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Bernard Voyer

Bernard Voyer: The Snow Man

"Canada has always been the most beautiful adventure playground in the world."

While thousands of Canadians can't wait for the arrival of summer, the explorer Bernard Voyer spends his summer impatiently waiting for winter.

"I absolutely love winter; it's the most wonderful season. In an art gallery, the first painting that catches my eye is the one depicting a winter scene."

He is so enamoured with the sensation of cold that he hardly ever wears gloves. In restaurants in winter, he seeks out the table closest to the window and leans against it. At the summit of Everest in 1999, all he would wear on his hands were cross-country ski gloves with no lining. He swears he has never been able to look at a body of water without imagining it frozen over, even in countries that have never seen snow, "even in the Sahara!"

His love affair with winter began when he was a child in Rimouski. "I quickly realized that although I loved winter, I was also afraid of it. It wouldn't let go of me." On his first trip to Europe, rather than heading to Paris, he went to Scandinavia! "I wanted to see fjords, experience the Northern sensibility, meet the people who had explored those regions. I know I love winter but that doesn't mean I hate summer. Summer is incidental, it helps pass the time. Then, the real season begins."

While captivated by the first snowfall, "A snowstorm is like a beautiful piece of choreography," he quickly adds that he doesn't like to shovel snow either. "But winter is so much more than that."

He believes that Canadian ingenuity is born from the necessity to brave winter, but finds it "distressing" that people freeze in inappropriate clothing because of their slavish adherence to the dictates of fashion. "Winter presents us with a significant challenge. It also challenges us psychologically. That's why people say, 'I don't know if he's going to make it through the winter.'"

Canada has always been "the most beautiful adventure playground in the world" for him. Although many people don't realize it, "there are still lakes that no human eye has ever seen," he marvels.

And what's it like to have a bird's-eye view of the world? "It's fantastic! Being on a mountaintop gives me goose bumps. You feel freed from schedules, as though time had stopped. I love to be face to face with nature, where man is stripped of his power."

Paradoxically, the man who has climbed the world's highest mountains, who skied to both poles, is terrified of dying. "My fear of death is not something I can really talk about. I am always very careful, but I am still afraid. I reject death; I push it away. I'm even afraid to think about dying... I just couldn't bear to miss winter!"

It came as a terrible shock to him when his "fairly close friend," the Quebec climber Yves Laforest, was lost in the waters of British Columbia's Incomappleux River. "I can't stop thinking about it." Yves' death was such a blow that he admits to having lost his taste for adventure, at least temporarily. The fact that he has already lost two friends who, like him, conquered Everest in 1999, is food for thought for someone who fears death. "I'll talk to them when I'm up there again," he vows, thinking of his next expedition.

What drove Bernard Voyer to climb, to ignore danger and go where few people have gone before? "I am very conscious of the fact that life and death are like two children standing next to one another on the sidewalk. I want to amplify life; I zoom in on it and life is enlarged, but I can't amplify life without also amplifying death."

Bernard Voyer's adventures have inspired ordinary people to overcome personal obstacles. One year to the day after he reached the South Pole by skiing across the Antarctic with no outside assistance, Bernard received a registered letter from a stranger. The man wrote that his life used to consist of little more than drinking, gambling and beating his wife.

He explained that he had followed the expedition's progress in the newspaper. At first he thought Bernard Voyer and his partner, Thierry Pétry, were simply two people with too much time on their hands. But, to his surprise, the months went by and the two lunatics continued to make their way across the frozen desert. According to Bernard Voyer, he vowed, "If those two madmen make it to the pole, I'm going to stop drinking." On January 12, 1996, they reached their goal. "Since then, he hasn't touched a drop."