1981: NORTH POLE SKYDIVE

How We Won The Cold War: A Personal Account of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times

Chapter Five
1981: NORTH POLE SKYDIVE

With the wind chill, it was around 50‑60 degrees below zero. I sat on my heels in the back of the Twin‑Otter and looked out the open door of the plane to the sea of white below. We were 8,000 feet above the ice and making our jump run. Some tiny black specks appeared on the ice in the distance. "Left five degrees!" I called out through my face mask, and Rocky nudged the Otter toward the specks.

"More left!" I yelled again, and as Rocky looked around to make sure, I nodded and pointed left with a gloved finger. When the spot was set, I pointed ahead, yelled "Straight!" to Rocky, then closed my eyes and turned inward. About thirty seconds to go.

"All right, man, how do you feel?' I asked myself. "Are you nervous?" I took a deep breath and relaxed, just letting whatever emotions were there come up. I had expected the reply to be, " What, are you kidding?!? I'm terrified!!" But no, to my surprise, I felt incredibly calm and peaceful.

Memories of the past four years raced through me like a flash flood. All the ecstasy and magic ‑‑ then all the pain and grief and mourning. A year ago, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to live or not. Learning how to sky‑dive when you don't know if you want to live is a good way to find out.

Even if you don't consciously want to commit suicide (which is easy ‑‑ just don't pull the ripcord), you'll find out real quick if there's a hidden death wish somewhere inside you. When you're in the air, if something goes wrong ‑‑ which happens more than once when you're learning ‑‑ you have got to figure it out and solve the problem right now, or else you bounce.

I had to learn, because a group of sky‑divers had hired me to take them on an expedition to the North Pole in an attempt to break the world record for the "Most Northerly Parachute Jump."

Taking people to remote places in the world was how I made a living. I led the first‑ever commercial expedition to the Pole in 1978, and this would be my fifth time there. In addition to the jumpers, I had a bunch of ham radio operators who wanted to broadcast for the first time from 90° North, and an ABC film crew from the American Sportsman television show.

It was a total zoo, I was an emotional basket case barely afloat in an ocean of grief, an ice crystal fog blanketed the Pole and we had to land on the ice more than 50 miles off true north.

With a grand total of 12 training jumps under my belt at a drop zone in Perris Valley, California, I jumped out over the Arctic Ocean with the rest of the guys, and landed in a jumble of jagged pressure ridges half a mile from the plane. Although we consoled ourselves by claiming a freefall record (the record we were trying to beat was done by a static line jump), it was a somber and quiet flight back to the Lake Hazen base camp on Ellesmere Island.

We ‑‑ I ‑‑ had failed.

Now it was one year later. April 15, 1981. A year before, I didn't even know how to pack my parachute ‑‑ the other jumpers had to do it for me. For a year I practiced, going every weekend to Perris. Now here I was ‑‑ and I was alone. No other jumpers, just me. The specks way down there on the ice were regular people who wanted me to take them to the top of the world for the sheer exhilaration of it.

This time, there was no fog. We had landed the Otter bang‑on 90 North according to our computer navigation system, everyone stepped out onto the ice, we took the doors off the plane, dumped the fuel drums out, I got my gear on, and Rocky and I took off again.

I asked Rocky ‑‑ Capt. Rocky Parsons, a good old boy bush pilot with thousands of hours flying in the Arctic ‑‑ to take the Otter to eight grand as I wanted over a mile of free fall, then "spotted" the jump run.

I opened my eyes from my short meditation. The tiny dark specks were right beneath me. "Cut!" I yelled to Rocky and made a slashing gesture with my hand across my neck.

Rocky nodded and throttled back the engines to idle. I gave him a thumbs up, and bailed out the door. I had never felt so serene and at peace with myself in my life. The struggle to survive was over. I knew now for certain that I wanted to live and that I loved being alive.

I launched out into cold empty space. 8,000 feet up in the air, falling out of the sky and flying free. I spun around. Below me was an unlimited expanse of white ‑‑ the blue cloudless vault above, the sheet of the frozen Arctic Ocean below stretching to the horizon and beyond in every direction. Directly beneath me was the center of all these millions of square miles of ice: the North Pole, the apex of the earth's axis around which the entire planet spins

Here I was, falling at 120 miles an hour right on top of the world's spinning axis.

The ice was far from featureless. The bright sun made it sparkle and brought out various tints of light pink and turquoise. Flat meadows of ice pancakes were everywhere, amidst piles of rubble ice where the cakes had smashed together. Pressure ridges ‑‑ where fault lines in the ice created by the ocean currents ground against each other, buckling up enormous blocks of ice 10, 20, 30 feet high into ridges that ran for miles ‑‑ coiled and writhed in crazy quilt patterns.

Off in the distance, there was a large polygnia ‑‑ an area of open water in the ice pack. In another direction, a blue­-black lead ‑‑ where a fault line had split the ice apart creating a river of water ‑- ­snaked through the frozen sea. When leads freeze back over, they make a seductively smooth runway of ice, a tempting landing spot. Rocky had to resist the temptation, and searched for an "old frozen‑over lead" that had been locked in the ice all winter and was at least 3‑4 feet thick. Luck was with us, for we had found one exactly at 90.00 North.

It was towards that spot I was hurtling. Years before, I had seen a film showing this sky‑diver in the air having the time of his life doing somersaults, back-­flips, and triple‑gainers. His partner, filming him with a helmet camera swooped in for a close‑up. Coming out of a double back‑flip, he looked into the camera with an expression of totally wired rapture. I promised myself that someday, I was going to experience that myself.

That someday was now, sky‑diving onto the North Pole. I did front‑flips, back‑flips, quadruple‑loops, and danced in the sky, whooping and hollering at the top of my lungs. It was a supremely ecstatic moment ‑‑ the way it should be when you accomplish something that goes into The Guinness Book of World Records.

Coming out of a gainer, I looked at my altimeter: 2500 feet above the ice, time to get serious. From a stable face‑to‑earth position, I grabbed the toggle of the hand‑deploy, tucked into a velcroed pouch on my harness leg strap. Pulling out the little white pilot chute, I glanced over my shoulder to see it fluttering, then let it go. I looked up to see the main canopy exploding out of the container bag and start to grab air. This is the moment of truth, when the canopy either deploys correctly or malfunctions. I reached for the steering toggles and yelled up at the unfurling parachute, "Come to papa, baby!" With a loud final whap!, the canopy opened completely.

Silence. Before there was the tremendous whoosh of the air while in free fall, accompanied by my loud exuberance. Now it was so quiet, save for the gentle rustle of the air flapping the tail of the canopy.

Still. A second ago, I was screaming through space at 120 mph. Now I was floating in mid‑air, seemingly motionless.

Cold. During free fall, I was too wired and pumped to notice the cold. Now I noticed that my fingers, wrapped through the straps of the steering toggles, were aching and going numb. Although mittens are much better at keeping your fingers warm than gloves, I had to wear the latter for grabbing the hand‑deploy and working the toggles.

With the altimeter reading 1500 feet, I thought I might as well have a little fun flying the canopy. Pulling down hard on the right toggle, I swooped it into two tight spins, then hard down on the left and S‑turned it back. Time to get serious again.

I set up the approach. No longer specks, the people on the ice below me were looming closer. I flew past them and the ice came up to meet me. As I pulled down hard on both toggles, the canopy flared, stopping my forward motion. Boots on the ice, stand‑up landing. World‑record. And since you can't get more north than ninety, a record that will stay put. As one edition of Guinness says, "Wheeler's record is one that cannot be bettered after setting."

Out came the champagne. We poured it into plastic champagne glasses and drank it down quickly before it froze. Down here on the ice and with no wind chill (I've rarely experienced any wind right at the North Pole), it was still a brisk 25 below Fahrenheit. Rocky came in to land and started refueling with the fuel drums, as everyone took pictures and reveled in being at one of the world's most magical places. Refueling done and doors back on, we clambered back in for the five‑hour flight back to Ellesmere.

The Ice Ages are still in full swing on Ellesmere Island, the northernmost island in the Canadian Arctic. To witness that world of gigantic glaciers and majestic black peaks jutting sharply through them, of massive ice caps and vertical mile‑deep fiords, of icebergs by the thousands, the world of musk‑ox and polar bears, of 24‑hour sunlight where the sun just revolves clockwise in the sky around you and never sets, and to make friends with this world's inhabitants, a special people who call themselves the Inuit ‑‑ all of this is to have an experience you will tell your grandchildren about.

And that's the definition of an adventure: an experience you never forget for the rest of your life. That's my business, giving people those kind of experiences. I certainly had done that for the people with me on this trip, I thought, as the Otter flew over the stark magnificence of Ellesmere.

After a rest at the Lake Hazen camp, and a couple of days visiting the Inuit village of Grise Fiord, we were back in the community of Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, staying at the house of my friend Bezal Jesudason, and his wife, Terry.

Bezal's phone, connected by a satellite hook‑up, soon began ringing off the hook as the news got out that I'd made it, friends calling with congratulations and the press calling for the story. Bezal and Terry took all the excitement with equanimity, as they outfit most every expedition attempting to set some sort of North Pole record.

One particular phone call, however, was different. Terry handed me the phone with her eyes wide as saucers. "It's for you, Jack, a call from Washington, D.C. ‑‑ it's The White House."

"It has to be Dana," I responded. Sure enough, the White House operator, friendly with only a hint of imperiousness, announced, "This is the White House calling for Dr. Jack Wheeler…" "You've got him," I replied. "Hold the line for Mr. Rohrabacher, please."

"Hey, Jack, I hear you made it on the money!"

"Right on the button, Dana."

"When you get back, you'll have to come visit us so I can show you the pictures."

"Pictures?"

"Yeah, I had one of our spy satellites take a break from watching the Soviets to check out what you were doing up there ‑‑ we got some great shots of the top of your head."

"Thanks. How's Washington?"

"Springtime! The cherry trees are in blossom, Ronald Reagan's been in office three months, and it's springtime in America!"

"Dana, thanks for calling. I'll give you a call when I'm home in Malibu."

"FTC!"

"FTC…"

Actually, on a modern parachute, there is no ripcord for the main canopy (although there is for the reserve); instead, there is a "hand‑deploy" of the pilot chute.

The Geographical North Pole is at 90 North Latitude, which is at right angles to the Equator at 0 Latitude (thus the South Pole is at 90 South). There is no Longitude, since all lines of longitude or meridians, 0 to 180 East and West, meet at the top (and at the bottom) of the world.

The record which we were trying to (and I subsequently did) beat was set by a Canadian, Ray Munro, in 1969, who made a parachute jump from a static line onto the Arctic Ocean at 89 39'N, i.e., 21 nautical miles off True North. To reach the area of the Pole, we fly commercially to Resolute in Canada's High Arctic, charter a DeHavilland Twin Otter with hydraulic skis to a base camp at Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island, either lay down a fuel cache up on the ice or charter a second Otter as a tanker for refueling, then fly the remaining 500 miles to the Pole. If the weather and ice conditions are just right, we can land on the ice at 90 North. The only safe time of year to do this is in April, after the sun comes above the horizon in late March, but before the sun starts to break up the ice.

Meaning simply, "The People." Eskimo is an Athabascan Indian pejorative meaning "eaters of raw meat." Inuit look upon the term as an insult.

Lake Hazen is the world's northernmost lake, 60 miles long, a mile or so wide, and deep.  Hazen's outlet is Ruggles River, which flows into an arm of the Atlantic Ocean narrowly separating Ellesmere from Greenland.  Ruggles is the northernmost river in the world – and it never freezes!  At 40 below (the point at which Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet), I've seen water running free at the outlet.  It's not geothermal, and I've never heard an adequate explanation.  It's the only free running water for millions of square miles in the Arctic where there is naught else but snow, ice, and bare rock.