At 58, Ian Evans clipped into skis, harnessed himself to a sled and set off across 900 kilometres of Antarctica towards the South Pole.
He was not a record-chasing elite athlete. He was not a professional explorer. He was a Chartered Accountant from Elora, Canada, with a childhood fascination for Shackleton and a lifelong habit of asking one dangerous little question:
Why not?
This article, drawn from Ian’s conversation with Sam Penny on Why’d You Think You Could Do That?, explores the life of an ordinary man who kept choosing extraordinary adventures, from Kilimanjaro and the Matterhorn to cycling across Australia, nearly dying on Mount Elbrus, skiing to the South Pole and building the Elora Adventure Film Festival.
It is not really a story about mountains, ice or distance.
It is a story about designing a life big enough to wonder what you are truly capable of.
By Sam Penny · Read time: ~15–18 minutes
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In This Article
- The Ordinary Explorer
- Kilimanjaro and the Start of a Dual Life
- Mountains, Risk and the Moment He Nearly Died
- Cycling Across Australia Alone
- 900 Kilometres to the South Pole
- The Whiteboard That Rebuilt His Life
- The Elora Adventure Film Festival
- Ian Evans’ Playbook for an Extraordinary Life
- The Brave Five
- Listen, Subscribe and Explore More
The Ordinary Explorer
Ian Evans grew up in Shrewsbury in the United Kingdom. A normal childhood. A loving family. Scouts, camping, hiking and enough curiosity to make sitting still feel slightly suspicious.
At three, he climbed onto the roof of a shed simply because the ladder was there. At five, he was banned from a cycling rink after deciding that riding the same direction as everyone else was unbearably dull.
That instinct never really left him.
Ian left school early, became a clerk in an accounting office and eventually qualified as a Chartered Accountant. On paper, it looked sensible. Stable. Respectable. But underneath the spreadsheets was the soul of someone who had been quietly haunted by Antarctic explorers since childhood.
Shackleton. Scott. The South Pole. The vast white silence of Antarctica.
To Ian, those places felt impossibly far away, which of course made them even more magnetic.
“I choose something that I want to do, not that I can do.”
That sentence might be the operating system of Ian’s life.
Kilimanjaro and the Start of a Dual Life
In his twenties, while many accountants were climbing the corporate ladder, Ian found a different ladder.
Mount Kilimanjaro.
He had been working in Zambia and travelling through Africa when the idea appeared. He had never been above 4,000 feet. He did not know how his body would react to altitude. So he bought boots, rented gear, got a lift to the start in an old Ford Zephyr and went up.
Kilimanjaro changed the geometry of his life.
It proved that high altitude was not reserved for some secret breed of superhuman. It showed Ian that the life of a finance professional and the life of an adventurer did not have to be enemies. They could be two engines on the same strange machine.
From that point, he designed a dual life. Accounting paid for the expeditions. Expeditions gave meaning, depth and voltage to the accounting.
He gave up career moves. He took time off. He chose adventure again and again, not as an escape from life, but as a way deeper into it.
Mountains, Risk and the Moment He Nearly Died
Ian went on to pursue major mountains around the world, including several of the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent.
But mountaineering is never just a highlight reel. It carries a shadow.
On Aconcagua, Ian came across two climbers who had died in a storm. On the Matterhorn, he stood on the summit in violent weather knowing the descent could kill him. On Mount Elbrus in Russia, the mountain finally got close enough to leave a permanent mark.
Ian fell roughly 300 feet down ice and cliff.
He nearly died.
That fall was the hinge point. Other people’s deaths had saddened him, but his own near miss changed the equation. He realised that if he kept chasing mountaineering in the same way, the next close call might not be close at all.
So he moved on.
Not quit. Moved on.
“When the horse is dead, get off.”
For Ian, bravery is not blind persistence. Sometimes bravery is the maturity to close one chapter before it eats the rest of the book.
Cycling Across Australia Alone
After years of expeditions with teams, Ian wanted to increase the degree of difficulty.
So he chose Australia.
More specifically, he chose to ride roughly 5,000 kilometres from Perth to Sydney. Alone.
His reasoning was perfectly Ian: he had one friend called David in Perth and another friend called David in Sydney, so he decided to cycle between the two Davids.
The Nullarbor is not gentle country. It is vast, exposed, brutally repetitive and famous for making distance feel almost philosophical. But Ian found something there that many people spend their whole lives avoiding.
Silence.
No constant music. No endless podcasts. No attempt to stuff the emptiness with noise. He listened to tyres on road, animals in the scrub and road trains appearing from behind like mechanical weather systems.
He discovered that some of the best expedition days are the ones where the mind thinks about absolutely nothing.
In a world addicted to stimulation, Ian found power in the blank space.
900 Kilometres to the South Pole
The South Pole had been waiting in Ian’s imagination since childhood.
At nearly 60, he got his chance.
Selected as part of a four-person team, Ian trained by dragging a truck tyre around his village for months. Locals started calling him a lunatic, which later became the name of the documentary made about the expedition.
But Antarctica did not care how well he had prepared.
Before the expedition even properly began, Ian had plantar fasciitis in one foot. Then his other foot swelled so badly he could barely get it into his boot. With hundreds of kilometres still ahead, both feet were failing.
He kept going.
Not elegantly. Not heroically in the glossy poster sense. He went to places mentally he did not know existed. He dragged the sled through pain, exhaustion and the kind of isolation that strips life back to its rawest form.
At the South Pole, Ian had achieved the dream. But achievement did not arrive neatly wrapped.
He came home with what he describes as a version of PTSD. The expedition had taken him beyond his comfort zone, beyond his physical capacity and beyond the tidy motivational slogans people often attach to endurance.
That honesty is what makes Ian’s story powerful.
Adventure gives. Adventure also takes. The question is whether the exchange leaves you more awake than before.
The Whiteboard That Rebuilt His Life
The hardest moment in Ian’s life was not on Antarctica.
It was at 40, when several worlds collapsed at once. He nearly died on Mount Elbrus, became divorced, lost his job and had very little money. He found himself in a basement with a whiteboard, trying to figure out who he was and what came next.
That whiteboard became a survival tool.
Ian realised he was, in his own words, a “corporate vagabond”. In the normal sense, unemployable. But he could take his analytical skills, his expedition mindset and his comfort with pressure, then apply them to businesses in crisis.
He began working with transport companies and other businesses close to bankruptcy, helping restructure and refinance them.
To Ian, walking to the South Pole and turning around a distressed business are not as different as they look. Both require planning, resilience, risk management, decision-making under pressure and the ability to keep moving when the scenery is hostile.
The mountain and the boardroom wore different costumes, but the lesson was the same.
Break the impossible into today’s next step.
The Elora Adventure Film Festival
Ian’s newest adventure does not require skis, crampons or a loaded touring bike.
It requires a cinema.
After years of adventures and after his own film Lunatic played on the festival circuit, Ian saw the power of adventure storytelling. He understood that one film, one talk, one flicker of possibility can change the course of someone’s life.
So, in his village of Elora in Canada, he started the Elora Adventure Film Festival.
It began with a simple idea: show films about ordinary people doing extraordinary things and send people home feeling like life had more doors than they realised.
Ian and his wife choose the films themselves. They sit in their garage, watch, debate, argue, cry and curate a schedule designed to be an emotional roller coaster. The films are short, often no longer than 30 minutes, and range from wild physical feats to deeply human stories of courage, age, family and reinvention.
The festival is entertainment, yes. But it is also a spark factory.
“Our goal is to inspire people of all ages to see ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
For Ian, the festival is not a retirement project. It is a long-range expedition. One he hopes to still be part of at 95.
Ian Evans’ Playbook for an Extraordinary Life
- Choose what you want to do, not what you already know you can do. The growth lives in the gap.
- Make the ridiculous sound normal. Big things become possible when broken into practical steps.
- Plan deeply, then accept that something will still go wrong. Preparation reduces risk; it does not remove uncertainty.
- Go alone sometimes. Solitude teaches lessons that teams can soften.
- Stop confusing ordinary with incapable. Ian’s whole life is proof that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
- Move on when the chapter is finished. Quitting and evolving are not the same thing.
- Use history to deepen adventure. The journey is richer when it connects to something bigger than distance.
- Go off the grid. If the phone is always available, you may never meet the deeper version of yourself.
- Let storytelling light the fuse. The right story at the right time can change what someone believes is possible.
- Keep doing bold things. Age is not the end of adventure. Letting the flame go out is.
The Brave Five
Most unexpected lesson from an expedition?
Injury. Ian learned in Antarctica that injury can threaten a dream just as much as weather, distance or fear.
A place he cannot stop thinking about?
Chile and the Atacama Desert, because the best expedition is always the next one.
The hardest moment to come back from?
Losing his marriage, job and financial security after nearly dying on Mount Elbrus. He rebuilt from a basement and a whiteboard.
One item he always packs?
A cut-out aeroplane his daughter made when she was five, calling him the best dad ever. It has been to the South Pole and beyond.
The best advice he ever received?
Learn the discipline of finishing a project properly. Think through everything that could go wrong, knowing you will still never catch it all.
What Bravery Means to Ian Evans
For Ian, bravery is not only found in skiing to the South Pole or standing on a storm-lashed summit.
Bravery is doing what you said you would do. It is adjusting when things become difficult. It is being honest enough to say, “I’m done with this now,” and move towards something better.
That may be the most useful lesson from his life.
The bravest thing is not always to keep climbing.
Sometimes the bravest thing is to choose the next mountain.
Listen, Subscribe and Explore More
Watch the full interview above and listen to more conversations with adventurers, record-breakers, founders, athletes and ordinary people doing extraordinary things on Why’d You Think You Could Do That?.
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This article is based on my in-depth interview with Ian Evans on Why’d You Think You Could Do That?
© Sam Penny. All rights reserved.
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