The New Yorker:

From 2007: A seventy-five-year-old explorer returns from the North Pole.

By Lauren Collins

Eight weeks ago, Barbara Hillary, a seventy-five-year-old resident of Queens, was on her way to becoming the first African-American woman on record to reach the North Pole. She had been taking her vitamins, hoarding fleece, and enduring gruelling treadmill runs at Rockaway Park’s Cyberzone gym. The one part of the journey that was not proceeding smoothly, as she explained then, was the matter of how to pay for it: she had raised thirteen thousand dollars, but she needed almost twice that amount to make the trip. Hillary seemed convinced that she would overcome this financial hurdle—“I believe mental poverty is a self-inflicted condition,” she said, as if to reify the expedition into existence. And many of this magazine’s readers—including an eleven-year-old boy from Louisiana, who wrote, “You have had a great life,” and a man who sent a two-dollar bill, for luck—shared Hillary’s determination. Fortified by their good wishes and their contributions, Hillary arrived in Longyearbyen, Norway, on April 16th.

Upon her arrival, she had to pass a fitness exam. After a battery of tests, she was deemed fit to participate in the expedition. “Boy, did I feel good,” she said the other day, over sandwiches near Union Square. “That was an emotional shot in the arm for me.” Hillary set to packing a knapsack full of gear: camera equipment, snacks, a hunting knife (“in case I met a polar bear and he didn’t have good table manners”).
From Longyearbyen, the expedition, organized by an outfitter called Eagles Cry Adventures, travelled by helicopter to Base Camp Barneo, which is situated on a moving ice floe roughly thirty miles from the North Pole. The camp had no running water, continuous daylight, and—perhaps most alarming to Hillary—unisex tents. “In the middle of the night, some burly Russian gentleman comes walking in, lies down, and starts snoring,” she said. “You don’t have any choice but to adjust or go sleep outside, where it’s twenty to forty below.”

On April 23rd, after several days of iffy weather, a helicopter deposited Hillary at a point on the ice that put her within skiing distance of the North Pole. She told me, “Part of you is saying, ‘I can’t believe I made it this far’; another part is saying, ‘Let this thing be over with’; another part, ‘Damn, it’s cold’; and another part, ‘The time is here. Can you rise to the occasion?’ All of that is compounded by the fact that the sun is shining at three-thirty in the morning. Talk about a head trip.” Swaddled in layers of long underwear, a red-and-black snowsuit, and a blue hooded shell, Hillary looked like a sumo wrestler on skis as she slogged across the desolate tundra. Pressure ridges—“incredibly beautiful ice sculpture made by nature”—yielded intermittent wonder, but, otherwise, the journey was as illimitable as the terrain. “It just seemed like I would never get there,” Hillary said. “I asked my guide, ‘When am I going to reach the North Pole?’ and he didn’t say anything—he just kept going and going.” After several hours, the guide stopped and turned to Hillary. “He said, ‘Barbara, you’re standing on top of the world,’ ” she recalled. “That’s when I went crazy!”

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