Oak Park's Amy Freeze Sets Sights on Arctic Blast

Amy Freeze is aiming to leave the warmth of her Oak Park home for a free ride to the top of the world. She wants to become “Quark’s Official Blogger” in the expedition company’s contest to win a $54,000 cruise for two to the North Pole.

Entrants are required to post a 200 to 400 word essay on the contest website, and then use their social networking skills to collect votes from the public. (See Freeze’s essay here.)

She’s got until 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 15 to be among the top five vote getters.  A panel of judges will pick the winner from those five finalists. At last count, Freeze was running second.

Freeze has been the chief meteorologist at Fox Chicago News, and an Oak Park resident, for the last four years.

“The station is releasing me from my contract on Feb. 20,” said Freeze, who can’t discuss future plans until her release but says she’s been “pleasantly surprised at the outreach” since Fox announced its decision.

She and her family — husband Gary Arbuckle and their four children who range in age from 2 to 12 — would love to stay in Oak Park.

“We absolutely enjoy and are so fortunate to be a part of this community. We adore our neighbors, parks and recreation services, Ridgeland Common. But in these hard economic times, it’s not where you are, it’s who you’re with,” she said.

If she wins the contest, Freeze knows exactly where she and her husband will be from June 23 to July 7: on an expedition from Helsinki, Finland to Murmansk Russia, where they will board a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker for stops at the North Pole and Franz Josef Land, uninhabited islands that are the habitat of polar bears and walrus.

Freeze happened on the contest while doing research on cold weather.

“My Google search turned up ‘blog your way to the North Pole.’ It sounded like a great adventure. But the North Pole is changing so drastically with global warming. It’s also a chance to live through this part of history, to see how it is now and what it might become,” said Freeze.

She has the chops to turn what is essentially a tourist trip into more of an “educational experience,” she said. 

Freeze holds bachelor’s degrees in communications and geosciences, and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in environmental science. She is one of a few women with a certified broadcast meteorologist accreditation from the American Meteorological Society.

If she wins, she plans to do a lot of prep work and “push a lot of information out” through video and social network sites, along with visits to schools.

Although her career began on the news side of broadcasting, Freeze was urged by a news director in Portland, Ore. to change her focus.

“He said, ‘Your last name sounds like weather. Get on it,'” she said.

And yes, Freeze really is her last name. It’s featured prominently in her essay.

“It’s the name I was born with and I took a lot of grief for,” she said. “But this time it could get me a huge prize.”