Written by John Ridgway, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1974 (OUT OF PRINT)

"You wanna go up there, in two ten-foot rubber boats?" the captain asked. He gestured with his hands to emphasise the futility of our project.

"That's a helluva piece of country. These glaciers on the sides of the mountains - they're just stuck on, waiting to come crashing thousands of feet down into the sea. There are rapids here in the narrows, its not much over twenty yards wide and the icebergs are grounded by the tide. The cliffs are so high they blot out the radio. Apart from the icebergs grinding about in the channel, the glaciers will be calving now with the onset of spring. That will mean avalanches and tidal waves as a result. Out here on the Pacific coast there's a terrific swell, and here, there's a tide-race."

The captain continued with his gloomy forecasts, but eventually reached a point where there really weren't many more disasters left to be imagined.

"We sure hate to lose good men," he said.

And so began the first attempted crossing of the Gran Campo Nevado Ice-Cap in the southernmost tip of Chile by John Ridgway, his wife Marie Christine, Richard Shuff, for three years Chief Instructor at the John Ridgway School of Adventure, and Krister Nylund from Sweden.

As well as navigating the Magellan Straits in their frail dinghies, the party crossed an unknown ice-cap, and climbed both the Great Northern Glacier and Monte Inaccessible. The result is a humorous but exciting story of high adventure and discovery in an inhospitable world.

Postscript 2003 by John Ridgway. I’d crossed the North Atlantic by rowboat and then crossed it alone by sailboat. I’d been down the Amazon. So, what next for a young feller running an Adventure School? Try crossing an ice-cap in Patagonia, that’s what…

Good practical leadership experience in a far away place. What memories. How useful, when we returned in the years to come.

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