Benjamin Weber 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 sometime 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 Antartica; 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 continues to work towards his dreams, and following the sudden death of his mother from cancer, wants his journeys to have much more of an impact than just reaching personal dreams, and he is looking to raise funds for Cancer Research UK with his expeditions.
With this, after almost 15 years in Brazil and a year in India, he has moved back to the Highlands of Scotland where he trained for his May 2022 Greenland Expedition and is now preparing for his coming solo expedition to the South Pole at the end of 2022.
CONTACT: blweber@outlook.com