| Tom Avery |
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| living people | |
| avery, tom | |
| english explorers | |
| 1975 births | |
| alumni of the university of bristol | |
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Avery was brought up in East Sussex , Brazil and France . The catalyst for his passion for adventure was when as a seven-year-old boy, he first read about the adventures of Captain Scott . He joined the Harrow School climbing club at the age of 16 before going on to read Geography and Geology at the University of Bristol. It was whilst at Bristol that he began leading his own mountaineering expeditions to places such as the South American Andes , New Zealand , and Tanzania . The highlight of Avery's climbing career took place in 2000 when he led a ground-breaking British expedition to the previously unexplored Eastern Zaalay Mountains of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. The team scaled nine unclimbed and unnamed summits up to 20,000 feet in altitude. He named one of the mountains, Pik Quenelda, after his mother and another, Pik Fiennes, after the expedition's patron and one of Avery's childhood heroes, Sir Ranulph Fiennes . Just days after turning 27, Avery entered the record books in December 2002 by becoming the youngest Briton to ski to the South Pole. His team was confronted with treacherous crevasse fields and blizzards within hours of beginning their 705-mile journey. Frostbite, altitude sickness, broken skis and crevasse falls make their achievement all the more remarkable. On the rare occasions that the winds blew from the north, his team each used a state-of-the-art Power Kite to power them across the ice, and by covering the last 47 miles to the Pole in a non-stop 31-hour ski, the four men broke the South Pole speed record in a time of 45 days and 6 hours. His highly acclaimed account of the expedition, ''Pole Dance'', was Avery's first book and published in 2004. In April 2005 Avery electrified the exploration world by recreating the disputed 1909 Arctic expedition of the American Commander Robert Peary , during which he claimed to have become the first man to stand at the North Pole along with his five companions, Matthew Henson , Ootah , Egingwah , Seegloo , and Ookeah . Mystery and controversy had surrounded Peary's expedition for nearly a century with most polar experts arguing that his astonishing 37-day journey to the Pole was impossibly fast. Traveling in a similar style to Peary’s with teams of Canadian Inuit dogs and custom-built wooden sledges, Avery's team set out from Peary's original Base Camp at Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island to prove the sceptics wrong and match his time. After an epic 500-mile journey across the most unforgiving environment on the planet, the exhausted five-strong team rewrote the history books and arrived at the Pole with less than five hours to spare in a new world record time of 36 days, 22 hours and 11 minutes. Avery's website - {Link without Title} |
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