Yorkshire Paralympic Champion Karen Darke on her world-first trip in Antarctica

Karen was a keen runner, climber and orienteer when she fell off a cliff whilst rock-climbing at the age of 21. She admits at the time she thought “I’d rather be dead than paralysed” but soon learnt that with friends, creativity and perseverance, most things are still possible.

It is thanks to those ingredients, combined with her adventurous spirit and a love of nature and the outdoors, that Halifax-born Karen has - to use her own words - a pretty extraordinary life. She spent more than a decade as a full-time athlete, winning a silver medal at the London 2012 Paralympics and becoming Paralympic Champion in the 2016 Games in Rio.

Now living in Inverness, Scotland, she is a transformational coach and motivational speaker. Her purpose, she says, is to inspire others through sharing her stories and experiences - and as an adventurer whose feats have included skiing across icecaps, kayaking at extreme latitudes of the planet, and handcycling the world’s biggest mountain ranges, she has some incredible tales to tell.

Karen has not long since returned from her latest trip, a journey across Antarctica, exploring mindset, technology and sustainability. “It’s such an incredible continent that it feels like you’ve been to another planet,” she says. “It is just otherworldly. There’s nothing about the world that we all know and largely occupy that relates to Antarctica, which is just this vast, vast wilderness…

"In our day-to-day lives, we’re almost so connected that we’re disconnected, because we’re not really in touch with ourselves or the natural world. In Antarctica, you can’t talk to anyone because there’s not connectivity and so you have to be absolutely connected with where you are and who you’re with. It was a very special experience."

The Pole of Possibility expedition and research project aimed to break world records and inspire ‘possibility thinking’ – the idea that with enabling technology, team and mindset, people can make the world healthier, happier and more sustainable. The expedition started in December at the 79th meridian west, at Union Glacier Camp and Karen and her teammates skied across the Antarctic plateau approximately following the 79th meridian to the South Pole. It was an opportunity for new records – a world-first for a female to sit-ski in Antarctica and a world record for the furthest distance ever taken by sit-ski in the continent.

“The highlight was the views,” says Karen. “I expected flat white and no views. But actually we were circumnavigating a range of mountains and it was stunning to see that. The other highlight was the weather. We had a lot of sunshine which meant we had lots of sparkly ice...As for challenges, all the things people are normally worried about going to Antarctica for were not even on my radar. It was all about how to stay healthy with paraplegia.”

Karen was joined by film-maker Mike Webster, who recorded the expedition through a documentary, and Professor Mike Christie of Aberystwyth University, who used the expedition as a research platform to demonstrate the impacts of climate change on the Antarctic continent and how this has wider impacts to people and nature across the world.

The team’s vision was to ‘inspire through exploration’, unravelling the processes and mindsets that help to navigate tough mental, emotional and physical challenges, and highlighting how interactions with nature can keep both people and the planet in a state of health and wellness.

Karen has a real attraction to wild places and mountainous environments, shaped in part by an expedition experience with the Yorkshire Schools Exploring Society at the age of 16. After studying geology and chemistry at the University of Leeds, she started her working life in the Bolivian Andes researching gold, but after her accident, moved away from being a “rock doctor” to “exploring both outside and within”. Being paralysed means accessing “pure” nature is more difficult, she says, and technology that enables people to do so is transformative. Karen and the Antarctica expedition team worked with various technology businesses on the project, including sponsors Sinequa, BBraun and Anatomical Concepts.

Karen was testing technology including an ICE/Z-trike, a new handbike, although she actually completed the mission on a sit-ski. “Using the bike, I’ve been able to go to places that I couldn’t go into for decades and that has really moved me a lot,” she says. "I think we often take for granted what we have got...and when something is gone, one of the main ways to cope is almost to forget about it because it’s too painful to deal with. If I focused on what I couldn’t do anymore, it would be incredibly painful. I’m interested in mental processes and mindsets and how we can retrain our brains to help us live the best and happiest lives we can, but having technology to take me back to these places made me realise how much I appreciate those environments.”

She adds: “If we don’t start to respect and look after nature more than we generally are doing as a race then we’re in trouble. I think we’ll slowly have more and more physical and mental health problems…There’s that symbiotic relationship between us needing to respect and look after our natural environments as well as the reverse.”

To read Karen’s blogs on her Antarctic experience, visit www.karendarke.com