Jeremy Clarkson turned our heads on Top Gear last summer by driving a Nissan 4x4 across the Channel with nothing to stop him sinking but some welded doors, a couple of floats and a Honda outboard. That’s nothing. Now his achievement has been more than matched by a Yorkshire farmer and a Land Rover 110 pickup.

Steve Burgess’s day job is maintaining a beef suckler herd on 140 acres of land in the Calder Valley. In his heart, however, Burgess wants to be an explorer, and to prove it, he’s driven his Land Rover across the Bering Strait – the treacherous stretch of ocean between Siberia and Alaska. What’s more, he and his team drove the Land Rover from England, in the middle of winter, and then waited for the sea ice to thaw.

They were the first people to cross the strait in a land vehicle. “I got the idea back in 1992,” said Burgess, speaking from Nome, in Alaska, where he has stopped to recuperate. “I was in Africa, and I wanted to be in South America, so I opened a map up and saw that actually, if I could just get across the Bering Strait, I could go all the way by land.” Back in the UK, he discovered Ford was planning the same thing - and its failure (its vehicle sank in the strait) became an extra spur to his ambition. The Cape to Cape Expedition - which envisaged driving from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn - was born.

To make the crossing, Burgess and his team had to surmount two big obstacles. The first was the strait. At its narrowest point it is 56 miles across, but currents, icebergs and unpredictable weather make it an intimidating prospect. It’s for this reason that many previous attempts on the strait have focused on a winter crossing (including an unsuccessful one led by Sir Ranulph Fiennes in 2001), which was Burgess’s original intention. “But when I first visited the region in 2001,” he says, “it was obvious that any vehicle capable of getting across the ice wasn’t capable of getting to the ice - and so it would be impossible for one vehicle to make the whole journey.” The challenge was to adapt a road vehicle for a sea crossing.

The solution, developed by Protection & Performance, a company specialising in adapting 4x4s, was ingenious. Take a “rest-of-the-world”-spec Land Rover, which is less complex than the UK version, run an extra drive shaft out of the engine to power a propeller, and add floats. Enormous floats: the two red tanks that sit on either side of Burgess’s vehicle have a combined volume of 1,480 gallons and can maintain 5½ tons of buoyancy. Even stripped to the bare essentials and equipped with its two-man crew (Burgess and Dan Evans, a friend), the vehicle weighed three tons (a quarter of a ton of which was fuel). The design was tested on Coniston Water, in the Channel, and on a crossing of the Irish Sea. It passed easily.

Burgess and his team produced detachable caterpillar tracks for the Land Rover so it could cross snow and ice on its way to the strait. Both were to be flown in to Yakutsk, and would be transported behind the Land Rover in tracked and untracked vehicles.

As if these challenges were not big enough, Burgess found he faced a more subtle and exasperating obstacle: Russian bureaucracy. “We wanted to leave Russia by unconventional means from an unconventional place,” he says. “If you want to do that in England, you can go and see an official and fill out a form. In Russia there’s no provision for this kind of thing. You’ve got to deal on a one-to-one basis with the officials.”

So difficult did it become that he sacrificed the first leg of the journey - through Africa -to devote more time and resources to the task, despite the help, a term used loosely, of an agency in Moscow that specialised in organising expeditions. “They saw us coming,” he says, “and in the end I reckon I spent £100,000. Most of which went on bribes.” He also drank an awful lot of vodka. “Every time you sit down at a meeting, out comes the vodka,” he recalls. “Local etiquette means you have to finish the bottle.”

Burgess left his farm on January 29 this year - having spent the night delivering calves - and reached Uelen, on the shores of the strait, on March 3. The final leg of the journey had involved tracking the Arctic coastline of eastern Siberia for two weeks and enduring temperatures below -40C. “We’d designed the caterpillar tracks for this final leg,” says Burgess, “so that we could drive over the sea ice, but when we got there we realised it was out of the question. There were blocks of ice as big as Minis everywhere, so after a while we had to put the wheels back on and weave our way around them, trusting in our Cooper Discoverer tyres to keep us moving.” They saw plenty of polar bears.

Once the Land Rover was in Uelen, Burgess and his team flew home to wait for the ice to melt. He returned on July 6. “Having the right weather is critical,” he says. “The ice has only just receded from the strait, and as soon as the wind blows from the north it comes back. So you need a strong southerly wind to blow it as far away as possible. But then you need the wind to switch round to the north to drive you down against the prevailing current to Alaska. Without it, we’d have ended up at the North Pole.

On July 7 they began the crossing - but there was a strong southerly gale approaching, and after nine hours they stopped on the island of Little Diomede in the middle of the strait. The island has a population of 140. “The gale did hit that night, and built 30ft waves in next to no time. If we hadn’t stopped I probably wouldn’t be here now,” he says.

The Land Rover was on the island for a month. A mixture of bad weather and local apathy about providing a safety boat meant the expedition almost ground to a halt. In the end, Burgess took a boat to Alaska, flew back to the UK, raised extra cash to fund his own safety boat and crew and flew back at the beginning of the month. Their arrival coincided with a calm spell of weather, and on August 7 the Land Rover entered the waters of the strait once more. Six and a half hours later, they came ashore at a place called Wales, cheered on by the local population.

“In the end, I couldn’t believe that we’d done it,” Burgess says. “After all the other attempts to do it, by teams with budgets 10 or 20 times the size of mine; and after nine years of organising and planning. To be the first team to cross the Bering Strait in a motor vehicle was a fantastic feeling.”

Now all Burgess has to do is drive to Cape Horn. The next leg begins in the winter once it’s possible to cross the boggy tundra to Nome and beyond. In the meantime he’s got a farm to run - and a wedding to organise, as he got engaged to Nicky Spinks, his long-time girlfriend, in Moscow during the drive.

Burgess is philosophical about juggling conflicting demands. “I prioritise,” he says. “If I wanted to be the most successful farmer in the area, there is no way I could go off and travel. But I’m not - not by a long way. We don’t have a patio. We don’t have granite work surfaces in the kitchen. Adventure is what I love, and I make sacrifices to pursue it.”

For more information on Burgess’s journey, visit www.capetocape.org.uk

FROM ABERDEEN ANGUS TO CAPE HORN

STEVE BURGESS Burgess, 53, is a farmer, who keeps a herd of 85 Aberdeen Angus cows in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. “My father instilled a love of adventure in my when I was a boy,” he says, “and I’ve never looked back.”

Previous expeditions have visited the Ethiopian highlands and Panama’s Darien rainforest, where he travelled in a dugout. He says the expedition was given extra impetus by the failure of previous attempts. Burgess is also a keen mountain marathon runner.

DAN EVANS Evans, 38, is director of Protection & Performance Ltd, the company that adapted Burgess’s Land Rover for the expedition. “Steve first came to me eight years ago to discuss the project,” Dan said, “and gradually I got sucked in. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d do something like this myself.”

Burgess and Evans are now looking for sponsorship for the second stage of their journey, which will take them from Alaska to Cape Horn.

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