LEAVE IT TO A PAIR OF STOUT-HEARTED BRITS to turn their honeymoon into a full-scale expedition with a high self-inflicted-suffering quotient. In May 2001, Oxford-based newlyweds James Tremayne, 29, and Louise Hoole, 31, began the first leg of a seven-year adventure trip that they’re calling the Footsteps of Man. The idea is to retrace the 40,000-mile path of human migration from Africa to South America, a journey that anthropologists believe ancient peoples embarked on 120,000 years ago. After a trek through South Africa last year and a spring break to nurse knee and foot injuries, the couple are now crawling up the east coast of Africa en route to Mozambique, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Then they’ll roll their gear sleds down the Blue Nile through the Sudan into Egypt, on to the Middle East and Siberia, across the Bering Strait, and down the west coast of North and South America to Cape Horn.

40,000-mile stare: Hoole and Tremayne in Oxford, England

James, an ebullient, self-deprecating ecologist, says the idea for the expedition popped into his head in 1991, after he was staring at a world map. Ten years later, he convinced his fiancee, Louise, then a London nurse, to join him, and they abandoned their careers to live as “experimental archaeologists.” Sponsored for now by a $10,000 fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and $20,000 of their own money—the entire trip will cost $500,000, which they hope to raise through additional sponsorships—they’ll walk 5,700 miles a year, resting one day a week while following a trail of archaeological and ecological sites suggested by the dons at Oxford and Cambridge. They hope to shed light on whether ancient humans migrated along Africa’s east coast or through its interior.
Of course, the world they’re traveling is a bit different from that encountered 4,000 generations ago. In South Africa last spring, they crossed paths with a band of down-on-their-luck white supremacists who were trying to make a living skinning bush cats in a primitive pelt factory. And while the ancients faced diseases and deadly animals, at least they didn’t have to deal with crabby border guards. When it’s all over, James and Louise plan to write a book, but not before taking a long, long, break. “After seven years,” says James, “I think I might just sit down for a while.”

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THE IRON CURTAIN IS GONE, but Russian officials apparently still get nervous when they see a growling, tanklike vehicle heading their way from the direction of North America. On April 7, the Ice Challenger Expedition—a bold, strange, $1 million attempt to drive an amphibious, seven-ton converted ski-run groomer dubbed Snowbird 6 across the Bering Strait—came to grief when Russian border guards reneged on an earlier promise to allow the mechanized beast free access onto Russian ice. (See March 2002.) The plan of Britain-based expedition leaders Steve Brooks and Graham Stratford was to drive more than 56 miles from Wales, Alaska, to the Russian mainland. But for reasons still unknown, officials on the island of Big Diomede—the journey’s halfway point—said no. The frustrated ice challengers decided to can the mission, but first they charged Snowbird 6 across the international date line into Russia, unzipped their bright-orange survival suits, and mooned the Ruskies on Big Diomede. Why the provocative fleshing? “Well,” says Mark Cullum, the expedition’s safety expert, “we wanted to show the Russians the white dove of peace.”

Snowbird 6, briefly penetrating Russian icespace

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SCHOLARS GENERALLY AGREE that the earliest North Americans crossed over from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge—an Ice Age isthmus that linked the two continents about 11,000 years ago. This month, Steve Brooks and his partner, Graham Stratford, plan to head the other way, traversing what is now a 60-mile expanse of shifting ice aboard a contraption that once groomed bunny slopes in Ontario. Their goal? An adventure prize that is part Mallory, part Magoo: to become the first humans to drive across the Bering Strait.

The Ice Challenger team on a practice run off Wales, Alaska

It remains to be seen whether the $1 million project, dubbed Ice Challenger, represents a milestone of exploration or merely an expensive lark, but these guys aren’t kidding around. Brooks is a wealthy 41-year-old London real estate developer who bankrolled five years of research and as many prototypes; Stratford, 40, designs expedition vehicles out of his office in Hereford, England. Together they’ve created Snowbird 6, a seven-ton ski-slope-grooming machine that they’ve rejiggered into a kind of high-Arctic monster truck. On solid ice, the neon-green beast plods along on caterpillar tracks at ten miles per hour. Upon reaching a stretch of slush or open sea, Brooks and Stratford pull a lever, lower a pair of five-foot-diameter revolving pontoons, and drive right in. The hollow aluminum outriggers provide both propulsion—picture a pair of side-mounted corkscrew propellers—and, as they lift the vehicle and crew safely clear of the water, flotation.
Clever stuff, but one has to wonder, What’s the point? “I wanted to push beyond my normal boundaries,” says Brooks, who says the expedition is neither charity event nor marketing stunt, but rather a simple kick. “I learn so much about myself that way.”


The Journey to the Center of Steve will begin when a rented Hercules transport plane deposits him, Stratford, and Snowbird 6 in Nome, Alaska. From there, they’ll drive 160 miles north and establish base camp in the tiny Inuit village of Wales. After topping off the antifreeze, they’ll steer west, bound for the two-square-mile island of Little Diomede, 20 miles into the Strait, where they hope to stop for the night. Alarmingly, at that time of year, Little Diomede tends to shrug off large chunks of its glaciers, which could easily turn even the beefiest snowcat into tinfoil. So if things look dicey, Brooks and Stratford won’t stop at all—instead they’ll push on to Lavrentia, Russia, completing the journey in three days straight.


As one might guess, the locals think the Brits are nuts. “You could say they are in for a wild ride on 15-foot ice cubes,” says David Carraway, a U.S. Coast Guard chief based in Port Clarence, Alaska, about 60 miles south of Wales. He reels off a litany of dangers: drifting house-size bergs, hungry polar bears, windchills dipping to minus 94 Fahrenheit, and (if the pontoons fail) the chance of a plunge into 28-degree water that would kill Brooks and Stratford with cold before they have a chance to drown. The last time someone tried tackling these hazards in a vehicle, the elements prevailed. As part of a 1993 effort to travel overland from London to New York, BBC producer Richard Creasey abandoned an ice-rescue machine called Arktos on the Russian side of the crossing, its jet-propulsion tubes hopelessly clogged with slush.


After a series of promising field tests last March in Alaska, Brooks believes his machine will fare better than Creasey’s. Should he and Stratford conquer the strait, they hope to repeat the trick as part of a 2003 bid to drive around the world. If stubbornness counts for anything, Brooks is halfway home.


“We’re not coming to this believing we’re the world’s greatest explorers,” he says. “But we might be among the most persistent.”

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With Russian officials refusing to grant them permission to make landfall at Lavrentia in the state of Chukotka, however, the team was forced to end the planned 56-mile crossing from Wales, Alaska, half way.
Despite the setback, expedition leader Brooks was thrilled that Ice Challenger had proved the crossing was possible. “Were it not for Russian red tape, we most definitely could have completed the mission.” Brooks said. “But I didn’t fancy my team getting tossed in the gulag.”


Brooks had worked on Russian permissions for two years, spending more than $10,000 toward the goal. He had visas and letters of support from the Chukotkan governor, Roman Abramovitch, and had actually received permission to cross in 2001 but never made the attempt after Snowbird 5 floundered during sea trials.


This time around Snowbird 6 performed fantastically. But the Russians sat on the paperwork for months, leaving Brooks little choice but to hope for the best during the weather window in the Strait.


On April 5, with high pressure over Cape Prince of Wales bringing northeasterly winds that push the floes toward Russia, the team set off. When they approached the date line on April 6, Russian border guards demanded the expedition go through the official customs port of Provideniya—some 200 miles south of Lavrentia—or else they would send military helicopters after the team.


Brooks and Stratford deviated from their path around the two Diomede islands (Little Diomede is American, Big Diomede is Russian) and headed directly toward them to wait for news. They had initially avoided the Diomedes because ice floes compact around them, forming massive glacial fields. Consequently, the team stood on dangerously thin, snow-covered ice pans and used chainsaws to mow a path around the east side of Little Diomede toward the date line and Big Diomede on the north side.


Brooks’s fixer in Russia, Rupert Wilbraham, tried in vain to obtain permissions for Snowbird 6 and the team’s safety support helicopter. But it was the weekend and he couldn’t get in touch with the proper officials.


In the final moments, with no good news coming from Russia, the Ice Challenger team used a GPS to locate the date line. Safety and logistics experts Mark Callum and Harry Rouse jumped aboard the front running boards of Snowbird 6 and the foursome rolled into Russia by about 50 feet on the flat, frozen sea between the islands. Once there, all four unzipped their bright orange survival suits, and mooned the inhabitants of Big Diomede—a dozen or so Russian soldiers, perched somewhere atop the massive rock.

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