Ben was born in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland, and has lived in several countries across the world, including Brazil, China and India. While he had always dreamed of adventure, with childhood heroes including Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton, until 2014 he had never even skied, nor been in a tent since his early childhood.
In 2014, after gradually becoming more and more discontent with the “comfortable” lifestyle working in consultancy, he and his then wife Natalia started thinking about how they could change their lives. After some time they started planning and working towards an expedition that would see them going around the world… via the South Pole and the North Pole – cycling south through the Americas; skiing across Antarctica; cycling back north through Asia and then skiing across the Arctic Ocean.
Ben and Natalia trained for several years–conducting polar survival training, followed by other lengthy expeditions in the Canadian Arctic, and other journeys such as cycling across the UK in winter and extreme altitude mountaineering in the Andes. However, the key boundary to their success was getting the required sponsorship, and they have been focusing on smaller but still extremely challenging polar and other journeys.
While Ben and Natalia have gone their separate ways (though are still great friends!), Ben continued to work towards his dreams, and skied 600km across the Greenland icecap in May 2022, and solo from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole over 58 days from November 2022. In this expedition, Ben skied over 1,200km and raised over £5,000 for Cancer Research UK, following the death of his mother from cancer.
With these journeys, and despite sustaining an injury that has taken two years to recover from while en route to the South Pole, Ben’s appetite for polar travel has not diminished and the idea of a full crossing of the Antarctic continent is a mouth-watering prospect for him!
Sir Ranulph Fiennes has mentored Ben and supported his journeys ever since he first started to work towards polar expeditions back in 2014.
Ben Weber on LinkedIn and Instagram.
