Compiled by Outside Online

January 13, 2003 South African Adventurer Mike Horn survived a fire that engulfed his tent and most of his equipment last Friday in an accident with his cooking stove.

"I was changing the fuel bottle on my stove and on opening the screw top, the fuel sprayed out under high-pressure all over the tent," Horn wrote in a posting on his Web site, www.mikehorn.com. "The tiny flame still remaining on the stove was enough to set the whole tent alight in a flash. It ravished everything inside the tent within seconds. It was so quick the only reaction I had was to save myself."

Horn, 36, had just skied across the frozen Fury and Hecla Strait connecting Baffin Island to mainland Canada on the fourth stage of his attempt to complete the first-ever motorless solo circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle. Horn launched the 12,500-mile sailing, skiing, trekking, kayaking voyage from Norway's North Cape on August 4. The blaze consumed all the gear in the tent, including Horn's sleeping bag, down jacket, and maps. His telephone and GPS, which were in his sled, were spared, enabling him to call a friend in Baffin Island's Arctic Bay who arranged for help to be sent from the island of Igloolik. In the twelve hours it took for a rescue team to arrive, Horn built a shelter on the ice. With the temperature dropping to about -40 degrees, Horn had only a windstopper and candles to keep him warm.

Horn, who completed a circumnavigation of the planet in 17 months along the equator by sailboat, dugout canoe, and foot in 1999 and 2000, is now in Igloolik, assessing the damage and awaiting resupply of critical equipment. Once he's on his way again, he'll trek westward towards Alaska then cross the Bering Strait in a sea kayak. He'll make landfall in Russia's Chukotka Peninsula and continue across Siberia to the port town of Murmansk. From there he'll take to the water again, either in a kayak or sailboat, completing the final stage of the expedition back to the North Cape.

"My logistics team will bring me new equipment next week and I will get moving again as soon as possible," he wrote.