How This Woman Survived 2 Years Alone on a Frozen Arctic Island

#AdaBlackjack #WrangelIsland #arcticsurvival

On September 21, 1921, five people boarded a ship and sailed north toward one of the most remote islands on Earth. Four men and one Iñupiat woman, hired only to sew the fur clothing that would keep them alive.

Two years later, four of them were dead.

Her name was Ada Blackjack. She was 23 years old, a single mother from a small coastal town on the western edge of Alaska, and she had taken the job for fifty dollars a month — money she desperately needed for her son Bennett's tuberculosis treatment.

The expedition was the idea of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a Canadian explorer who believed the Arctic was not dangerous. He sent four young men — Crawford, Knight, Maurer, Galle — to Wrangel Island, 140 kilometers off the coast of Siberia, with six months of supplies and the confident promise that the island would provide everything else they needed.

It did not. By January 1923, the expedition was starving. Lorne Knight collapsed from scurvy. The other three men set out across 90 miles of frozen ocean toward Siberia, hoping to find help. They were never seen again.

Ada was left alone on Wrangel Island with a dying man, a cat named Vic, and no rescue in sight. She had never trapped an animal. She had never fired a rifle. She learned both, alone, in temperatures that reached minus 48 degrees Celsius, surrounded by polar bears.

She kept a diary. She kept Knight alive as long as she could. And when he died, she built a barricade of wooden boxes around his body to protect it from animals, moved into the storage tent, and survived another two months alone until a rescue ship finally broke through the ice on August 20, 1923.

This is the story of how a 23-year-old seamstress survived two years alone on a frozen Arctic island when four men did not. And what she came home to.

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#AdaBlackjack #WrangelIsland #ArcticSurvival #SurvivalStory #RemoteIslands

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