Ann Daniels, 44, polar explorer, is about to trek 1,200km to the geographic north pole. By the time she arrives, she will have dragged a 52kg (115lb) sledge for 100 days and put up with great hardship: temperatures of minus 52C, plunging into Arctic waters, no luxuries, dehydrated food, a cup, spoon, pencil and a diary. She won't even be able to wash or change her clothes for more than three months. But there is one thing she won't sacrifice: phone calls to her children - triplets Lucy, Joseph and Rachel, 14, and five-year-old Sarah.
"The phone is really for operational purposes," she says, "but if they [the team] want me to perform, I just have to use it for the family. Going on past experience, I'm fine for about three weeks, then I start to pine and am really unhappy, so I get on the phone. They never really want to know what I'm up to. They just want to tell me what they've been doing. Then I've had my fix and I'm OK again."
Daniels has been to the north pole six times, but the Catlin Arctic Survey is her first scientific expedition. Led by Pen Hadow, the polar explorer, its aim is to measure the rate at which the polar ice cap is melting. "Ann's as tough as you like," says Hadow, who describes her as immensely grounded and cool under pressure. "She is the best woman explorer in the world."
We meet at her village home in Devon where she lives with her partner, Tom O'Connor, an aircraft engineer who is on nights and asleep upstairs. Sarah, her youngest, is milling around eating her mother's expedition rations of chocolate chips - you can't take bars of chocolate into the Arctic, Daniels explains, as she pulls her daughter close, because the chocolate gets so frozen it would break your teeth. Outside there is heavy snow and Daniels's parents, who "move in for every expedition and take over my life", are dressed in heavy knits and scarves, but Daniels is wearing a light jumper because by her standards this cold is close to tropical. Inside, there's a play-school atmosphere - bits of paper and glass beads on the kitchen table - mother/daughter art-project bonding before she leaves in five days.
"The children are a barometer for me," she says. "I always think, I've got to come home. So I don't take stupid risks." Not that everyone agrees. There are plenty who say mothers shouldn't leave their children to do something so dangerous. She went on the Vanessa Feltz show on television in the late 90s "knowing the whole show would slag me off. I was the mother from hell." But one woman stood up and said she admired her personal ambition. Still, she is disappointed by how little attitudes have shifted since Alison Hargreaves, the mother and climber, was killed on an expedition to K2 in 1995. "That was more than 13 years ago and I'm still being hit with her name," she cries. "How many other mothers have died in that time on motorways, and in work environments, whether they be policewomen or nurses or cleaners. Nobody ever mentions them. It's always Alison Hargreaves doing her job."
"She does have a harder time from society," says Hadow, who has two children, "much harder than me."
Daniels's children, for their part, are sanguine. "It just feels ordinary because she's my mum," says Joseph, when I ask him what it's like having a mother with two frostbitten toes. Plus, he rather likes the routine: "She doesn't work every day. She stays home for, like, a couple of years and then goes away in one chunk."
He says they will follow her progress by sticking pins in a map and he's looking forward to his present: snow from the north pole. "Mum puts it in bottles and brings it back," he says, "but the problem is, it melts." His only difficulty with her job is how to explain it: "When people ask, I say she's a walker. I don't know how else to describe it."
Daniels is a firm leader through the frozen unknown and yet for years she never left Bradford. Her father was a door-to-door insurance salesman, her mother was a secretary at Marks & Spencer. Growing up, she was a tomboy with four older brothers. "My poor father wanted a girl but then one pops up who is into climbing trees and running around and watching football and rugby." She thrived at school and got nine O-levels - the only one in her family to pass any exams - "but university was never an option in my family", so she focused on "doing the right thing".
She got married, aged 21, and worked as an office junior for NatWest, rising through the ranks to assistant bank manager. In 1994, she went on maternity leave - she had had fertility problems and opted for IVF - planning to return to middle management. But having triplets changed everything. "Everyone said, 'You won't cope, here's my number, ask for help, don't feel a failure,' and I thought, I damn well will cope." She didn't just discover enormous resolve through her children. They also up-ended all her ideas of a conventional life. "I'd left the safe bank and what was expected of me, had three children rather than one and was having a great time. I thought, there's a big world out there."
The breakthrough came in 1995, when her husband showed her a newspaper advertisement asking for volunteers for the McVitie's Penguin Polar Team Relay to the north pole. More than 300 women applied and they all gathered for SAS-type trials on Dartmoor. Daniels ended the day in tears. "I was so outclassed. They were all hardy outdoor types who had climbed Kilimanjaro in a weekend. But they told us to come back in nine months for four more days and that's when they would pick the team."
So while her babies slept, she did push-ups in the garden, skipping, running, anything to increase her fitness. When they announced the team at the end of the trials she wept again, but this time with happiness. "That was when I fell in love with the Arctic ocean and expedition life," she says. "It blew my mind. Before that, my sum total experience of nature was two weeks on Dartmoor." Life moved quickly on her return. She was part of the first all-women's team to ski to the north and south poles between 1998 and 2002. She also tried to ski solo to the north pole in 2005 but had to abandon the attempt due to permit problems. Her marriage broke down when the children were three. She met O'Connor in 2001, and had Sarah two years later, but providing for her children is a big drive. Consequently, she took on a day job as a motivational speaker, and uses such phrases as: "You have to put the pain in the box."
Daniels's job on the expedition is to cook, which sounds easy, but isn't. "In the morning, it's minus 45C and you've got to get out your sleeping bag to light the cooker. You can't speak because your brain slows down and you are just so cold. You tense every muscle."
Her routine is making tea and coffee, plus dehydrated porridge, then melting enough snow to fill flasks with the six litres of water they will need for the day. This takes three hours, which is why Daniels will get up at 3am. They plan to trek in 75-minute bursts, with five-minute breaks, when they eat chocolate chips, nuts and biscuits. The biggest challenge - apart from the polar bears, storms, frostbite and hypothermia - is eating enough. "We have to get in 6,000 calories and we still lose weight,' she says. "By the time I come back I expect to be a goddess!" Dinner is dehydrated chicken curry and rice or beef and potato stew.
The lack of terra firma, it becomes clear, is what makes the north pole so testing. "The ice moves, breaks up, and you can be in danger of being mangled, crushed up with the ice as it shifts." The south pole is much easier, she says, because it's just an endless flat white wasteland.
So why does she do it? It's not for solo self-advancement, that's for sure. "She's not about strutting her stuff," says Hadow. My guess is that her reports of cracking ice, sensory deprivation and howling wind are partly about conquest and moral determination - "It's the challenge and not only coming out of it, but being able to deal with it and deal with it well" - but also about something far more primitive: "Yes, it's cold, yes it's terrible, yes it's painful," she says, "but actually it's nature at its best and it's huge and it makes you realise just how small you are - how humble, how insignificant."
