Journey to the south

'Three-pole challenge'

One summer, when he was 15 years old, Wen watched the Hollywood survival thriller Vertical Limit and fell in love with mountaineering and adventure. In 2002, while still in high school, he started physical training, including running, riding, swimming and hiking. He recalls he insisted on wearing just his slippers during harsh winters in his hometown of Tianjin in a bid to train his body to endure the cold.

Years later, in May 2017, high up on the Tibetan Plateau, Wen, an accomplished climber and adventurer by that time, fell through glacial ice and ended up submersed in icy water. The glacier had melted under the frozen surface due to a rise in the surrounding temperature. The experience awakened Wen to the dangers of global warming and pushed him to raise public awareness.

"If it hadn't been for my habit of swimming in winter, along with self-rescue training, I'd be dead after falling in the icy water," Wen says.

He recalls, between 2004 and 2018, over the course of 11 ascents of the 7,546-meter Muztagata, a mountain in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, he had to change his huge ski board into crampons to contend with the rising snow line.

In 2018, Wen and Hu founded a Beijing-based nonprofit called Polar Hub, which aims to raise public awareness about the impact of climate change. They combine adventure and a scientific spirit, with Wen writing on social media about areas where climate change is most visible such as glaciers and ice caps.

Inspired by the 2015 Paris Agreement that stipulates the world should commit to capping the global temperature rise below 2 C, they started the <2° Project in 2018, to attempt a "three-pole challenge" — to reach both the North and South poles and climb Mount Qomolangma (known as Mount Everest in the West)－and do some research as well. The mountain is referred to as the third pole. That May, Wen reached the top of Mount Qomolangma, and in August, he took a 30-day trip of the Arctic via the North Pole. Both were in preparation for his trip to the South Pole.