Into the Ice
The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author Mark Synnott has climbed with Alex Honnold. He’s scaled Mount Everest. He's pioneered big-wall first ascents, including the north-west face of the mile-high Great Trango Tower, and skied monster first descents. But in 2022, he realized there was a dream he’d yet to achieve: to sail the Northwest Passage in his own boat-- a feat only four hundred or so sailors have ever accomplished—and in doing so, try to solve the mystery of what happened to legendary nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin and his ships, HMS Erebus and Terror.
Only a few hundred vessels have ever transited the Northwest Passage, and substantially fewer have done so in a fiberglass-hulled boat like Polar Sun. But Mark was determined to return to the Arctic, where he cut his teeth as a young climber, and in the process investigate one of the great mysteries of exploration: What really happened to Sir John Franklin and his entire 128-man crew, which disappeared into these ice-strewn waters 175 years ago?
In this pulse-pounding travelogue, Mark Synnott paints a vivid portrait of the Arctic, which is currently warming twice as fast as any other part of our planet. He weaves its history and people into the first-person account of his epic journey through the Northwest Passage, searching for Franklin's tomb along the way-- all while trying to avoid a similar fate.
In Into the Ice, Mark and his crew race against time and treacherous storms in search of answers to the greatest mystery of all time: What is it that drives someone to risk it all in the name of exploration?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Synnott (The Impossible Climb) delivers a thrilling account of his 2022 journey through Canada's inhospitable Artic islands in search of the truth about what happened to the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845. Synnott gives glowing descriptions of the landscape ("Dark streaks of rain slanted down into the valleys, where fog poured into the sea like vapor from a witch's cauldron") while recapping heart-pounding encounters with blizzards, gales, polar bears, and an Arctic typhoon—all in a 47-foot fiberglass sailboat that could crack open like a walnut if caught in the ice. Along the way, he recounts the lethal history of those who have attempted to sail the Northwest Passage—the once fabled route from the Atlantic to the Pacific that, due to global warming, has recently become occasionally navigable. While some clues about the Franklin Expedition's fate had already been discovered by previous explorers, Synnott's goal was to locate the tomb of its leader, John Franklin, which is believed by researchers to hold the expedition's logbooks. Though he doesn't ultimately find it, he develops a strong hypothesis about its location based on the oft-overlooked oral testimony of Inuits and his own archival sleuthing. Synnott and a single crewmate also, astonishingly, complete Franklin's journey, fully traversing the Northwest Passage—one of fewer than 100 vessels to have done so to date. It's a page-turner.
