Skier wearing a black ski mask to prevent frostbite
from the Extremes found on the North Pole.

This is Randall Peeters showing all of the equipment that he wears at minus thirty five degrees.  He wears his black ski mask and other ski equipment as you would expect but he had only one spot exposed and that was the part just below his chin.  Unfortunately he did not cover this part early enough and his ski mask did not cover this area either because he ended up with a bad case of frostbite.   I wish that I would have taken some pictures of his frostbite because it would have been a good example for this site. 

After he received his frostbite, Victor Boyarski covered it with an antibiotic ointment and then a regular gauze bandage as frostbite treatment.  Many days later, after we were back in the hotel room, Randy showed me the frostbite and it didn't look good.  It looked as if it had a little infection in it but I wasn't really sure.  The area of frostbite was about three inches square.

So far on every expedition someone gets frostbite.  Usually, most people get frostbite on the edges of their nostrils where the cold air comes in.  I avert this problem by breathing in my mouth and out of my nose.  However, if you have a runny nose this procedure does not work too well, but it still works for me.  I never had frostbite myself and I don't ever want to get it, but as it is described to me is that the area starts feeling cold, then it starts to hurt, then it starts feeling warm, then you don't feel any problem at all. 

In 2003 I watched a doctor get frostbite on his whole ear as he was doing a TV interview.  They had him do the interview with his hat off and as the video was taken and taken again, I was watching him put his hand over his ear because of the pain.   Earlier on that same day I was doing sponsorship pictures where I had my USS Kitty Hawk hat on.  My ears were exposed and in just a couple of seconds my ears hurt from the cold.  This doctor must have been in a lot of pain in the many minutes that his ears were exposed.

Anyway, when we were returning on the airplane on the next day I looked at his left ear and it was swollen to twice the size of his right ear.  His ear stuck straight out to the side and looked very red.  Later, after talking to one of my friends in Svalbard, he told me that the doctors ear will turn completely black and then the skin will fall off.  This is all bad news.