Lindsay Barber has braved freezing cold, treacherous winds and deadly ravines, but would do it all again to help a Taylors Lakes girl.
Mr Barber recently returned from a trek to the North Pole he undertook to raise money for six-year-old Tilly Wilkes and the EB Research Foundation.
Tilly was born with Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB), a rare genetic condition in which the body is missing the functioning protein that binds skin together, causing it to blister at the slightest touch. It has been likened to living with third degree burns.
Mr Barber said he wanted to raise money for a charity on his trek and was immediately touched when he heard about Tilly and the EB Foundation.
“I wanted to give the trip a purpose outside of being self-fulfilling for me,” he said. “As soon as I saw what those kids go through and how terrible the disease is, I knew it was the charity to link in with.
“So we got Tilly to write a letter to Santa and I delivered that. There’s an actual letterbox up there so we were able to personalise the trip for Tilly.”
Mr Barber, who has thrown himself into challenges ranging from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to swimming on the Cinque Terre coast in Italy, raised $48,000 for the foundation, making the nine months of training and preparation for the trek all worthwhile.
The 110-kilometre trek took his crew six days to complete, with plenty of obstacles to overcome on the way.
“It’s totally different from what you would expect because you’re on the ice, not terra firma,” he said. “There’s one to two metres of pack ice, and then the snow coverage can be from 20 to 500 millimetres. No vegetation, 24-hour daylight, some days only 200 metres visability and temperatures down to minus 28.
“We had a bear come into our campsite. Our guide – who’s been guiding since 2005 – said he’d never encountered a bear, but we got one.
“And we were just a couple of miles from the pole when we got a call saying there was a crack in the ice on the runway back at the base and they’d be coming to get us, so we had to push on quickly just to make sure we made it. It’s hard to explain what it’s like. It’s not like climbing a mountain when you get to the summit and you know you’ve done it.
“The North Pole is exactly the same terrain we’d seen for the past five days, so it’s a very different feeling.”
Donations to the Mr Barber’s EB Foundation effort can be made at donate.grassrootz.com/ebresearch/my-north-pole-challenge.
