July 14, 1897. The ice cracks under me like a rusted detector coil. I’m flat on my back, shoulder screaming, watching the Örnen—our balloon, the Eagle—tatter into the wind. Silk shreds whip past my face, and I taste frost.
“Salomon!” Knut yells, hauling me up. His goggles are frosted, breath coming in white puffs. Nils stumbles over, camera clutched to his chest, bellows caked in ice. “We’re alive,” he says, but his voice shakes.
No. We’re stranded. Seven miles from the North Pole, on a floe that shifts like quicksand. Our balloon, once 32 meters of hydrogen and hope, lies in rags. And home? A million miles south.
The Launch: When the World Cheered
Three days earlier, Stockholm cheered like we were heroes. I—Salomon Andrée, engineer, dreamer—stood in the basket, Knut at my side (Arctic vet, scar across his cheek), Nils grinning (camera in hand, ready to photograph the Pole).
“Steady,” I yelled, cutting the ropes. The Örnen rose, silk envelope glowing in the sun. Crowds waved hats, dogs barked, and for a minute, I thought: We’ll do it.
We’d spent months prepping. The balloon? Triple-coated silk, steel frame, 32 meters tall. “Like a detector coil for the sky,” Knut joked. We packed pemmican (tastes like leather), coffee, matches (stupidly, we forgot to waterproof them), and Nils’ glass plates—he wanted to shoot the Pole in color.
But the Arctic doesn’t care about plans. By July 13, the envelope iced over. Hydrogen hissed through cracks. “Drop ballast!” I shouted, kicking sandbags overboard. We skimmed the ice, basket scraping jagged floes.
Then—snap. The main rope gave. The Örnen collapsed, and we crashed.
The March: Frostbite, Pemmican, and a Stupid Idea
First rule of surviving a balloon crash: salvage what matters. We dragged out the tent, Nils’ camera, my notebook, and tins of that godawful pemmican. The matches? Soaked. Knut laughed, bitter. “Guess we’ll eat cold.”
We lashed the basket remains into a sledge, loaded it with gear, and started walking. Goal: Kvitøya, an island 200 miles away. “Rescue’s there,” I lied.
The ice isn’t solid. It shifts, groans, opens up into black leads—water so cold it burns. Knut fell in once, up to his waist. We hauled him out, stripped off his frozen pants, and rubbed snow on his legs till he screamed. “Better than frostbite,” he panted.
Nils kept taking photos. His fingers were swollen, blue, but he’d prop the camera on a chunk of ice, click, and grin. “These’ll shock the world,” he said. I just wanted to shock a fire.
By August, rations ran thin. We ate leathery horse meat, drank melted ice that tasted like metal. Then Knut spotted it: a polar bear, dead, its carcass half-frozen. “Liver’s good,” he said. “Vitamin A.”
Stupidest mistake of our lives.
The Bear Liver Delirium
We cooked that liver over a sputtering stove—smoke stinging our eyes, stomachs growling. Tasted like iron, but we scarfed it.
That night, the delirium hit. Nils started scribbling equations on the tent walls: “Gov = gov * sine(i)^2 ???” His camera clattered to the ice, lens cracking. Knut laughed till he cried, pointing at snowmen that weren’t there. “They say we should go home,” he muttered.
My head throbbed. I tried to read the compass, but the needle spun. “Wind speed’s 20 knots,” I slurred, writing in my notebook. “Pressure dropping. Science must know…”
The next morning, Nils didn’t wake up. Knut followed by noon. I lay there, cold seeping into my bones, and thought: We tried.
Last entry in my notebook: “If this is the end, tell them we touched the ice. That’s enough.”
Found: 1930, Kvitøya
Thirty-three years later, a Norwegian team stumbled on our camp. The tent, half-buried. My notebook, frozen shut. Nils’ camera plates—still intact.
They developed the photos. There we were: grinning in the balloon basket, hauling the sledge, huddled in the tent. Ghosts in fur coats, frozen in time.
They buried us on Kvitøya, under the midnight sun.
Field Notebook Takeaways (Scrawled in Frost)
- Gear fails. Adapt: Our balloon iced over, but we walked. Your detector’ll chatter—tweak settings, don’t quit.
- Hunger makes fools of us: That bear liver? Like chasing a false signal. Stick to the plan.
- Stories outlive us: Nils’ photos, my notebook—they’re why we’re remembered. Your finds? They’re stories, too.
- Respect the terrain: The Arctic doesn’t care about your dreams. Neither does mineralized dirt. Slow down, read the signs.
Dumb Questions I’d Ask Myself Now (Over a Melted Drink)
Q: Did you really think a balloon could cross the Pole?
A: (Laughs) I thought desire was enough. Like swinging a detector in a trashy park, thinking you’ll find gold. Hope’s a powerful drug.
Q: What’s worse—Arctic cold or a detector that won’t stop beeping?
A: Cold fades. A bad signal? It haunts you. Makes you dig when you should walk.
Q: Worth it?
A: (Pauses) Nils’ photos. My notebook. Proof we tried. That’s always worth it.
They say the ice on Kvitøya still gives up pieces of our gear—rusted tent stakes, shards of balloon silk. I like to think they’re like relics: small, broken, but full of story.
Ever chased a dream that crashed? A hunt that went wrong, but taught you something? Tell me. I’m all ears.