Training for a ‘world-first’ Antarctic expedition while living on the Sunshine Coast is making one extreme sports enthusiast use his creativity.
From roller skis to pulling tyres in the forest to a combination of both, James McAlloon has been forced to get inventive as he prepares to live out his polar exploration dream.
Last year the Alexandra Headland resident walked more than 5000km from the Sunshine Coast to Broome to help raise funds for South Americans who had “lost it all during COVID”.
But now he is preparing for a never-attempted sea-to-summit trek in the frozen continent.
During the 10-week trip he plans to summit the tallest mountain in Antarctica – Mount Vinson – from the country’s coastline.
“I’m very excited. It’s all becoming very real very quickly,” he said.
“It’s 1200km of skiing and nearly 5000m of elevation.
“The expedition combines different disciplines you don’t normally see in polar expeditions. It’s reflective of the old expeditions that were done in the heroic age.
“It combines polar exploration across uncharted areas, meandering through crevasse zones, climbing glaciers and polar mountaineering.
“It’s a massive project and it brings together all the skills and experience my expedition partner Henk Morgans and I have accumulated over the last 10 to 15 years.”
Mr McAlloon is already well acquainted with the country as he works in Antarctic tourism and has ample mountaineering experience.
“I have done a lot of climbing throughout the US, Patagonia, New Zealand and Africa,” he said.
“Then I’ve done some bigger kinds of endurance expeditions like a sea-to-summit of Kosciuszko twice and one of Kilimanjaro in Africa,” he said.
“Antarctica has always been the number one dream. It combines everything I love about the different disciplines of running, hiking, navigating and climbing, and puts it all together in a really pure way.”
Once he had decided to do the Antarctic mission, he soon realised no one else had attempted it before.
“I was trying to find information on how to do it and no one had, so we’ve had to invent pretty much all of the preparation,” he said
Before the epic sea-to-summit next November, the expedition partners will embark on a few smaller expeditions to Greenland, the Arctic and New Zealand to train in similar conditions.
“You have to be quite creative and inventive training here for it,” he said.
“Quite a lot of it is education and skills stuff … we don’t have snow, so it’s things like roller skis, instead of real skis, pulling tyres instead of pulling sleds, rock climbing instead of ice climbing.
“You make do.”
He said he trains five days a week “pretty much anywhere and everywhere”.
“One of my favourite places to tyre pull is Ewen Maddock Dam,” he said.
“You might see me walking around the local hills with a heavy back pack or pulling tyres.
“The roller skis are shorter skis on wheels, with the binding setup exactly the same so it allows you to simulate skiing and the movements and muscles of skiing on pavement.
“My favourite place to pull tyres on the roller skies is on the 3km strip of footpath just north of the Maroochydore River. I definitely get a lot of people calling out and taking photos.”
But he said the most challenging part of the journey was the preparation.
“Like most big trips, it takes two years to prepare, so when we start 90 per cent of the work is done,” he said.
“All the preperation is a bit like an iceberg, everyone sees the expedition but they don’t see everything it took to make that happen.”
Another exciting aspect of the trip is teaming up with some science institutions – including the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the Polar Collective – to conduct a climate survey.
“We will basically carry these climate-measuring devices, which allows us to collect a huge amount of climate data that will go into some research projects,” he said.
“Because we’re pulling it behind our sleds with our own power, it’s one of the most eco-friendly climate surveys done.”
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