“Death still lurks on an expedition. ”
It is Vincent Colliard who says it. In the first of six episodes of the documentary dedicated to the couple’s 63-day journey through northern Norway last winter. A 1000 km expedition, trying in several ways. The toughest Caroline Côté has done.
“The hardest part was never knowing what was going to happen the next day. If I were to succeed in having the desire to take one more step. In everyday life, I had to decide to act even if it didn’t tempt me, says the native of Charlevoix. At the end of the day, I told myself that there was one more done. ”
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE PRODUCTION
Caroline Côté in the documentary The last glacier
To his credit, the steps are less light when pulling sleds totaling 120 kg (265 lbs). For him, 180 kg (397 lb).
On February 2, Caroline Côté and Vincent Colliard left Longyearbyen to go to the northern tip of the island of Spitsbergen, the main one of the Svalbard archipelago. Their objective: from there, to reach the southern point before March 21 in order to become the first to make the crossing in winter, without assistance, before then ascending to the starting point, Longyearbyen. Their journey ended on April 5. In suffering.
I have really gone a long way in the lack of food and it made me doubt a lot. In the morning when I woke up, due to hunger, there was a level of anxiety that was always present.
Caroline Cote
“It allowed me to understand what it was like to be in a situation of famine and not being able to eat,” she adds.
It is not a feeling that the woman her French partner calls “the wolf” is keen to relive.
Without the constant support of Vincent and several collaborators, upstream or remotely, the adventure could not have ended positively, says the explorer, filmmaker and ultramarathoner on the trail.
The distance that unites
On the pitch, the couple were not, however.
“We said to ourselves that during the expedition, since it would be very difficult, we couldn’t really be a couple. We had to put emotions aside because we lived a bit of survival every day, ”says Caroline Côté.
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Vincent Colliard and Caroline Côté in The last glacier
They met in Antarctica. An experienced polar adventurer, he led a group. She was filming the 30-day expedition.
Since then, they have lived together in Norway, although she has kept a small apartment in Montreal.
With a pied-à-terre in Scandinavia, she will be able to adequately prepare her future polar escapades, including the next one, “surely in Antarctica”.
“I really want to go back there. To make a complex route and to do it as quickly as possible. It’s going to be a mental challenge, solo, ”reveals the 35-year-old Quebecer.
For the next year, it will therefore prepare for this purpose. She discusses it with explorers, Norwegians master skiers.
But an important event awaits him in the much shorter term. She was leaving Quebec on Sunday, then Vincent and she will get married on Friday, in a small Norwegian village.
In the end, the adversity experienced during the expedition sealed the couple.
Global warming
Caroline Côté speaks in a very calm and composed voice. Even when she describes the undoubtedly very destabilizing effects that the adventure had after the fact.
“It’s really special because I thought it was going to be physically, the most difficult. It took me two, three months to want to resume my daily running and participate in events, but in fact, the hardest part was the mental. ”
I couldn’t motivate myself. I no longer wanted to make efforts that led me, for example, to go out in the cold. I was like, “Oh no, not today.”
Caroline Cote
“I really felt like someone else,” she adds. Someone who no longer wanted to live on challenge. ”
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE PRODUCTION
Caroline Côté’s adventure in Norway was not easy.
In short, his need for rest turned out to be much more mental than physical. She plans to research these post-shipment reactions.
But the natural has taken over, obviously.
And what drives her, besides the adventure in itself, is putting her camera at the service of subjects to which she wishes to contribute positively, whether cultural or environmental. On their way back from Svalbard, they went to meet a glaciologist.
“This person told us that the repercussions of global warming are really being felt more in places like Svalbard than elsewhere in the world,” says Caroline Côté.
Like Mike Horn and Børge Ousland before them, or Steve Backshall and Aldo Kane, from the series Extreme explorations, Caroline Côté and Vincent Colliard were able to observe firsthand how rapidly the ice is melting. For example, when people directed them to a place they claimed to spend every year.
“And unfortunately, we got turned back in the middle of a fjord that was supposed to be icy. For us, it’s just boring. But the stakes are much greater than this expedition, ”emphasizes the Quebecer.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE PRODUCTION
Vincent Colliard
They eventually had to climb the glacier to pass. In other places there was simply no more snow. So much so that they sometimes wondered if they should take the sleds on their backs and walk instead.
Anyway, Caroline Côté does not regret her choice of 2016. Classic Western life, obviously, she would not return.
But it is not so much out of rejection of a certain way of life, we understand, as in favor of another who called it.
“My daily life is on skis with the sled,” she says. This is where I feel it all makes sense. I am close to the environment, and shipping is just getting closer to what is natural. For me, it’s not living to the extreme every day. It’s being outside and feeling good. ”
Watch the first episode of the documentary The last glacier