If you don't find Santa Claus in Lapland, the South Pole or the North Pole, maybe you will find her. Canadian Sarah McNair-Landry (33 years old) is not an elf, but he lives among glaciers and the northern lights. His spirit of survival and adventure seems like the script of a video game: he is the youngest person to explore the poles and, together with his brother Eric, they have revolutionized expeditions with sports such as kitesurfing to cross Greenland or the Arctic driven by the wind. Always with a camera on his helmets to document travel and climate change.
“We must inspire young people to go out, to know and take care of the planet. Let them be active. The same thing happens with the cold, if you stay still you will freeze,” says the explorer. McNair lives in a mobile home made of recycled materials that she has built with her boyfriend, Erik Boomer – also an adventurer and kayak expert – in Iqaluit, a corner of the icy and giant Baffin Island (Canada). There she grew up surrounded by dogs and snow, without television or roads, with two polar guide parents who taught her to live with temperatures so cold that thermometers do not register them, and to love white, desert landscapes.
You won't find it in a resort Caribbean, despite having crossed the Sahara on a camel or the Gobi on kite boogie. Your comfort zone is the cold. Sarah McNair-Landry runs the company Northwinds, which makes expeditions and documentaries through the coldest areas of the Earth. She is the first woman certified by the International Polar Guides Association as a master polar guide and National Geographic He considers her one of the top adventurers in the world. At the age of 17 she reached the North Pole with her family on a sleigh that crossed fluorescent nights. When she was 19, a statue of her was waiting for her in the heart of the South Pole: Lenin. The Soviets planted it there after tearing up Antarctica with tractors.
In many places that he has stepped on, a human being has never been, but his presence is felt. The Inuit tell him about missing animals, about thaws and cracks along ancient paths. With his brother she traveled the mythical Northwest Passage, more than 3,000 kilometers of ice sheets where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet. The crossing had not been completed since 1906. Along the way they encountered a broken horizon. They had to deviate 550 kilometers. That day had another surprise in store for them: a hungry polar bear.
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The McNairs form an almost perfect tandem. The yard of their house was the steppe where they played as children imagining distant megacities. That day in the Northwest Passage, nature reminded them of its harshness: Eric defended himself against the bear with a shovel while his sister looked for a gun. Sarah had to choose between her brother or the animal. She shot into the air and the bear walked away. The terror was recorded like a tattoo.
American activist Will Steger knows the tandem. They taught him to fly kitesurfing. For an old-school explorer of maps and sleds, it was a revelation. “They have done almost everything. Your challenge is to find another great challenge,” he details.
Sarah McNair-Landry still relies on her dogs, but she takes advantage of technology: GPS, recording equipment, drones. On Google Earth she found two unknown rivers in Greenland. The discovery translated in the documentary Into Twin Galaxies. At the beginning of the expedition Sarah was going so fast that her kite He rose into the air and fell like a stone. He broke his helmet and part of a vertebra. Her partner, who was accompanying her, begged her to return, but she continued. Boomer avoids using the word stubbornness and prefers character. She smiles when reminded. On trips she never lacks determination and chocolate, whole boxes.
National Geographic has followed her travels since 2007, although she also focuses on invisible stories such as the documentary Pour ne pas perdre le Nord (so as not to lose the north), a short film that denounces the mountains of garbage that accumulate in Arctic towns. He also supports art installations like Gauge, where he shows the white walls that emerge from the water and are painted by artists. He uses renewable energy for his equipment and recovers Inuit techniques for making kayaks through the Qajakkut network. The networks have given visibility to her adventures, and although there are clients who go after the image for Instagram, she conveys respect for the environment.
In 2019 he received the 21st Century Adventurer Award from the European Outdoor Film Tour, the largest exploration film event on the continent. The adrenaline of sneaking into new folds of the planet and sharing its beauty gives you hope for the future. One of her most symbolic adventures was to repeat her parents' pioneering journey around Baffin Island, as large as Spain. Four months traveling through a lunar and deaf world. Those who look for her often wait for an older, bearded man to guide them and they find the snow queen.
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