The eight days of misery and suffering, the chronic lack of sleep, the crushing physical challenge of this wild place, the extreme mental exhaustion of such unsure navigation; everything built up within them and released itself in an expression of pure, utterly exhausted and understated relief.
Images copyright Alexandre Buisse/Patagonian Expedition Race
The PATAGONIAN EXPEDITION RACE® is a true expedition, taking teams of four through lands previously unknown to the human eye. Racers receive minimal assistance as they traverse through the pristine southern Patagonia by means of trekking, climbing and related rope work, kayaking, mountain biking, and backcountry navigation. For more information visit www.patagonianexpeditionrace.com
Alexandre is a commercial mountain photographer with a double interest in adventure and landscape images. He is an avid practitioner of many mountain sports, especially climbing, but also skiing and paragliding. Mountaineering gives Alexandre unique access to some of the wildest and most beautiful places on the planet, and sharing those moments is one of his main motivations for picking up a camera.
You can follow Alexandre on Twitter @alexandrebuisse or on Facebook/AlexandreBuissePhotography
This article was written by Jamie Maddison. Jamie is a journalist and photographer by trade, an expedition-man and wannabe-adventurer by preference. His assignments have taken him far and wide: from the serene forests outside of Fontainebleau, France, to unexplored valleys in Kyrgyzstan’s Tian Shan Mountains, through to adventurous climbing in South Africa’s Cederberg Rocklands. Find out more at www.jamiemaddison.com
So ended the first stage of the competition, and the temporary reprieve marked the first time I had seen a race organiser since I set off several days ago and a hundred kilometres away. I had been surviving with just my little sleeping bag and whatever spare food the teams could afford me.
But despite the cock-ups, I had managed to get some really unique photos of my comrades-in-suffering. Images that showed what I was looking for when I joined up to photograph this race: extreme challenge, extreme endurance, and a picture of those people who stood up and faced it all. In spite of absolute exhaustion these racers just kept on going, bore the pain and kept up the pace, all the while knowing in their heads that they were not even halfway through yet. For them, the next circle of hell lay just ahead.
Thankfully, my experience of the race’s second stage was rather more pleasurable than the contestants. After half-a-section trekking with some of the teams I headed back overnight to Punta Arenas to take a boat to the race’s ultimate finish line on the Beagle Channel. The vessel, unbeknown to me, turned out to be a big luxury cruiser; wealthy individuals were paying something like $4000 dollars for a four day jaunt. The contrast was ridiculous in its extremity, as us photographers received a two-day pampering that could only be dreamed of in the battered minds of the contestants slogging through their own personal nightmares to reach the same end point.
We arrived at the finish, well not quite the finish but the penultimate checkpoint, in good time. The last stage - kayaking across the expansive channel - had been called off due to high winds and the end of the trekking section became the de facto finishing line. The winning group ‘Adidas TERREX – Prunesco’ (UK) passed us by, completing the race in an incredible 147 hours and 39 minutes.
Other teams however had yet to arrive, the Dancing Pandas among them. The next morning I backtracked my way to a mountain halfway between the checkpoint and the finish, attempting to catch any contestants that might come through this obvious route. I was lucky; after four hours shivering in the cold I met a Danish team and went back with them, shooting some of my favourite shots of the trip; the really wild environment, crazy glaciers, untamed vegetation and murky swamps serving as the perfect backdrop for these images of extreme human stamina.
The race’s deadline for disqualification was at 8am the next morning. We had waited up all through the night for the teams to arrive, and the only one still unaccounted for remained my friends the Dancing Pandas. The tents had been packed away, the boat loaded and still there was no word of them; everyone was resigned to the fact that the event was truly over. Then with an amazing fourteen minutes to spare in an eight day race, the Pandas turned up.
None of them could walk. They stopped and they just couldn’t walk any further. Their feet had been ravaged, eaten out by river bugs, one member all the way up to his ankles. I have some bad pictures of feet, awful ones that would be censored if you ever tried to publish them. These racers had pushed themselves right to the knife’s edge of endurance, walking for the past 48 hours without sleep and without stopping just to reach this checkpoint in time.
I have a set of photos that have since become some of my favourite images. They are taken in the very instance that I told the team that the last stage of the race had been cancelled, that they’d done it, they’d completed it; they wouldn’t have to kayak another fifty kilometres to the finish line, it was right under their feet.
It only lasted a momentary instant but you could read on their faces what it had taken to get here. Those eight days of misery and suffering, the chronic lack of sleep, the crushing physical challenge of this wild place, the extreme mental exhaustion of such unsure navigation; everything built up within them and released itself in an expression of pure, utterly exhausted and understated relief.
The pictures I took of this moment were the whole reason I came to Patagonia. And, I suspect, that unknowable feeling I had seen through my lens on the racers’ faces was also the reason why these incredible individuals had come so far and fought so hard to complete this incomparable race, here at the bottom of the world.
Don't miss out. Sign up to receive free monthly email updates from Sidetracked here.