Tom Avery - Polar Explorer

About Tom

As one of only 41 people in history to have reached both the North and South Poles on foot and a veteran of over a dozen mountain and polar expeditions, Tom Avery is one of the bright stars amongst the UK's new generation of explorers.

Tom Avery was born in December 1975 and brought up in Sussex, Brazil and France. His passion for adventure began when he was just seven years old and first read about the exploits of Captain Scott.

Tom's outdoor career began when he was 16 with a series of rock and ice climbs in Wales and Scotland. University climbs took him further afield, during which time he organised and led mountaineering expeditions to the Andes, New Zealand, the Alps, Tanzania, Patagonia and Morocco.

After graduating from Bristol University in 1998 with a B.Sc. in geography and geology, he began a 15-month career as an accountant with Arthur Andersen. His life appeared to be settling into a fairly regular sort of routine as a young twenty-something in London.

But he couldn’t get the expeditions out of his system and his employers reluctantly gave him extra time off to climb and ski. It soon became clear that Tom had to choose between a life in the City and a life in the mountains. Tom chose the mountains.

Tom ski touring up the Grand Lui, Switzerland (3509m)

A few days later, Tom landed a job as a ski guide in Verbier in the Swiss Alps and never looked back. During his years in Verbier Tom developed a love of ski touring and continued to organise mountaineering expeditions.

The highlight of Tom’s climbing career to date took place in 2000 when he led a pioneering British expedition to a previously unexplored 20-mile mountain range along along the Chinese border. His team scaled 9 unclimbed and unnamed summits up to 6,000 metres high in the Eastern Zaalay Mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

The first ascent of Pik Quenelda, Kyrgyzstan, 5439 metres

Not long after returning from Central Asia he embarked on putting together the ultimate expedition - a journey to the very bottom of the world. Despite his extensive mountaineering experience, it is his record-breaking journey to the South Pole for which Tom is better known. The Commonwealth South Pole Centenary Expedition was the ninth major expedition that Tom has organised; the culmination of two years planning and a dream he had had ever since he was a young boy.

Following a training trip in New Zealand, the small party of four flew to Antarctica in early November 2002. Within hours of beginning their 705-mile journey, they were confronted with treacherous crevasse fields and blizzards. Frostbite, altitude sickness, broken skis, crevasse falls and a telephone call from The Prince of Wales 100 miles from the Pole all contributed to a remarkable expedition.

On 28 December 2002, just days after his 27th birthday, Tom Avery walked into the record books by becoming the youngest Briton to complete the perilous journey to the South Pole. Tom’s team managed to break the South Pole speed record by using state of the art kites to power them across the ice and covering the last 47 miles to the Pole in a marathon final 31 hours.

Tom (left), Pat Woodhead and Andrew Gerber at the South Pole

Sledging across the frozen Arctic Ocean

In April 2005 Tom electrified the exploration world by recreating the American Robert Peary's disputed 1909 Arctic expedition, during which he claimed to have become the first man to stand at the North Pole.

Mystery and controversy have surrounded Peary's expedition for nearly a century with most polar experts arguing that his astonishing 37-day journey to the Pole was impossibly fast.

Travelling in a similar style to Peary’s with teams of Canadian Inuit dogs and custom-built wooden sleds, the Barclays Capital Ultimate North team set out from Peary's original base camp to prove the sceptics wrong and match his time.

After an epic 500-mile journey across the most unforgiving environment on the planet, the exhausted five-strong team rewrote the history books and arrived at the Pole with just five hours to spare.

Peary and his team reach the North Pole
on April 6 1909

George, Matty, Tom, Hugh and Andrew at the North Pole 96 years later

Tom now spends his time giving motivational talks to businesses (and to schools when time permits), writing his next book and raising funds for The Prince's Trust, for whom he is an ambassador. He is also an official ambassador of the London 2012 Olympic Games and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.