Will Smith is standing on a wall of ice as snow swirls around him. His bright yellow La Sportiva ice climbing boots are kicked into the snow. “Hey Will,” polar athlete Richard Parks shouts from the top of the 300-foot ice wall, “the wind’s picking up.”
“Oh my god,” says Smith. “It’s like a fricking hurricane.”
The wind grows intense and so does the snow, at some points blowing so much that even Smith’s boots and matching neon jacket become almost invisible. Smith keeps moving, swinging his left ice tool into the wall, then his right, then kicking in each foot, one at a time. It’s slow progress as Parks belays him from above.
“I don’t quit a lot. I generally don’t give up.”
In the first episode of Smith’s upcoming docuseries, Pole to Pole, the pair is in the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica, a 217-mile-long range, where Mount Vinson, the highest peak, reaches 16,050 feet. They’re traveling 700 miles from basecamp to the South Pole, and this is the first stretch of their journey. After this portion of the Ellsworth, they’ll reach a remote airbase from which they’ll fly to the Polar Plateau, an ice sheet that stretches on for more than 600 miles. Then, they’ll continue on skis to the bottom of the planet.
At one point during his ascent of the ice wall, Smith finds a small ledge and hangs his weight onto the rope. “I’m going to sit down for a couple of minutes,” he mumbles into his mic. “I can’t feel my lips.”
The screen cuts to a shot of Smith in a plain T-shirt, speaking directly to the camera. “I don’t quit a lot. I generally don’t give up,” he says. “But in Antarctica, you have that moment where you’re like, ‘Oh, Mother Nature is actually in charge.’”
And he doesn’t give up. He stands and starts swinging his ice tools again. He’s visibly exhausted, grunting as he inches up the wall. By now, Smith’s beard is white with snow. When he finally reaches the end of the pitch, it takes him four tries before he sinks an ice tool into the ground and pulls himself to the top of the wall.
He and Parks hug. “It was terrible down there,” says Smith. “But I loved it.”
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