Bernard was the first Canadian to cross the biggest ice cap in the Northern Hemisphere on skis. Greenland is the best training ground for an expedition to the Antarctic.

They set off from Isortoq, a little village on the east coast of Greenland, and followed the glacier upwards for several days, to a plateau over 2 500m high.

Three very experienced skiers, Thierry Pétry, Benoît Roy and Bernard, battled high winds, crevasses and sasturgis, pulling 100kg loads.

They crossed the Arctic Circle and arrived 23 days later on terra firma, at the foot of a glacier, very dangerous and crisscrossed with crevasses. Their great solitary adventure finally took them all the way to Kangerdlugssuaq.

As soon as they returned, Thierry and Bernard began looking southward... and undertook the last phase in their preparations for their Antarctic expedition.

FACTS AND FIGURES

600km on skis, a load of 110kg for each skier, 2 550m altitude to the top of the path across the ice cap, 6 500 calories a day of which 55% was fat, 11 hours of skiing a day for 22 days, a budget of $40,000 and...1 million memories! A Norwegian skier, Nansen, was the first to make this crossing, in 1888.

TESTS

The Greenland expedition gave Bernard and Thierry a chance to measure their physical and psychological endurance and their ability to withstand the cold. It was also an opportunity to test their equipment in conditions quite similar to those prevailing at the South Pole:

• radio transmitter
• global positioning system (GPS)
• satellite telephone
• CTA Space System computer and transmitter
• Argos telecommunications satellite
• distress positioning beacon
• lithium batteries
• pulkas (sleds pulled by the skiers)