The Hummer is better known in Britain as an American celebrity vehicle of choice, with its 12mpg, 6.5-litre turbo-diesel engine. They were origi-nally built for the US military and called a Humvee, but the name was changed to Hum-mer for the civilian market.
The journey can be done, although no one has managed it yet because of the logistics of getting across the Bering Strait. The route starts kindly enough - the team will leave New York and head up the United States, through Cana-da to Fairbanks, in Alaska. This journey of about 3,500 miles will take about a week, but the next 6,000 miles will take at least five times that.
The road runs out at Fair-banks, so the team will follow the coastline until they arrive at the westernmost point, an Inuit village, called Wales. From there, it is across the Bering Strait, to Russia.
Although only about 50 miles Wide, the Strait is mainly ice, between two and five feet thick. But the problem with this particular stretch is that it is moving at three miles an hour. "This floating bridge of ice will carry you to Russia," Brooks said. "Hopefully."
The strait is bisected by the international dateline, which also denotes the line between the US and Russia. Two small islands sit on either side, two miles apart. Little Diomede is American, Big Diomede is Russian and, as if a moving carpet of ice was not enough to contend with, the area is bris-tling with military hardware.
The last attempt on the cross-ing, by Ford, ended, predicta-bly, with the vehicle at the bot-tom of the sea. But this is where the, tank fan comes in. When they are ready to leave Wales, the team will bolt a specially designed hovercraft -type skirt on the Hummer and set off across the ice.
And if the unthinkable hap-pens? "We have the Challen-ger fan on tickover and, if we feel the ice giving way, we just
turn that big silver knob and off we go," he says. The idea is that the fan creates such a mas-sive amount of downforce that the Hummer will hover across the surface. "Oh yes, we’ve tested it on water," said Brookes.
The Hummer, however, cannot cross the floe alone; it needs something to create some sort of pathway, because the ice is not simply one shiny, 50-mile sheet but a mess of sheer faces and drops. So, another crew leave for the Bering Strait in advance, to begin tests with Snowbird, a sort of floating piste-basher. ‘There’s no point leaving with the Hummer until we know we can crack the Bering Strait,’ Brooks says, "but if all goes well on the test, we’ll leave New York next February to attempt the challenge."
Although the Hummer is pretty comfortable on a short trip around West London, leav-ing a trail of open-mouthed pedestrians and car drivers in its wake, there is little room for three men for several weeks —there are just two seats up front and a sleeping area. "You drive for four hours, navi-gate for four hours then sleep for four hours," Brooks says. "We have to keep going. If you turn the engine off at -40, it might not start again.’
What motivates people to attempt such a feat? Brooks, a hardened explorer, doesn’t really know, apart from the desire to create a record. "The thing is, it started off small, but it’s just kept growing and you don’t know whether to stop or not. We’ve got a couple of sponsors, but we really need a main one, there must be someone who wants to get in-volved with a British attempt at a world first which is also raising money for charity."
Asked if his family perhaps thought he was, well, mad. "Yes, I should say so," he says, cheerfully. Mad, per-haps, but the challenge may well soon be gone.
Plans are afoot to construct a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait to link the two conti-nents, but although this has been in the pipeline for about a hundred years, who wouldn’t prefer to see the Ice Challenger expedition make the first successful crossing?
