Real Survival Stories - Swept Away in Antarctica: Great White Chaos

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Two friends from Australia attempt the first unsupported crossing of the Antarctic Peninsula. The brutal conditions of the world’s southernmost continent have defeated many an intrepid explorer. But Peter Bland and Jay Watson are undeterred. Disaster strikes though, in the middle of the night. When Peter is mysteriously swept away, it’ll be down to Jay to find his mate and keep him alive… A Noiser production, written by Paul Olding. For more on this story read A Step Too Far: Peter Bland and the Obsession of Adventure (https://www.peterbland.com). For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of Junior Chicken, McDouble, or Chicken Snack Wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. It's Monday, January 29, 2001, at the end of the world. It's early morning in the desolate, frigid landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula, a land of seemingly endless ice and snow.

More than a thousand kilometers from the southern tip of South America, it's a place of unforgiving isolation. A biting gale blasts across the tundra. It whips up tiny bullets of ice, which flurry all around, reducing visibility. A biting gale blasts across the tundra. It whips up tiny bullets of ice which flurry all around, reducing visibility. Inside a cave, dug out of tough snow on the side of a steep cliff, two lifelong friends are hunkered down in a small tent. Australian explorers Peter Bland and Jay Watson are alone in this vast, white wilderness. They have secured their tent with ropes and skis, but it still shakes violently in the

storm. The pair are nearing the end of an astonishing adventure, but today it's clear they are going nowhere. I was blowing like 60 knots, like 100 kilometres an hour, and the wind was buffeting us. All we're going to do today is stay put in our tent and let the storm blow over. The only problem is their food supplies are outside, packed inside two sleds, secured 10 paces away. They'll need to get them at some point. With temperatures well below freezing, stepping outside for any reason could spell disaster. Still, Peter volunteers.

I'll step out of the tent and I'll go and get the food out of the sleds. And I'm coming towards the end of my memory because I've got a condition called PTA, which stands for post-traumatic amnesia. But I do remember leaving the tent. Peter ventures outside into the tempest. His friend, Jay, remains tucked up in his sleeping bag. He writes in his diary about the last few days of their journey. Three minutes pass, then four, and Peter hasn't returned. Odd. Jay calls out, but can hear nothing, aside from the tent's fabric whipping in the wind. Something is definitely wrong. So after a while, he thinks, oh, Pete's been out there for a while, so he opens up a tent and he looks out and he sees that both the sleds are gone

and so is his best mate. Stepping out of the tent, Jay is met with a scene of utter destruction. All around, the ice and snow has been violently churned. Large lumps of rock lie scattered here and there. Above, a huge chunk of the mountainside has fallen away. An enormous avalanche has swept by with terrifying force, and Peter is nowhere to be seen. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice?

Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet Peter Bland. He's a Melbourne farmer and family man, but also a polar explorer of great ambition. In 2001, Peter and his best friend Jay are attempting the first unsupported crossing of the Antarctic Peninsula. Despite their experience, the Earth's southernmost continent is harsh, unforgiving, and totally unpredictable. And when Peter is blindsided by a violent natural

disaster, he will find himself teetering on the edge of life, at the edge of the world. I experienced fear. I experienced pain. I experienced being in a situation where I couldn't just get out of it with sheer determination or charm or charisma. I hadn't probably experienced that before in my life. That was the first time I really got hit hard. I'm John Hopkins from Noise of This, is real survival stories. It's Thursday, January 11, 2001, on the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost tip of the world's southernmost continent. This monochrome landscape is made up of blinding white ice and dark, fang-like mountains. The only color is a huge, cloudless, piercing blue sky,

which today stretches from horizon to horizon. It's midsummer, a time of near-perpetual daylight, and the temperature is relatively mild, hovering just above freezing. But this is Antarctica, where nothing is predictable. The surrounding sea ice is melting. On land, glaciers are laden with dangerous cracks and deep crevasses. This morning, the fierce, katabatic winds scream relentlessly across the landscape. Two men stand with the ocean behind them Observing the desolate terrain

They are Peter Bland and Jay Watson Two Australians about to embark on a monumental mission They're going to try to travel across this icy wilderness The Antarctic Peninsula is a long, jagged finger of land Jutting out into the Southern Ocean. Covering over 200,000 square miles, it's more than twice the size of the UK. It's also practically uninhabited, with just a few human souls working away at scientific

research stations. The only other life occasionally found on land? Penguins, seals, moss, and lichen. This place goes by several names, Graham Land in Britain or O'Higgins Land in Chile. For those who have been there and experienced it up close, it is the Great White Chaos. The two Aussies are going to film their expedition as they go, in the hope of creating a documentary of their endeavours. There's no camera operator.

It's just them, alone, on the ice. I say to Jay-Z, right, I'll run ahead there, I'll set up the tripod, the camera, run back. Let's hook onto the sleds and let's make history. You know, let's do this big hero shot of us walking past the cameras, right? In fairness, what the pair are doing is worthy of documentation.

Peter and Jay hope to make the first unsupported crossing of the peninsula. Travelling from east to west, they'll have no dogs, no mechanical assistance and no resupply. Everything for their trip, all their food, shelter and climbing equipment, is packed inside two rigid kayaks. The boats allow them to adapt to their ever-changing surroundings.

They can paddle through open water and then drag the kayaks as sleds when walking across solid ice and rock. That's the theory, anyway. We start walking and we can't move. The kayaks are too heavy. We just could not move them. Oh, hell's bells. After a bumpy start, the men find smoother terrain

where they can more easily drag their boats. And so the adventure begins. This may be an unsupported crossing, but the pair have a contingency plan. They've chartered a yacht, the Toluca. After sailing for five days down from South America, the Toluca has dropped Jay and Pete off at their starting point, Hope Bay, at the northeastern tip of the peninsula. The yacht will now travel around the coast and pick them up at the end of their journey. Toluca's skipper is experienced yachtsman Roger Wallace.

Jay had sailed with Roger before on the yacht Toluca, so that was going to be our support vessel, and they would drop us on the eastern side of the peninsula, and then the plan would be that we would kayak our way across the bay and then we'd go up a glacier and then we'd drop to the other side. One thing the team hasn't got is expedition insurance. Costing hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars. They simply couldn't afford it. For Pete and Jay, their only insurance currently sits on the Toluca,

as it carries a small but experienced support team who can jump into action should the need arise. We weren't just taking anybody. I mean, they had to be, you know, decent mountaineers in case we did need a rescue operation or in case we did need support. So, you know, Jay's brother Andy came and Nigel and John and Philippa and Mitch, who were friends of ours, and they also paid their way to come. The scarcity of funds means the expedition is on a very tight schedule. They only have the budget to keep the yacht for a limited amount of time.

They have 23 days to make their crossing, a journey of over 300 kilometres across some of the most difficult and perilous terrain on Earth, from slushy, melting sea ice and craggy mountains to crevasse-cut glaciers and snowy rock fields. The place isn't called the Great White Chaos for nothing. People ask me just recently, why do you do it, what do you get out of doing it?

You get this real sense of yourself being tested. I haven't discovered where else, not in business, not in day-to-day sort of living, do I get tested like that? So that's what I get out of these pursuits, you know, that testing of the limit. Pete's love of the great outdoors goes right back to his early childhood. He grew up in the wild and untamed Australian outback,

working on cattle stations. As a youngster, he was enthralled, reading about the adventures of great polar explorers. I idolised their pioneering spirit, taking on harsh elements and their capacity to not give in and to pursue their passions despite the circumstances. It was at school in Melbourne that Pete first met his expedition partner

and kindred spirit, Jay. Even from an early age, it was clear they'd be firm friends. We went to boarding school together, you know, since we were 13 years old. We both loved the outdoors. He's super, super reliable. Yeah, bulletproof, strong. When I say strong, I mean mentally strong, just a smile and a joke and a laugh about no matter what life chucked at him.

So that's the kind of person I would take on a trip above skill set every day of the week. Still only in his mid-30s, Pete has achieved a great deal and gone far, literally to the ends of the earth. He's one of a tiny number of people to have stood at both poles. All the more remarkable given that he's twice undergone major heart surgery. But now fit and healthy and drawn by the challenge of completing a world first, Pete and Jay have been planning their Antarctic expedition for some time.

We'd go and have a game of tennis and then straight after the game, we'd go up for dinner and we'd pull out a chart and we'd look at these charts from all over the world and kind of what hasn't been done, what would we love to do, where could we go and explore and test ourselves. But at several points, the expedition nearly didn't happen their original sponsor pulled out then on the journey to south america pete lost his passport next their kayaks went missing in transit for several days and on top of all that officers from from the Australian Antarctic Division strongly advised them not to go at all. The superstitious might call these bad omens. Given what happens next, maybe Pete and Jay

should have heeded the signs. With TD Direct Investing, new and existing clients could get 1% cash back. Great! That's 1% closer to being part of the 1%... Maybe, but definitely 100% closer to getting 1% cash back with TD Direct Investing. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.

It's now mid-January 2001, three days into the expedition. The weather has been fair and the duo are making good progress. So far, they've pulled their kayak sleds across rocky terrain at the top of the peninsula, and have now turned south. Their plan is to trek down the east coast, eventually hitting the Victory Glacier. But they're walking on unsteady ground. They're heading across an enormous stretch of pack ice, formed by the freezing of seawater. It can be tens of meters thick, but it's unattached to the shoreline and thus remains mobile.

During the summer months, there is a real chance huge chunks can break off without warning and drift out to sea. Danger lurks with every step. One time I fell through the ice and the deal is if the other person falls in quickly chuck them the rope to haul them out. When you do fall through the ice you're wearing skis, all your gear, you put your arms out wide, you've got your sled behind you, you know, you're pretty much toast. With just seconds before the icy water sends Pete into hypothermic shock, Jay jumps into action, throws him a rope and hauls him out.

It's a close call, a reminder that down here things can go south very quickly. The following morning, as Pete and Jay travel on, they see the pack-eyes becoming thinner and sparser, until they finally reach open water. The blinding white land makes way for the mesmerizing deep blue of the ocean. An inquisitive seal pops his head above water to investigate these interlopers before disappearing back beneath the waves. They prep the boats. Hypothetically, things should get easier from here.

After all, paddling a kayak is preferable to pulling one. Pete and Jay secure themselves in their crafts and launch off the ice into the cold, open ocean. But it's immediately clear there is a problem. When we got into the ocean

we started paddling. There's footage there of Jay trying to go upwind and I'm filming him and making no progress at all, zero. Because the wind, the katabatic winds coming off Antarctica were just too ferocious. And so I said, Jay, mate, we just can't do it. We're just not going to make it. Like we've been 14, 16 hours into this wind. Let's just turn around and go with it at that point. And now it became survival. We're not trying to achieve something first. We just want to live, survive this day.

The wild winds blow them 50 kilometres off course. With some hard paddling and a slight improvement in the weather, eventually they make it onto an island off the peninsula's east coast. Vega Island isn't where they want to be, but at least it's solid ground. Hauling their kayaks out of the sea, they start walking west once again, knowing they're now wildly off track. Day 7 Having traversed the length of Vega Island, the pair need to paddle back to the mainland. But they're struggling to find a way off the western end. After hours of searching, one of the last coves they investigate appears to have an easy access route to the sea.

Getting back into their kayaks, they launch themselves off the rocks into the ocean and start paddling. The sun shines and the sea current runs in their favor, but it doesn't mean it's all plain sailing. All the splashes from my paddle, which froze on impact on my face and on my jacket, would then go down to my kayak and make it heavier and heavier and heavier. And so eventually, my kayak sank with all the gear inside of it. I was able to kind of make my way towards this iceberg. And I grabbed the ice pick. And I got it and I went whack into the side of this iceberg and then Jay comes along because he hadn't sunned because he's 10 kilos lighter than me

he hops on this iceberg and then he helps me out we both haul both kayaks out and we haul them up eight feet off the water level to the top of this iceberg, and we just start this hypothermic shivering, shaking, shaking, shaking. Sitting on the huge iceberg, the pair get their stove out and put on a brew. It takes a little while for Pete to dry off, warm up, and regain control of his body. When he's ready to move on, he gives Jay a nod, and the pair resume their journey. It's a draining process as they switch between paddling the kayaks through water and hauling them over sea ice. But they keep going until well past midnight. With almost 24 hours of daylight, night and day merge into one. Finally, the pair make landfall.

They have reached what they've been aiming towards for days. The Victory Glacier. To continue their expedition, Pete and Jay now need to tackle this behemoth of ice, which runs 15 kilometers along a narrow plateau. But to reach the top, they'll have to take on an incredibly steep and dangerous slope. Just then, as they consider the task ahead, the weather starts closing in. With piercing winds picking up and the mercury rapidly plummeting, there's no time to lose. They move quickly and start their climb. But with the added weights of

two cumbersome kayaks, it is an arduous task. We're going up the glacier and it gets so steep that we just can't actually haul it by ourselves. We had to literally, two of us would haul one sled. So you just do haul one sled, both of you, on your hands and knees, crawling up the mountain. And then you get up there and you do a rope length, 50 metres, and then you just leave that kayak on the ice, screw it in with an ice screw, hop on your bum, slide back down. Sometimes it was white-out conditions. Yo-yoing up the icy face, transporting one kayak at a time,

it takes an astonishing five days to reach the top of the peninsula plateau. For the two explorers, time is now running out. They simply don't have the cash in their budget to keep their support yacht waiting any longer than planned. Time is money, and they're already overdrawn. By the time we get to Victory Glacier, we're probably about 10 days, 12 days behind schedule. We had some pretty tough decisions to make. It's Saturday the 27th of January, 16 days in. Pete and Jay have delicately traversed the top of the narrow peninsula plateau.

Now, at its western end, the men have camped out for the night. Pete cooks up the evening's dinner rations. The friends consider their options. Studying their maps and electronic GPS, they have two potential routes available to complete their epic crossing. They can stick to the original planned course or take a shortcut. We couldn't crawl back 10 days, like we just couldn't. And we were supposed to drop down to Charlotte Bay,

which was a nice, easy descent. We agreed to make a shortcut, right? But the shortcut was not going to be down like a nice easy slope down to a bay. It was actually going to be a sheer vertical drop off perilous cliffs in Antarctica at the side of a mountain. Sheer drop down to get access to this closer point called Charcot Bay. So that was the call. Choice made. They radioed the Toluca to tell the crew about the new pickup point at Charcot Bay. Galvanized by their bold decision, the men settle in for the night,

totally unaware that this change of plans will soon have dire ramifications. It's the following morning, Sunday the 28th of January. With the sun once again shining, Pete and Jay begin their dangerous descent down a sheer cliff of ice and rock. Even as experienced mountaineers, the descent is extremely tough. But it's made many times tougher and more treacherous by their two unwieldy, kit-laden kayaks. So what we would do is we'd use the rope and the ice picks and the screws, and Jay would go down and then I'd lower a kayak vertically down a cliff to him, and then he'd clip it in to a screw. The kayaks each weigh as much as a fully grown man,

but they repeat this elaborate, exhausting process with the boats again and again. Then the wind starts picking up. Dangling off the ice cliff, the pair are soon engulfed in a snowstorm. There's no turning back now, but the weight of the kayaks is becoming too much, and Jay is struggling to hold them. Their rope belay system is pulling free from the ice. It can either hold Jay or the boats, but not all three. He's got no choice.

He's going to have to cut them loose. The kayaks plummet down the steep cliff face, crashing over icy crags, before disappearing from view. For Pete and Jay, it's now a race to the bottom. If they don't get down and find the sleds by nightfall, they'll be without their supplies and could freeze to death. The baleful wind continues to shriek around them. They slowly, painstakingly descend, limbs buckling and muscles full of acid, before they finally hit the horizontal ground at the foot of the cliff. Glancing around, they spot the kayaks in the distance.

Luckily they didn't tumble too far. The pair hurriedly gather their scattered supplies. It's been stressful and strenuous, but it looks like the gamble may have paid off. Thanks to this shortcut, they are now just 12 kilometers from their new pickup point. The end suddenly feels within touching distance. With a bit of downhill skiing, they could be with the yacht in a matter of hours. But in front of them is a series of large crevasses cutting across their route. These gaping ice chasms are often concealed by snow, making the path ahead incredibly dangerous, particularly

in bad weather. Right now, they can see a huge crevasse right in front of them, but how many others lie in wait? And so, with the storm intensifying, the explorers seek shelter. I said to Jay, mate, it's not safe for us to take on that crevasse tonight. We're going to have to really think and look at this in the clearness of a new day on how we're going to tackle this crevasse. Let's dig in and make camp.

We got the ice picks out and we dug in. We dug into this cliff to make a cave and then we put our tent inside this cave. Safe inside their tent, they make some tea and try to warm up. Slipping into their thick sleeping bags, they hunker down for the night. It's the morning of Monday the 29th of January. The howling gale has not abated. Pete and Jay's tent is still being battered by the swirling storm. Looks like they'll be here longer than expected.

Stepping outside is extremely dangerous in these conditions, but the men need to eat. We woke the next morning and it was blowing like 60 knots, like 100 kilometres an hour. It's not safe to walk today because the wind i'll step out of the tent and i'll go and get the food out of the sleds pete pulls on his expedition boots and jacket and heads out jay stays put in his sleeping bag and turns to his diary he writes about the difficult descent the day before. Minutes pass. Jay looks at his watch. Pete should be back by now.

So after a while, he thinks, oh, Pete's been out there for a while. So he opens up a tent and he looks out and he sees that both the sleds are gone and so is his best mate. Pete is nowhere to be seen. Heading out into the wind, Jay immediately sees the ice around the tent has been violently churned up, as if turned by a giant plough, with rocky detritus scattered right across the slope. Peering up, half the mountainside appears to be missing. He looks up and he sees that somebody's taken a giant ice cream scooper and kind of scraped half the mountain.

And you think, well, Pete's been taken by that avalanche and he's either dead, buried at the bottom of the mountain, or he's been taken by that avalanche and he's been thrown in that crevasse, the crevasse we saw the night before, and he's dead. Looking around, Jay can see the avalanche missed the tent by just a few meters incredibly he didn't even hear it over the roar of the wind but he can't dwell on this near miss he needs to find his friend jay calls out for pete but there's no response he turns and looks at the giant crevasse nearby,

a deep, sinister canyon in the ice. With most of their kit swept away in the avalanche, Jay now only has one rope left. He secures it to the skis pegging down the tent and gingerly approaches the edge of the crevasse. So what Jay does is he takes the rope, the 50 meter climbing rope, he ties it to an anchor point and he goes backwards,

slowly, slowly, slowly to the edge of the crevasse. And crevasses can go a long way, like they can just go forever, three kilometers. Anyway, he peers over the edge of this crevasse, almost to the absolute tail end of this 50-metre climbing rope, and he looks down and he sees the blood-splattered body of his best friend. Avalanches can travel at speeds of over 300 kilometers per hour, carrying as much as a million tons of ice and rock.

It's hard to imagine being struck with such force, and Peter's recollection of the moment he was swept away is very patchy. I've got a condition called PTA, which stands for post-traumatic amnesia. But I do remember leaving the tent, going across the ledge to the sleds. I'm at the sleds and I'm getting the stuff out for lunch. And I remember feeling this kind of a vibration like, imagine you're at, you know, King's Cross Station and the tube comes and you can feel those tubes before you can actually hear the train.

You can feel it. So I felt the train before I saw it. And then when I saw it, what I saw was an avalanche just rumbling it down. So now I'm talking to you from a memory that's been told to me because I don't remember what happens next. Dazed, barely conscious, Pete is now sprawled on a ledge inside the icy cavern. If it hadn't have been there, it would have fallen hundreds of metres to the very ledge inside the icy cavern. If it hadn't have been there,

he would have fallen hundreds of meters to the very bottom of the crevasse, never to be seen again. He's plummeted 40 meters, the height of a 12-story building. Jay can see the blood seeping from his friend's mangled body, staining the snow around him. It is impossible to tell if he's dead or alive. Looking down at his friend's twisted, motionless body, Jay has a dreadful choice to make. And there I am down there.

Now, by all reasonable measures, you'd say, well, he's dead, you know, and it's foolhardy to go down to him. He's dead. Staring down into the eerie blue light, Jay calls out, but Peter is still unresponsive. It's hugely dangerous to descend into the chasm.

But if there is any chance his friend is still breathing, Jay won't give up. I imagine he was listening to his gut. He said, you know what, the right thing to do is to do this. To go down and see if he's okay. See if he did survive. With the kayaks gone, Jay has very limited supplies. Just one rope, two ice picks and whatever is left in the tent. He packs up as much clothing, food and equipment as possible into his backpack.

And standing on the edge of the precipice, Jay proceeds to do something extremely brave. He then abandoned the rope, right, because the rope was no good to him. It had ended at the edge of the crevasse. He had no ice screws that he could attach to, so he had to do what's called a free climb. He did a free climb down using my ice pick, his ice pick,

and his crampons, which are the metal spikes which go on your boots. And he did a free climb down, down, down to me. Supported by just four small points of steel, Jay carefully makes his descent, delicately moving one limb at a time. The wall of the crevasse is a constant challenge. At some points it's as solid as a diamond, at others it's crumbly and insecure.

It may be many degrees below zero, but the physical exertion creates beads of sweat which drip into his eyes and blur his vision. It takes Jay over three hours before, finally, he makes it down to the ice ledge. But has this monumental effort all been for nothing? Stealing himself,

he approaches his friend. He didn't know I was alive until he actually laid his hand on my chest and then through the clothing you know with my Gore-Tex jacket he felt my chest rise and then he saw that I was breathing. He's been polaxed by a tsunami of ice

and thrown 130 feet into a freezing cold chasm and yet Peter is alive. But only just. Blood oozes out of his ears, nose and mouth. His limbs are grotesquely contorted. Shockingly, one of his broken bones is poking through the flesh of his buttock. The way I fell, and I was so twisted up, it looked like my back was broken. I must have landed absolutely vertical, like perfectly on my feet.

My left leg, and all the way it's gone through my left leg, up through my femur and out through my hip socket. You could definitely see that there was brain damage of some sort because I was bleeding out my ears and I had big bruising around. Jay kneels next to his friend and gently tries to rouse him. Initially, Pete remains unresponsive. But then, perhaps thanks to the sound of Jay's voice, he manages to open his eyes. He says that he looked in my eyes and he just saw, he just saw a fight. He just saw like this absolute sheer determination to not die here.

Like he just, he looked at me and then from there he said, right, well, Blandy is going to live. With Pete battling to just keep breathing, Jay gets to work. Unpacking his rucksack, he extracts their tent and cuts a slit through the base. He then manages to place it over Pete, offering him some protection from the freezing chunks of debris which continue to drop into the crevasse. But preventing him from freezing to death is the bigger challenge. He put an extra jacket around me, my duvet jacket around me, and zipped that up and then put the sleeping bag over me,

so all this trapping of the heat. He lay on me with his body temperature, you know, to give me his body temperature as well. Jay also needs to keep Pete hydrated. Around them, the giant crevasse forms a cathedral of ethereal blues and whites. Huge ice stalactites hang down like organ pipes. These icicles are made of the very purest water.

He then put a brew on, so he got the snow saw, a normal wood saw, but you chop the ice with it. And he made some blocks of ice and he melted it up. Jay tries to make Pete as comfortable as possible. The strange quiet inside the cavern is occasionally punctured by low rumbling crunches as the glacier shifts around them. There's still a significant risk another avalanche will tear down the mountainside and bury them alive. Again, Jay huddles up to his friend to share his body heat. It's going to be a long, cold, and dangerous night.

It's the morning of the 30th of January. Jay wakes and immediately checks on his friend. He's still breathing. Peter survived the night. But he's clearly in agony, and the painkillers from their first aid kit are having little effect. While he still can't move or speak, he is now becoming more aware of his surroundings.

Despite his severe internal injuries, this is a positive sign. I was able to communicate with blinking like one, you know, blinking and two blinks for no type of thing. But Jay is still left with some massive problems to solve. Will he be able to get help? And even if he can, how on earth do they get Pete out of here? It's evening as Jay scrambles out of the icy canyon. Outside of the crevasse, he is now able

to use the high frequency radio. Switching it on, he is now able to use the high-frequency radio. Switching it on, he speaks urgently into the device. It's a painful wait as he listens to the static, hoping his call has been heard. He's trying to contact their yacht, Toluca, which is 12 kilometers away. On board is their support team, and right now they need them desperately. Eventually, crackling over the white noise, a familiar voice comes through. Roger Wallace has answered the call and they say, congratulations guys, well done. You know, you've made history. We've got a chocolate cake, we've got champagne. And Jay-Z said,

whoa, whoa, whoa, you know know peace been taken my avalanche he's back's broken and we need help it's a few hours later and up in the pristine blue sky a small black shape starts to emerge far in the distance jay squints his eyes as the nebulous shape nears he starts to hear the dull whir of helicopter blades. Roger has put out an emergency call from the Toluca. Luckily, a passing cruise liner, the Marco Polo, has responded, sending its onboard helicopter towards Jay and Pete. Jay waves vigorously at the approaching chopper. But after circling above for several minutes, it makes a sharp turn and heads off back the way it came.

It's unsafe to land. With evening closing in, Jay clambers his way back down inside the crevasse. For now, he just has to keep caring for his friend. He melts more ice for drinking water and rehydrates rations, which Pete is able to suck up through a straw. He updated me with what had happened, like I'd made a call to Rog, you know, things like, oh, the helicopters, they're trying,

that sort of thing. So that communication was very important. Getting hot food into me was important. Keeping me from being hypothermic was important. Pete spends a second agonising night in the crevasse, in sub-zero temperatures, in terrible pain. Any movement is accompanied by the sickening sound of his broken bones grinding together. Through being hurt, I learnt my vulnerability.

I experienced fear. I experienced pain. I experienced being in a situation where I couldn't just get out of it with sheer determination or charm or charisma. I hadn't probably experienced that before in my life, and that was the first time I really got hit hard. First day, February the 1st, three weeks since the expedition began. It's 11.45 a.m., and once again Jay has made the dangerous, draining struggle up and out of the crevasse. He stands, shielding his eyes from the blinding sunshine, which reflects off the gleaming

snow. Jay has kept Pete alive for three days, but how much longer can they hold out? Suddenly, Jay sees something. In the expanse of white in front of him, he can just about make out three tiny figures slowly moving his way. It's three members of the Toluca crew, Nigel, John, and Jay's brother Andy. Knowing that a helicopter rescue may be impossible, the three men had set out from the yacht on foot. It's been an arduous eight-mile trek up a steep incline through deep snow. But they are finally here. The cavalry has arrived.

Shaking hands gratefully, Jay and the crew quickly formulate a plan to extricate Pete. With no medical stretcher on board the Toluca, they've had to improvise. And they take a cordless drill and they unscrew the door off the yacht to use the door as a stretcher and they take a roll of gaffer tape with them. And then it becomes a whole logistical operation of how they ever lift an 86-kilo guy vertically up out of a hole. With little more than some rope, some tape, and a door doubling as a makeshift stretcher, Jay and the rescue team get to work. Using a series of pulleys, the team manage to winch the yacht door and themselves down to the ledge inside the crevasse. Meticulously,

they then move Peter across and onto the improvised stretcher. Once in place, they strap and gaffer tape him as securely as they can. With the utmost care, they slowly manage to bring Pete, inch by inch, meter by meter, up to the surface. With a final heave on the pulley system, they drag him over the lip of the crevasse and into the fresh, cold afternoon air. Pete is free of what could have been his icy tomb. Barely stopping for breath, the rescue team start dragging Pete down the mountain as fast as possible. The Toluca's distress call has now been picked up by a Chilean military base on the nearby King George Island. Another helicopter is on its way,

but they need to reach a safe spot for it to land. Transporting Pete down the steep, uneven crevasse-strewn slope is far from easy. They're going along for a while, hauling me along on this door, four of them dragging this thing, plus all the gear. And Nigel turns to John and says, gee, it's been hard for a little while, hasn't it? They're pulling. And he goes, yeah, I wonder what's happened. And they turn around and the door had

flipped over and they dragged me in the ice upside down. Quickly flipping Pete the right way up, the team re-secure the stretcher and continue their descent. After hours of heaving and hauling, they eventually arrive at the helicopter rendezvous site. Clearing the area, they wait as the chopper approaches. It comes into land, then two paramedics jump out and rush over to Pete, immediately administering a morphine drip to help with the pain. Once sedated, he's transferred inside the chopper, ready to make the three-hour journey to a Chilean-run medical facility.

Jay watches as the helicopter launches into the sky and powers away across the vast horizon. Peter spends two weeks at the hospital on King George Island before being transferred out of Antarctica to Chile, where he receives further treatment. There he is joined by his wife Julia and 10-month-old daughter Olivia, who fly out to be with him. If it hadn't been for the Herculean efforts of his rescuers, plus his own willpower, he would never have seen his family again. So why did I survive? Having a team around me was super, super important.

Clear communication, decision-making processes, good equipment and inner belief in myself that I can overcome no matter what gets chucked at me in life. That must have been in there, even in my unconscious state, that must have been inside of me to survive what was being chucked at me in that moment. But Pete's recovery is slow, painful, and complex. Of all the savage injuries he has suffered, the blow to his head has the most lasting impact.

Brain damage is pretty horrific of how it can really muck you up when you kind of come back and try and reintegrate or it mucked me up pretty bad because I occurred for myself as a big, powerful, successful guy, well-connected, well-loved, married, you know, kid, all the rest of it. But when I came back, I just wasn't that guy. Like I had just slurried my words and I had to sleep the whole time and I didn't know anybody's names.

I forgot them all and I was scared. So that was a long, long journey. It will take a year of speech therapy, physiotherapy and ongoing medical attention before Pete returns to some semblance of his former life. Looking back at the fateful expedition and its aftermath, he believes there are vital lessons to be learned. I couldn't start recovering until I admitted where I was.

And if I stayed stuck of, oh, this shouldn't have happened, you know, there shouldn't have been an avalanche or it's not my fault, then I couldn't have recovered. I had to take full responsibility for everything, including the stuff up with the sponsorship, the kayaks, the gear, my decision to make a shortcut. I had to own all of that and its impact and the risk that I put to my family. The journey that I went on from that moment on made anything that I'd done or any challenge that I'd faced looked like nothing compared to the journey that I then took on,

which was recovering and reintegrating into society, into work and into marriage and into fatherhood. It makes everything else pale into insignificance. Today, Pete remains justice-driven and ambitious. He now runs a series of programs and expeditions which help to develop leadership skills. Through this work, he has raised millions for charity and led hundreds of novices on trips back to Antarctica. And though ultimately Jay and Pete never succeeded in their goal of crossing the Antarctic Peninsula

unsupported, the fact that they survived the ordeal together is in many ways their crowning achievement. It would only take one slip, one rock, one bit of ice, one little thing, and then you'd have two guys dead. Did he do the wrong thing to come down and get me? Well, hindsight says he did the right thing. Not long after then, my son was born, and I named him after Jay. His name is Angus Jay, Robert Bland. And, you know, I asked Jay to be his godfather. So the thanks, you know, lives on into the next generation. In the next episode, we meet Annalise Cochran,

a marine conservationist who lives in Hawaii. But in 2023, the island paradise she calls home transforms into a hellish inferno. As a colossal wildfire tears through her historic seaside town, the terrified locals are driven towards a small patch of coastline. There, cornered by suffocating smoke and blistering flames, Annalise will be forced into a terrifying decision. That was kind of the moment that I realized, like,

I am trapped in like a horseshoe ring of fire and my only out is the ocean. That's next time on Real Survival Stories.