The ice-quake survivor

Rosie Stancer was raised to be a lady, not a polar explorer, said Lucy Cavendish in The Times (U.K.). A great-niece of Britain’s late queen mother, Stancer discovered her vocation in 1996, when she heard a radio program about a planned all-female expedition to the North Pole. “I was in the bath,” says the 53-year-old. “I jumped up and told William [her husband] I needed to go on that expedition.” Since then, she has trekked to the South Pole twice and is about to leave her husband and 11-year-old son, Jock, to make her second solo attempt on the North Pole. Her first, in 2007, ended badly, she says. “Everything seemed to conspire against me.” Besides losing two toes to frostbite, she nearly died in an ice-quake. “I heard a terrifying noise, like ice cubes rattling. There were mountains of ice coming down toward me in folds.” She grabbed her sleds and ran, “but I knew I couldn’t outrun it. So I sat down, and took out the picture Jock had drawn for me before I left and stared at it.” In its squiggles, she saw her son’s face. “He was looking at me, smiling. I felt calm. I knew I was going to miss Jock,” she says, blinking rapidly, “but the end was nigh.”

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