Solo Mission

“We’re going to be OK. You’re such a worrywart. I’m doing all the work anyway. All you have to do is hang out back there.” Todd Carmichael is talking to his sled again, whom he affectionately calls the Pig. She carries the supplies, he pulls her and after a couple weeks, they’re starting to sound like an old married couple. “Don’t be afraid. Everything’ll be fine.”

You can’t blame Carmichael for hallucinating. Try setting the world record crossing Antarctica, stomping over 700 miles of snow and ice, your face and feet black with frostbite, your body shedding pounds faster than you can eat a stick of butter, nothing but you and ice and your sled Pig — try all that and see if you don’t go bat-shit crazy.

Indeed, Carmichael says he welcomed the occasional hallucination. Disconnecting from reality made him feel less alone and he could separate himself from what was happening to his body.

But on Day 37 — with only 47 miles left between him and the South Pole — his mind slipped another gear or two. And then it happened: the boneheaded mistake that could kill him. Carmichael was trying to fire up his stoves to melt ice for drinking water when he spilled a fuel canister over the last of his food reserves.

Had he been more lucid, he might have panicked. Or even done the sensible thing and slept for a couple of hours. Instead, he tore down his tent, packed up the Pig and without food or rest just started walking.

“Let’s move, Pig.”

Carmichael always had a taste for adventure, even as a kid in Spokane. Born in ’63, he grew up in a family of women, three sisters and Mom, and felt a bit like their mascot. He recalls having a long leash as a kid, free to explore the world on bicycle. As a teenager, he took up distance running and after class at Northwest Christian School, he’d race his sister’s school bus home, some 15 miles, to the Valley.

“He was very wild,” recalls his older sister, Lisa Wolfe, now an instructor at Spokane Community College. “He talked all the time. He never slept. He couldn’t concentrate on school work if you held a gun to his head because he was really interested in everything.

“My mother tried to rein him in, but he was always in trouble. He was always erecting something, building something, traveling somewhere … probably going somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go.”

Carmichael’s mother later moved the family to Spokane’s South Hill so he could attend Ferris High School, which had the area’s best cross country team at the time. Running became his life and he often did it alone — through wheat fields, down into Hangman Valley, up to Mica Peak. He recalls traveling across central Washington for running competitions and wondering how far he could get on foot through the arid landscape. In 1981, he ran on Ferris’ state champion cross county team.

A running scholarship took Carmichael to the University of Washington, where he studied business and then went to work at an accounting firm. Later, in 1994, with a nest egg built up, he moved to Philadelphia and with a partner founded a high-end coffee roasting company. Coffee became his life, his endurance test, as running had once been. “It was 24 hours a day coffee,” he says. “That’s what I thought about, that’s what I did.”

But by 2000, with the company raking in millions, Carmichael looked to take a break. He arranged to be dropped off at a tiny island in the South Pacific called Nagigia with about 150 villagers. “The idea was to go back in time … to learn from the indigenous people there how to survive,” Carmichael says. He spent the next two and a half months surfing, spearing fish and building a hut. It became a turning point. “During that time, I thought, ‘You know what, it’s very, very clear for you, my friend: Adventure and endurance is just part of your life. And it’s time you take it more seriously.’”

Before long, he was in Namibia, hooking up with a team tracking elephants through the desert and attaching GPS collars to the herd. He quickly moved from team treks to solo expeditions and made several return trips to Africa. “But trekking deserts has its limitations, and the limitation is how much water can you bring,” Carmichael says. “In 2004 [during a desert dune trek] the idea struck me: ‘Wait a minute. Antarctica is a desert, and they have loads of water.’”

A few months later, he was standing at the South Pole in a group that had trekked about 70 miles in eight days. By the end, he was wrecked. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve got some work to do here’ — and for the next four years, I went through a physical transformation,” Carmichael says. He gave up cigarettes, wine and fatty foods. He started doing eight-hour bike rides and runs. He dragged weighted tractor tires on roller skis around Philadelphia to prepare for pulling a sled across Antarctica.

In 2007, Carmichael set out with a partner to ski from the edge of the continent to the South Pole. Unfortunately, his partner hurt his leg early on and had to quit after a week. Carmichael continued by himself but — frostbitten and running low on food — he called for a rescue plane after 24 days.

He vowed to return the next year, at age 45. This time he’d go it alone.