LOS ANGELES -- An expedition of 'gloriously mad' Englishmen has reached Los Angeles on its way around the world the long, hard way -- over the south and north poles.
A ship carrying Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes' Transglobe Expedition, making the first polar circumnavigation of the earth, docked Wednesday to a warm greeting from Mayor Tom Bradley who presented Fiennes with keys to the city.
On the dock was Sir Ranuph's wife, Lady Virginia Fiennes, who had returned to London to attend to expedition business. Earlier she spent a winter in a cardboard hut in Antarctica, alone for 11 months except for her terrier, Boothy.
Sir Ranulph, 36, and Lady Virginia, 33, began planning the expedition in 1971. It was her idea.
They left Great Britain in September 1979 to follow a 52,000-mile course around the world, roughly following the Greenwich Meridian and international dateline.
Prince Charles, heir to the British throne and official expedition patron, sailed with the explorers when they left England and praised them as 'gloriously and refreshingly mad.'
Fiennes, formerly an officer in the armies of Britain and the Sultanate of Oman, and his wife were joined in the expedition by four others, chosen from a pool of 40 volunteers after tests on the Greenland ice cap.
The expedition's 1,200-ton polar research ship, the C.T Bowring, carried the explorers from Britain to France. They drove through France and Spain, crossed the Mediterranean and drove southward through Africa, across the Sahara to the Ivory Coast.
The Bowring carried them to Capetown, South Africa and from there to Antarctica, where the expedition arrived in January 1980. The members spent the next 10 months 230 miles inland, sheltered by prefabricated huts of triple-walled cardboard from temperatures of 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and winds up to 100 mph.
In October 1980 -- spring in the Antarctic -- the expedition's 'ice team,' made up of Fiennes, Oliver Shepard, 36, and Charles Burton, 39, set off to cross the 2,200-mile-wide continent on snowmobiles pulling sleds carrying food, fuel and other supplies.
Lady Fiennes, who maintained the base camp, flew in to join them when they reached the South Pole. The men continued on, completing the crossing -- the second ever -- in a record 78 days.
Along the way, they heard radio traffic from the scientific camps that dot the bleak continent that three South African scientists were missing, lost in a blizzard. The three snowmobilers found the scientists, who were near death.
The ship picked them up at McMurdo Sound and proceeded to New Zealand and Australia en route to Los Angeles.
The group planned to spend 10 days in Los Angeles, the expedition's only U.S. stop, giving a public exhibition at the dock of their equipment and methods, before continuing to Vancouver.
By June, the explorers will be in Alaska to head up the Yukon and McKenzie rivers by inflatable rubber boat toward Tuktoyaktuk in the Canadian Arctic. They plan to winter on Ellsmere Island and the 'ice team' then will begin the trip over the North Pole to Norway in February 1982. After going over the North Pole, they plan to reach England in the summer of 1982, almost three years after their departure.
