20. 05. 2008

Report on a journey to the North Pole

Petr Horký

The book describes the longest hike to the North Pole, successfully undertaken by a Czech expedition. Peter Horký and the polar explorer Miroslav Jakeš reached the North Pole on 12 April 2008 at 11:57 CET.

A two-member expedition of Peter Horký and the experienced polar explorer Miroslav Jakeš set out to the Pole from the 88th degree of northern latitude, i.e. from the same line from which the renown mountaineer Reinhold Messner started his journey to the Pole a few years previously.

Excerpt from the book:
I don’t even know anymore how many times I imagined how fabulous it would be, that I would arrive at that fascinating place and start screaming with joy. The Pole was not very far off in that moment and the landscape, if you can call planes of ice floating on the waters of the Arctic Ocean a landscape, was reasonably hospitable around the Pole – no pile-ups of ice boulders, no crevasses with water traps, only a snow-covered plain, flat as a table.

We were not far from our target when we heard a loud hum from behind us. A helicopter whizzed above our heads and landed exactly on the Pole. And then Italians started spilling out of it into the snow. It was just as if we were in a Forman film. Mrzne má panenko! – toto se moc neda prelozit, protoze v anglictine se Hori, ma panenko! jmenuje The Firemen’s Ball. A tourist excursion to the North! The Italians ceremoniously opened a bottle of bubbly, uttered a toast and tried to sing something. However, it was utterly freezing and we could not hear anything properly. I felt a bit daft in that moment.

Year published: 2008