Dog sledding - perhaps the most effective form of polar travel even today. In February 2022 I went to Tromso with my family and tried it out. Initially sceptical of an organised tour type activity, I loved it. The landscape is breathtaking, the dogs enigmatic and the history is grizzly and fascinating in equal measure.

Dogs and polar travel go together like a horse and carriage. Sled dogs are capable of running for miles day after day, they can be fed on hunted meat rather than having to carry fuel and perhaps most importantly, they keep morale up in the human teams, something a skidoo could never do. In these most remote and harshest of places, mental state is everything. These inter-species sled teams are tight knit.

Knowing that and seeing it first hand made it harder to learn that during the first successful expedition to the South Pole led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, only 11 of the 98 dogs came back alive, the rest were killed for their meat.

Roald was a contemporary of Shackleton, they were racing to the poles. The story goes that Roald laughed when he heard that Shackleton took horses on his expedition. The horses didn’t do well, most of them died from the conditions. Polar exploration is a grizzly endeavour.

On a slightly less gruesome note, during the gold rush in Alaska, gold prospectors travelling up through the USA would take any dog they could get their hands on. Dogs sold for three times as much in gold prospecting towns. The sled dogs don’t look like a typical husky because of this, they’re mongrels with long legs and almost limitless energy.

From what I saw these dogs LOVE what they do, they bark and howl and wag their tails when they know they’re about to run. There’s something about hearing dozens of dogs all howling in the cold air that resonates with something primeval in us.