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Felicity leads team in Scott’s icy footsteps
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Felicity Aston and the team
Explorer Felicity Aston is set for her next adventure.

The Birchington woman has been selected to lead the Kaspersky Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition next month.

Eight women from the Commonwealth countries of Brunei, Cyprus, Ghana, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom will be skiing through some of the coldest temperatures imaginable.

They are taking on the journey to the geographic South Pole to mark the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth.

They set off in November and hope to arrive at their destination on New Year’s Day 2010 – 100 years after Scott of the Antarctic made the trip.

It will also be the first vegetarian expedition to the South Pole and, if successful, the team members from Cyprus, Ghana, Brunei and Jamaica will be the first representatives of their nations to ski to the South Pole.

Felicity has been specially selected to lead this Commonwealth challenge to Antarctica and she is the only widely-experienced member of the team. 

She has raced in the Canadian Arctic, led a team of women across the inland ice of Greenland, searched for meteorite craters in Quebec, skied along a frozen river in Siberia to search for a herbal cure for leprosy, traversed the winter ice of Lake Baikal, completed the infamous Marathon des Sables across the Moroccan Sahara and lived and worked in the Antarctic as a meteorologist for three years.

Felicity’s first ‘expedition’ involved being bribed up Helvellyn in the Lake District at the age of nine by her parents for a packet of Opal Fruits.

The sense of achievement on reaching the top was slightly lost in the pouring rain, but something about the experience must have stuck.

You will be able to track Felicity’s progress by clicking on kasperskycommonwealthexpedition. com, but in the meantime she is at home preparing for the challenge.

Over the last four years Felicity’s projects have been awarded the Captain Scott Society Spirit of Adventure Award, a Wilderness Award and a Timberland ‘Make it Better’ scholarship, as well as earnt support from the National Geographic expeditions council in the United States.

In the UK, she has been made a 2008 Churchill Fellow by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.
POSTED: 21/10/2009 16:00:00

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