How the Turner Twins Are Mythbusting Modern Gear (Mike Knispel , March 16, 2026, Carryology)
The Turner Twins’ trajectory into the world of high-stakes exploration wasn’t born from a childhood obsession with Everest; it spawned from a near-tragedy.
At age 17, just prior to their 18th birthday, Hugo dove into the sea and hit a sandbank. He fractured his C7 vertebra. In a week where eight other people were admitted to the same hospital with similar injuries, Hugo was the only one to walk out. The proximity to permanent paralysis was a profound wake-up call.
“We had a midlife crisis at 17,” Ross explains. “Life got put in perspective.”
They needed to live and test their limits. They started by rowing the Atlantic to raise funds for Spinal Research, a UK-based charity they’ve worked with for years. But the real epiphany came on a London tube train years later, reading about the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They looked at the grayed photos of men in tweed on the ice and wondered: How did they survive?
They realized they possessed the ultimate scientific tool: a perfect control subject and a perfect variable. If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance—be it core temperature, calorie burn, or cognitive function—could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.The “time travel” experiments were born.