Cochrane doctor takes on 720-km trek in Siberia
Solo mission intended to bring attention to lack of health care in remote areas
Meeting 62-year-old Dr. William Hanlon at his clinic in Cochrane, you wouldn’t guess the local family doctor recently conquered a 720-km walk across a frozen lake in Siberia.
But Dr. Hanlon is no stranger to the extremes of nature. He completed the seven summits (including Mount Everest) in 2007, and just last year spent 70 days walking through Afghanistan with only a translator and a few horses.
Dr. Hanlon left Cochrane in February, embarking on a three-week solo expedition traversing Lake Baikal in Russia to increase awareness around the lack of health care in remote areas of the world.
“It’s difficult to get a crowd out to a talk about treating tuberculosis in Tibet. If I do something adventure-wise, it tends to attract a lot more attention,” Dr. Hanlon said.
While he classifies the experience as an adventure, few would entertain the idea of lugging a 75 kg sled across almost 650 km of ice in temperatures plummeting to almost -30C.
“I’ve done some extreme stuff before, but this was my first solo expedition,” he said. “It was very remote, and the rapidly changing environment required constant attention. Nature like this can be very unforgiving if you’re inattentive.”
Dr. Hanlon recalled only having one major scare when he realized his only safety net — a satellite phone — wouldn’t work unless it was registered (Russia is the only place in the world where you have to register satellite phones).
It was a particularly blustery day, and Dr. Hanlon had to scramble into a dripping rock cave and try and read the 16-digit number on the back of the phone’s tiny SIM card while steadying himself against buffets of blowing snow.
“That was probably the most stressful part of the whole expedition,” he said with a laugh. “But I went there with the expectation there would be no backup — obviously we take those risks when we do these expeditions.”
Every evening, Dr. Hanlon had to hammer in ice screws to secure his tent — he couldn’t risk having his small shelter ripped away by the forceful gusts through the nights.
Days were long and arduous: three hours in the morning taking down the tent, layering up and prepping for the day, 10 to 12 hours navigating broken ice and pressure cracks in the lake, and three more hours setting the tent back up and readying for night.
And with Dr. Hanlon on a 30-day Russian visa (he finished the trek in just under 23 days, but also had to factor in his 36-hour train ride to a small city from where he would fly back to Moscow) he couldn’t even afford one day of rest.
“Six hours a day was spent purely setting up your house and getting the basics of life like food and water going,” Dr. Hanlon said.
Check out Dr. Hanlon’s trip on the Basic Health International Foundation blog: basichealthinternational.org.