to
become an Outward Bound educator and an adventurer.

On their way to the North
Pole, he and Huston each pulled 300 pounds including four sleds filled with supplies
across the Arctic Ocean.

The ocean looks
like a frozen, solid mass. “It is frozen, mostly,” Fish said.
“But it’s like a puzzle. The pieces slowly come apart and come
together. When they come apart, they reveal 4,000 meters of the
blackest water you’ve ever seen.”

There were no showers. No
food was dropped. They used satellite phones. Their lifeline was a
DeLorme PN 40 GPS.

Before the trip Fish
weighed 200 pounds, heavier than his normal 180. While skiing to the
North Pole “it’s impossible to eat enough. You need to have
reserve.”

They never saw wildlife
except seals. “When we saw seals, we looked around for polar bears
because that was our biggest worry.”

Planning took three years.

On the first day: “The
plane lands. The plane leaves. It is the quietest place,” Fish
said. “There’s nothing to rustle. No wildlife. No people, nothing.”

The beginning was easy.
“We were still on the ice shelf and not on the ocean.” The skiing
was smooth.

Then came day two.

The audience groaned as
Fish played a video showing huge chunks of ice everywhere. The two
had to crawl and climb, moving only a few feet at a time.

It took seven hours to go
one mile.

The first two weeks were
tough with so much rubble. The temperature was 50 below zero. “We’re
just putting in our time. It is cold. It is slow. We will speed up
later,” Fish said.

They got past the first
two weeks. “The middle was kind of the sweet spot. Life is good.
We’re getting along. We take breaks.”

They stuck to a strict
routine, which Fish says was part of their key to success. They skied
for 90 minutes to two hours, then took a break. “Lunch was nuts,
butter, deep-fried bacon, it seals the fat in, and fudge. That’s what
we ate every day. But we had four flavors of fudge.”

Their daily schedule was
up at 5 a.m. to get ready. Out of the tent at 8, traveling from 8:30 to
6:30, dinner at 8, sleep at 9:30.

“Soon we were halfway
to the North Pole.”

By day 47, “we’re feeling
very good. We’re excited.” They became a bit over-confident. Fish
showed the audience a picture of the hole in the ice where “John
went swimming,” he said. “That was one of the toughest moments. We
had to get him out of the water, get him in the tent and try to warm
stuff.”

They decided to be
smart, not just fast. From then on they wore suits that kept them
dry as they swam across open water.

The wind picked up, which affected how the ice moved. The frozen ocean was moving south, taking
them away from their destination.

“You could only ski so
fast,” he said. Their way out of the Arctic was a helicopter which
would take them to the last plane ride off the frozen ocean in late
April.

“We went from ahead of
schedule to on schedule to behind schedule to not making it,” he
said. “It wasn’t like we were going to die. The helicopter was
going to pick us up wherever we were.”

They didn’t want to abandon
their goal. They decided to skip
sleep. In their last 66 hours, they had only three hours of sleep.

They got to the North Pole
as indicated by their GPS. They hugged, recorded a video.

Fish documented the moment
by writing in his journal: “Tired. Proud. Smart. Safe. Here. We’re
here.”

People often ask Fish why
they did it. The question is tough to answer, he said. Some don’t
get it. Some understand it was for the experience, the challenge.

“What now?” Fish asked
aloud. Work on a book, sit and dream about what they did. “Remember.”

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Tyler Fish, left, speaks to a packed room at Bates College on Saturday night about his 2009 expedition of skiing across the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. Fish, a Bates graduate, and John Huston were the first Americans to complete an unsupported cross-country ski expedition to the North Pole.