“An adventurer who never chooses the easy road” is how the Australian Museum described Tim Jarvis, their Explorer in Residence in 2016. Their full description reads as follows:

“In 1996 Jarvis went on his first major expedition, a 500-kilometre unsupported crossing of the crevassed ice sheet of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic, facing polar bears among other dangers.

In 1999, Jarvis and fellow adventurer Peter Treseder undertook the fastest unsupported journey to the Geographic South Pole (47 days) and, at the time, the longest unsupported Antarctic journey – 1,580 kilometres. During this trip, Jarvis carried Mawson’s balaclava, given to him by Mawson’s grandson.

In 2001 he completed the first-known unsupported crossing of the Great Victoria Desert, covering 1,100 kilometres in 29 days. The following year he was back in the cold, on an unsupported trek to the North Pole across 400 kilometres of frozen Arctic Ocean, before undertaking the first unsupported traverse of Australia’s Warburton River and Lake Eyre in 2004.

All of this was just a precursor to his two most extraordinary expeditions. In 2007, Jarvis donned 1912 clothing and equipment, and recreated the distance of Mawson’s survival journey, hauling a sled hundreds of kilometres across the crevassed Antarctic landscape. He tried to subsist, as closely as possible, to the starvation rations suffered by Mawson.

After being made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010, Jarvis then recreated Sir Ernest Shackleton’s incredible Antarctic survival journey of 1916. In an open boat not much bigger than a rowboat, using only a chronometer for navigation and wearing the barely adequate clothing of 100 years ago, Jarvis and five other men sailed 1,200 kilometres across the Southern Ocean from Elephant Island to South Georgia. Then Jarvis and two others crossed the island’s precipitous mountains, mostly using the gear available to Shackleton in 1916. This historical re-enactment, completed in 2013, earned Tim Jarvis the Australian Geographic Society’s Adventurer of the Year Award.” [The Australian Museum]

Tim’s most recent expedition project takes him away from the polar regions but not from the ice. In 2015 Tim launched 25zero, a project to raise awareness of the urgent need for action on climate change by climbing all of the mountains at the equator with a remnant glacier. So far Tim has climbed thirteen of the 25zero peaks: all three 25zero mountains in Uganda, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Kenya, seven of the Ecuadorian mountains and Puncak Jaya in Indonesia (the only 25zero mountain in Asia) as part of the project.