Adventurer prepares to climb Antarctic summit
Albertan also plans to ski to South Pole to raise funds for cancer foundation
He’s climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen. Crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a record 53 days in a rowboat. Climbed the tallest mountain on six of Earth’s seven continents.
That means there’s one that Calgarian Laval St. Germain, 49, hasn’t summited and he’s looking to complete the Seven Summit scorecard by climbing Mount Vinson, Antarctica’s highest peak, in November.
“Vinson isn’t a difficult climb, most of these big mountains aren’t actually, the seven summits,” said St. Germain.
Perhaps that’s why he added a detour to his journey. His stay in Antarctica starts with a ski from sea level to the South Pole, a journey that’s expected to take 50 days. Then, a plane will pick him up and carry him the 1,200 kilometres to Mount Vinson, where he will climb to its peak 4,892 metres above sea level in two weeks.
It’s a trip he’s undertaken not only as a summit completionist but as a means to settle unfinished business. When he rowed across the North Atlantic in a custombuilt rowboat in 2016, he had a goal of raising $200,000 for the Alberta Cancer Foundation. He raised $60,000; this time he’s hoping to raise the rest.
Though St. Germain has been undertaking epic adventures all his life, the Atlantic Ocean crossing was the first to have a fundraising element. He has described his early expeditions as selfish.
He came to that realization “not because of some epiphany, like, ‘Oh I have to give back.’ It’s because all of a sudden a 40-year-old fellow airline captain of mine had a persistent cough and it turned into lung cancer,” said St. Germain, who is a pilot with Canadian North when he’s not climbing mountains or crossing oceans. “The next thing I know, I was in the hospital with him and he was getting a biopsy. I was in the planning of stages of this solo row, and I thought, ‘You know what? I need to do something.’”
St. Germain was born in Morinville, an “island” of French north of Edmonton.
“My dad wanted me to read; my mom wanted me to stay fit,” said St. Germain. The two directives blended into a love of the outdoors.
“I grew up on things like the Hardy Boys and Tarzan, Farley Mowat, and of course we — still do — had a National Geographic subscription. That was what really got me dreaming about faraway places.”
The family would go on multiday canoe trips on the Pembina and Athabasca rivers.
Once, when St. Germain was seven or eight, he climbed the bank of the Pembina river “with a piece of driftwood pretending I was (Edmund) Hillary on Everest. With my rubber boots on, getting maybe not even as high as (this),” he says, gesturing about threeand-a-half metres above his head, “and getting scared. My dad had to come up to get me.”
St. Germain will be using alpinetouring skis to climb Mount Vinson, with bindings that allow for the heel to lift up “so I can walk uphill, with skins on the bottom” and crampons for when it’s too steep to ski.
Mount Vinson’s average temperature is -30 C in November; the South Pole’s is -37 C. Antarctica is dry and windy. Cold air flows from the top of the South Pole toward the coast. When you trek to the South Pole, you’re operating into a headwind. Your face, and your thighs, are vulnerable to frostbite.
He’s aware of the dangers of frostbite; he lost the tips of three fingers during his climb of Everest. “I don’t need them any shorter. Though I guess it wouldn’t make much of a difference if they were any shorter. I only type with two fingers anyways,” he deadpans.
Some traditional gear will help. An elder in the Dene village of Deline, N.W.T., is making him mitts that he hopes will be finished in time for his expedition.
“Caribou or beaver, super warm, gauntlet-style with some Dene beadwork on them. I want to wear those on the expedition,” he says.
His connection to the Northwest Territories village was created through tragedy: his son Richard drowned while canoeing the nearby Mackenzie River in 2014.
“I travelled up there and I wanted to confront it by canoeing the river with my youngest boy,” he said. They flew into Deline, where he discovered how the Dene deal with death.
“They have a thing called the spirit house, which is this log house on the shores of Great Bear Lake. It’s basically almost a place of pilgrimage for them. Myself and this elder sat and had this conversation about death,” he said. “It was about the continuation of life and this is part of it, their beliefs that Richard’s still there. It was an interesting way to keep Richard alive, to use nature, to use exercise as medicine, or in this case, an antidepressant. I got a lot out of it. It was valuable.”
People can donate to the Alberta Cancer Foundation through St. Germain’s site at albertacancer.ca/southpole.