From Everest to the Open Ocean: Mark Synnott’s Sailing Adventure Begins

Mark Synnott, a professional climber and mountain guide who’s been a member of The North Face athletic team for more than two decades, knows a thing or two about extreme adventures. His bestselling book The Impossible Climb is both a memoir and a page-turning account of his pal Alex Honnold’s first free solo of El Capitan. His riveting second book, The Third Pole, is the story of his harrowing 2019 expedition to Mount Everest to search for the remains of legendary mountaineer Sandy Irvine. Heck, his Stevens 47, Polar Sun, is named for a sheer rock tower on Baffin Island in Canada that took him 39 frigid, ridiculous days to ascend in 1996.

However, when I phoned Synnott this past April, he was anchored off Manzanillo, Mexico, with his wife and 9-year-old son, preparing to set sail for the Marquesas and points beyond. He sounded just slightly apprehensive: “Hampton and Tommy don’t usually go with me on expeditions. I’m usually with my buddies, and everyone’s signed up and wants to be there. This is different. Setting off on this passage and looking at three weeks offshore with my family is the most daunting thing I’ve ever faced.” It’s a literal sea change for the longtime adventurer, from dizzying heights to sea level. 

I met Synnott three years ago through our mutual friend John Kretschmer, when Synnott was preparing to attempt a Northwest Passage transit and we all set off on a bit of a training voyage. The Northwest Passage seemed like a pretty ambitious goal. Synnott not only knocked it off, but he also just released a terrific book about it. 

Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery is a fantastic first-person tale of high-­latitude seafaring with a twist: Synnott’s side mission to uncover the ever-elusive truth of what exactly transpired during Sir John Franklin’s legendary, tragic Arctic expedition in 1845. No spoilers here, other than to say it’s quite possible, and also ironic, that the accomplished alpinist has written the best sailing book of 2025.

Synnott’s own journey as a sailor began back in 2005 on a climbing expedition to, of all places, Pitcairn Island in the southern Pacific Ocean. The climbing turned out to be subpar, but offshore on the 66-foot sailboat he’d chartered to get there, he had a revelation. 

“Ahead,” he writes in Into the Ice, “a full moon lit a corridor across the sea and the waves scintillated in a light so heavenly, it felt as if Neptune himself were drawing me down the path to enlightenment. At that moment, it washed over me that I had only ever felt such tranquility before when I was deep in the mountains.”

Returning home to New Hampshire, he bought his first boat, an Irwin 27, for a buck. Later, he upgraded to a 32-foot ketch. Itching to sail ever farther, he eventually purchased his “forever boat”: Polar Sun. Which is when he asked himself, If I could go anywhere in the world in this boat, where would it be? The answer soon became clear. Back to the Arctic. Through the Northwest Passage. What an odyssey it turned out to be. 

During our conversation, I asked Synnott what, if any, parallels there were between climbing and sailing. “Seafaring is so similar,” he said. “It’s like the flip side of the same coin. There’s just no limit to how deep you can go with it. You never run out of stuff to do; you’re always learning, always an apprentice. It’s all-consuming. The planning and preparation are exactly the same as mounting a climbing expedition. How well it goes has a huge amount to do with your logistics and how thorough, careful, and meticulous you were with your planning. The more I got into it and kept going, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is everything I dreamed it could be and more.’ The way it’s resonating is telling me that, deep down, maybe I was meant to be a mariner.”

Now, despite just a tinge of trepidation, Synnott is swapping the unforgiving ice for the swaying palms of French Polynesia. I’d be utterly shocked if it doesn’t all go swimmingly. The dude’s got a pretty great track record. 

Herb McCormick is a CW editor-at-large. 

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