In this March 1998 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Denise Martin — the Canadian guide who helped lead the first all-women team ever to ski to the North Pole — sits down a year after twenty amateur British women reached the top of the world in a relay across the Arctic ice. She was one of only two guides who skied the entire relay, from the Canadian coast to the Pole, which makes her one of a very small number of people who saw the whole thing.
The centre of the account is the ice coming apart. Somewhere out on the pack, a stretch of frozen lead turned to open water under three of them. How she got out is the reason this footage exists, and she walks Petty through it without dressing it up. Around that she describes the conditions the team actually held to: zero frostbite, zero snow blindness, one tent for six women, and a ski pressed into service as a pole.
She also explains how the expedition came to exist at all — a film financier’s idea, taken up by Caroline Hamilton — and talks about the Sedna effect, the Inuit legend that followed them across the ice. Petty asks why so few women go to the poles, and why Martin keeps going back, and what Outward Bound is really for. At thirty-one she is already looking north again, describing the pole-to-pole crossing she wants to attempt in 2000. What she cannot know yet is that she will become the first Canadian woman to ski to both the North and South Poles, and that nearly thirty years later she will still be one of the very few women guiding in the polar regions at all.
Skiing to the North Pole is all but over now, ended by open water and cost, so a 1997 all-women traverse cannot be repeated. This is one of the few filmed accounts of it, told by someone who was on the ice for every mile. Unseen since its original 1998 broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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