Race to the Top of the World: Inside Will Steger's Historic Expedition to the North Pole

As Paul said later, it was like an earthquake at sea. With the sound of a mighty rushing wind, the ice around us suddenly began to heave and buckle under titanic force. Sections of ice the size of city blocks smashed and ground together, forming pressure ridges like giant hedgerows over the Arctic Ocean's frozen surface.

Somehow our team—seven men, one woman, five sleds, and 49 dogs—dodged and scrambled through the maelstrom until it gradually subsided. In the silence that followed, our woman team member, Ann Bancroft, remarked grimly: "I'd say that ocean was very much alive."

The date was March 16, 1986, our ninth day on the ice. We were bound from Canada's Ellesmere Island for the North Pole, a straight-line distance of 478 miles. In those nine days we had chopped, scraped, and hauled our way 20 miles into the ice, to a point known as the ice-shear zone. Here a stretch of relatively stable coastbound ice meets ice constantly driven by powerful forces of wind and current. The result is an area often beset by open leads, some of them mile-wide gaps of fog-shrouded black ocean. In 1906 one such lead barred the way of explorer Robert E. Peary for several critical days, a major factor in turning him back and delaying his attainment of the Pole for another three years.

After first threatening us, the shear zone actually helped us on our way. The morning after the icequake the area directly ahead proved to be a recently frozen lead, a strip of smooth glare ice running due north as far as the eye could see. "Look at that gorgeous skating rink!" exclaimed Brent Boddy. "At this rate we'll be at the Pole in a week."

Of course Brent knew better, as did the rest of us. After 12 miles the lead petered out, and it was back to chopping and hauling our way painfully through the jumbled ice. Using lumberjack peaveys as levers, we pried the sleds forward foot by foot, urging the dogs—"Hut! Hut!" Pry, push, grunt, curse, and repeat the cycle hundreds of times a day. It was hard going, but none of us expected less; together we combined more than half a century of Arctic experience.

At 41 l was the senior member and co-leader of the expedition. For more than half my life I have taught winter camping skills in my native Minnesota and have logged more than 20,000 miles of travel in the far north, mostly with dog teams I have raised and trained myself.

My partner, Paul Schurke, a 30-year-old wilderness instructor, was my co-leader and joint organizer of the expedition, the planning of which had occupied us for three years. Paul and I direct the Lynx Track Winter Skills School at Ely, Minnesota.

No expedition is stronger than its individual members, and Paul and I had chosen the very best: Brent Boddy, 31, a veteran dog driver and trail outfitter from Canada's Arctic settlement of Frobisher Bay; Canadian cross-country skiing medalist Richard Weber, 26; Alaskan dog driver and carpenter Bob Mantell, 31; and Arctic wildlife specialist Geoff Carroll, 35, also from Alaska. The two remaining members were our lone woman, Ann Bancroft, 30, a schoolteacher and crack mountaineer from Minnesota, and Bob McKerrow, 37, an Antarctic expert from New Zealand.

Despite our training and experience, that first week on the ice was a painful introduction to polar travel. Temperatures of minus 70°F present a constant danger of frostbite, and the slightest wind can cause eyelids to freeze shut. One quickly learns that no part of the body functions separately from the rest. Wearing a face mask, for example, conserves overall body heat and thus protects the hands for longer periods of exposure. At such temperatures pain accompanies nearly every task, and the tendency is always toward haste. To understand patience, one must lash sleds at 70 below.

In order to reach the Pole without re-supply en route, we had to load each of our five wooden sleds at the start with 1,350 pounds of food and equipment. Clearly such loads could not be manhandled over the ice, and for the first three weeks we relayed back and forth with partial loads.

As a result we traveled three miles for every mile gained. Bob McKerrow calculated that our trail through the ice combined a total of 636 mukluk and paw prints for each step forward.

Each day our eight team members and 49 sled dogs consumed 126 pounds of fuel and food. The former consisted of white gas for our stoves, the latter included high-energy nut bars, cheese, butter, oatmeal, noodles, and that staple of polar travelers, pemmican—a mixture of dried beef and lard.

For variety each member of the team was allowed to bring a small amount of a favorite treat. I chose frozen lemon juice for a morning drink and dried seal meat. It was a mistake. Late in the trek my sweet tooth got the better of me, and I offered to swap for some of the delicacies others had brought—Ann's brown sugar, for example, or Richard's hard candy. No one seemed interested in dried seal meat, however.

The farther north we traveled, the lighter our loads became and the less our need for big sleds. We simply trimmed the sleds down bit by bit and fed the wood into a small stove we had brought for heating. It was so cold that those of us who kept daily journals would warm our notebooks, pens, and pencils directly over the stove before making an entry. Soon after the ice-quake I made the following one:

DAY 11 (MARCH 18)—The Arctic has an uncanny way of teaching you, forcing you, to live in the moment. Early in the trip our moods swung wildly with each change in conditions. For hours we'd fight our way through a hellish chaos of huge rubble, suddenly breaking free onto a pan that seemed endless. Despair would flash to exhilaration. "Finally the worst is behind us," we'd gasp. An hour or two later we'd strike another maze....Another slump. Another heavy dose of doubt about our prospects....We found ourselves expending as much precious energy fighting doubt as we did fighting pressure ridges. But now in the second week we've learned to stop groping for some elusive highway of smooth travel to the Pole and settle in for the long, hard grind northward.

One of my chief concerns was what drivers know as dog burnout. If we taxed our five teams too heavily, exhausting their strength and spirit, we would have to lay over one or more days to allow the dogs to recharge. With limited food and fuel, the one thing we could not afford was extra days.

Each time we cut off a section of one of the sleds, it was a special occasion. On these "party days," as we called them, we would bask in the added heat of our wood stove, the pungent aroma of smoke recalling autumn days at home. At such times we were grateful for small comforts, and though we could never dry our perspiration-soaked clothes completely, we drove out enough moisture to boost our morale.

Our confidence grew in direct proportion to the miles, and we became a team of instinctive problem solvers. When the abrasive "corn" snow and rubble ice wore holes in our moose-hide mukluks, we cut patches from our sled covers and stitched them in place with dental floss.

One thing we could not do: Walk on water. Open leads appeared, and when they crossed our path, they were an obstacle to reckon with. The boats we had brought for such occasions had broken in the extreme cold, but the same cold proved our ally, freezing the leads sufficiently in a matter of hours for us to cross over with the sleds.

Unlike freshwater ice, which is rigid, sea ice takes the form of a resilient, rubbery skin that will support a loaded sled on a thickness of as little as two or three inches. Crossing a newly frozen lead is like traveling over a huge water bed, with the ice directly underneath sagging but not breaking and occasionally setting up wave patterns across the surrounding surface.

During the last few weeks of our trek, when the temperature reached a relatively balmy minus 20°F, the leads often failed to freeze over, and we spent long hours making detours in search of ice bridges.

On normal days we followed a routine of ten to twelve hours of battling the ice and the remainder making camp, feeding the dogs, having dinner, sleeping, breakfasting, breaking camp, getting under way again. We were four to a tent—close quarters, as my journal reveals:

DAY 20 (MARCH 27)—Inside...steaming teacups balanced precariously on the rim of the stove box. A two-gallon pot of melting snow teeters on the tiny white gas stove. Any quick clumsy move would spell disaster. Steam billows from the warm gray slurry of pulverized meat and fat mixed with the morning's leftover oatmeal—our pemmican supper—as we dish out our portions....

We talk little—the roar of the [stove] gas jets makes conversation difficult. What a confined world this is! Bob's knee is touching my left elbow, Richard is blocked from view by hanging mittens and boot liners, Geoff huddles in the corner....Tight spaces; some men sew, some write, some drink tea and wonder.

Such intimacy was hardest on Ann, though she never complained. I later found that she had made a similar journal entry:

Now it's really claustrophobic! Tough to move the arms. Mittens inside my polar suit to dry, I now must look like a mummy. Certainly feel like one.

By the end of the third week we were about 80 miles from Ellesmere Island, with some 400 to go. The vital question of where we were from day to day fell on Paul Schurke, our expedition navigator. In line with our rule of no outside navigational aid, Paul relied on sextant and chronometer to plot our position at regular intervals.

Though we carried a small transmitter whose signal could be picked up and pinpointed by polar-orbiting satellites, we were never told of the results. Our occasional radio contact with colleague Jim Gasperini at base camp in Resolute far to the south was strictly one way: We would tell Jim how we were doing, and he would relay the news to friends and family, but in return we received neither position fixes, weather forecasts, sea-ice reports, nor anything else that would benefit our progress.

In short, we were determined to reach the Pole by manual navigation alone and by the power and perseverance of ourselves and our sled dogs.

The dogs were an exception to our rule against outside aid. As we moved northward and our loads lightened, we would cut back a sled and eventually eliminate it, and thus there was no need for the dogs that pulled it. In the early days of polar exploration excess dogs were usually killed and fed to the other dogs, or even eaten by the explorers themselves.

Such treatment was out of the question for our dogs, and we had planned two airlifts along our route by ski plane to remove animals we no longer needed. The first airlift took place on Day 26 (April 2), when we were roughly a hundred miles out from Ellesmere Island.

To our sorrow the same flight evacuated Bob McKerrow, who could no longer continue. Sixteen days earlier, while Bob was crossing a pressure ridge, his sled had suddenly careered into him, injuring several ribs. We all hoped Bob would mend, but the pain worsened day by day, and he began spitting up phlegm in a way that suggested internal injuries.

The night before the airlift was scheduled, Bob sat up for hours, wrestling with a decision that only he could make. By morning he had made it. "For years," he told us, "I've wanted to be the first New Zealander at the Pole. But I've got a wonderful family back home to think of. I know I'll still feel fulfilled if I leave you now, and I may be a lot healthier for it in the long run."

It was a tearful good-bye all around as Bob boarded the plane with seven weary dogs. There was a quick thumbs-up from him through the window and then he was gone.

During our first three weeks on the ice, the total minutes of daily sunlight grew rapidly. Three days before Bob's departure, Richard Weber and I shared a memorable experience, and I later recorded it:

DAY 23 (MARCH 30)—While Richard and I returned from...relaying a load forward to our camp, we witnessed an amazing phenomenon. For three hours, between 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., the sun's orb, half under the horizon, half above, rode across the northern rim of the pack ice. As we walked, we wondered when the sun would set. It never did. This marked the beginning of five and a half months of continuous sunlight at this latitude, which we estimate to be 84° 30'.

It was a moving sight, one we shared with great Arctic explorers of the past such as Nansen and Peary, as well as more recent ones like my friend, the late Naomi Uemura. They had made great sacrifices and had been drawn forever north by the polar spirit, which I noted was now urging us on:

It was this spirit that revived my tired body on the long northern trip back to camp, gave me energy and freshness that not only enabled me to walk effortlessly, but also to see my surroundings on the polar sea with new clarity....My dogs pulled the load on into the 13th hour, crossing ridge after ridge. As we crested each, my eyes caught the sun—half under in winter, half above in summer. I knew then that we had crossed the barrier of hardship that tried to prevent us from reaching this point of harmony between day and night, cold and warmth.

If we had crossed a major barrier, there were others ahead, most of them all too familiar. The severe cold remained, occasionally accompanied by storms, the leads and pressure ridges continued to plague us, and at times our progress was agonizingly slow.

In addition to Paul's chronometer and sextant we had two natural aids to navigation. If we set our watches at the local time of the meridian we were following, then our shadows would point directly north at noon and due south at midnight. The second aid was provided by the winds, which blew predominantly out of the southwest. In some places the winds created sastrugi, or long wavelike ridges of hard snow, that ran northeast and thus gave us an additional reference for true north.

Such visual aids, however, could be wiped out in seconds by fog, low overcast, or blowing snow. These whiteouts obliterated all visual clues of depth, height, and distance and made us feel as though we were suspended in skim milk.

The maxim of polar travel when whiteouts develop is to make camp and sleep until visibility returns. Late in our journey we tested that maxim and lost. When we were only 30 miles from the Pole, heavy cloud cover and light fog enveloped us. By then we were hell-bent to reach our goal, and we traveled blindly on, trying to navigate by means of the wind, which kept shifting, and sastrugi we could barely see.

Six hours later when the sun blinked through the clouds, Paul saw our dogs' shadows and knew instantly that they were in the wrong place—we were traveling more west than north. We followed the maxim then, made camp, and slept. Paul's later position fix confirmed we had been off course.

On Day 32 a wild coincidence took place—we ran into the French polar explorer Jean-Louis Etienne. We had left at different times from different jumping-off points, and our routes were not coordinated. Yet in the hundreds of thousands of square miles of trackless polar wastes we nonetheless crossed paths. I noted it in my journal:

DAY 32 (APRIL 8)—Richard was scouting as usual and ran into ski tracks that I figured were two days old. There is only one person on the polar sea, and that is Jean-Louis, traveling solo to the North Pole by skis, pulling a sled. We lost the trail rapidly—the storm here had done a good job covering it up, and it was heading over terrain too difficult for our dogs....Later in the day....I heard something. My dogs made a lunge at forty-five degrees to the right, and l caught a dark figure simultaneously. It was the Frenchman. He was camped on the other side of a pressure ridge...Heard our dogs and went out to investigate.

On April 10 Jean-Louis pushed on ahead of us, traveling far lighter thanks to regular resupply by air. Nevertheless, our route and longer hours of travel got us to the Pole ten days ahead of him, but we were delighted that he, too, succeeded.

On Day 35 we had the final dog pickup, airlifting out 21 animals and keeping 21 others in three teams of seven each. The sled loads were now down to 700 pounds each, we had come only 170 miles, and we had nearly twice that distance still to go. We faced a real crisis, and my journal reflects the argument that ensued over it:

DAY 35 (APRIL 11)—Paul and I feel the handwriting is on the wall. We are not going to get seven people to the Pole....The only way...is the way Peary did it—the mountain-climbing, pyramidal approach, gradually cutting back on the team's size, and thus payload, to ensure that at least a few members reach the top.

Brent, Geoff, and Bob share these feelings....Ann and Richard cling desperately to the hope that we can still get all of us there, disregarding the dismal-rations arithmetic that we are faced with.

In the end we compromised, jettisoning some 300 pounds of precious equipment, including two sleeping bags. We zipped four single bags into two doubles and slept three people in each, a situation that was to yield a memorable passage in Ann's journal:

Our 2nd nite sleeping 3 in 2 bags. I slept a little better. Paul and Brent on either side snoring and making all kinds of noises....Last nite I slept on Brent's side almost entirely. He said we held hands. No wonder Thad such good dreams!

High hopes against harsh realities, and then suddenly another loss, as I recorded:

DAY 39 (APRIL 15)—Tonight Bob Mantell, who rarely acknowledges pain, made a tearful announcement. His feet are badly frozen, every step is hell for him, and he feels his disability may hold us back...He is about as tough as a man can be. To hear him moaning as he crawls into his sleeping bag at night is to know of real suffering.

There was nothing to do but airlift Bob out. To me the loss was even more wrenching than that of Bob McKerrow, for the original idea of the North Pole expedition had occurred to Bob Mantell and me in 1982, when the two of us were holed up and waiting out a blizzard during a dog-sledding journey across Canadian barrens.

The irony was that on the previous day we had made decent time—we were now at 86° north, roughly halfway to the Pole. But on Day 40, which was April 16, the plane landed in the ice and Bob left us. Now we were six, with 21 dogs, and barely enough food to reach the Pole.

Six days earlier my dogs had contributed to the problem by staging an early morning burglary. While we slept, my lead dog, Chester, had chewed through the team's restraining rope, and half the animals got into the pemmican stored on the back of the sled.

We lost 20 precious pounds of food, but it could have been worse. If it had been Geoff's ravening bunch, they would have eaten everything. A few weeks before when they had gotten into an equipment pack, they tried to eat the stock off the expedition rifle.

After the slump when Bob left us, our fortunes took a turn for the better. Trail conditions continued to improve, and with the gradually lightening loads the dogs were pulling steadily for 8 to 12 hours with no sign of burnout. At the same time we hit a few of what we fondly called our "wild cards"—firmly frozen northbound leads that cost us and the dogs little effort to travel along. On one such lead we made a memorable 15 miles in less than three hours.

As the sun inched steadily higher, the temperature rose with it, and the thermometer now hovered around minus 20°F. The cold was losing its stabilizing grip on the ice, and we began to encounter more and more fractures. Fortunately most were still narrow and could be easily bridged by the sleds, but the number and width of the leads were growing. The challenge we now faced was more one of speed than of weight. We were desperate to reach the Pole before the spring thaw. It had already dumped Ann in the water a week earlier, on Day 38, as I had noted:

Ann fell in a lead today. We encountered an active crack, some 20 feet across, that was slowly opening. Half a mile to the west we found a point where the lead narrowed enough so that we could jump across. Ann blazed trail, positioning herself on the lip of the lead to make the jump. Unknowingly she had stepped out onto a hanging cornice of snow. It gave way as she began to jump. She plunged into the black seawater....

Through quick action Ann saved herself from going under by throwing her arms wide and catching the edge of the lead. Somehow she wriggled back onto the ice, soaked to the waist, her outer pants already frozen stiff as stovepipes.

It was no time for ceremony; Ann quickly stripped off her wet things and donned dry clothes grabbed by Paul from his sled. Fortunately she suffered no permanent injury, but she told us later it was two full days before she began to feel warm again.

On this occasion, as on all others, we treated Ann like any male member of the team, and she would not have it otherwise. Earlier she had considered the prospect of being the first woman in history to walk to the Pole and had written in her journal that the thought failed to impress her:

DAY 29 (APRIL 5)—I truly never think of being the first female to the Pole. I'm basically so busy trying to get there....When I do get time, I worry about being a good representative. Don't want to let friends down in any way.

On another occasion, when Ann's performance fell slightly short of her incredible demands on herself, she wrote a line in her journal that each of us echoed silently many times on the trek: I hide my tears behind a face mask and a cold day.

Now at last we were on a dash for the Pole. On Day 50 we made the best mileage of the trip—38 miles in 18 hours. We were at 88° 45' north, less than 100 miles from the Pole. Despite long days of travel the dogs' spirits held, and I recorded my pride in them:

My veterans know something is up. They have been in a number of situations where food is short and have pushed it; they know there is rest and food after the long march, and they have figured it out now. Some of the dogs also know that when the dog food runs out and we start feeding them our food, the end is near. Last night I unharnessed Chester and he fell asleep in my arms....

Then, suddenly, three days later, everything seemed to come apart:

DAY 53 (APRIL 29)—Panic nearly struck today. Having now entered our last degree of latitude, our hopes, dreams, years of planning and preparing have relied increasingly on the accuracy of the sextant and the chronometer and the skill with which they are used. After we traveled 18 hours straight in our dash to the Pole, Paul announced with quivering voice that the last two sun shots conflicted badly and thus he did not trust the position fix that resulted on the charts. While he frantically inspected the [sextant], searching for some flaw that could account for the error, the rest of us collapsed in exhaustion and desperation, knowing we were helpless to assist.

There followed what all of us to this day regard as a minor miracle:

Hours of restless sleep went by while Paul, in the other tent, dissected portions of the instrument with his Swiss army knife. Suddenly a glint of light reflected off a speck of frost. On closer examination Paul found that the frost formed by condensation on a tiny adjustment screw had wedged a delicate mirror out of alignment. He corrected the error and, swept by euphoria, took a series of shots that placed us back on track—some 30 miles from the Pole.

After weathering such crises, felt a renewed kinship with my teammates and the overwhelming power of the human heart:

I think about those who died in loneliness in the polar reaches. Alone, desolate, exhausted, starving. I need to be among sparkling red human hearts. The warmth of the human heart I crave....as beautiful as the polar snow is, blowing high in the air by the wind, shimmering against the low, yellow, eternal sun which never sets, as beautiful as my surroundings are, the human heart is still the home of warmth, and the most beautiful of God's creations.

For the past 54 days we had been traveling over a surface in constant motion toward an invisible goal. But by the morning of Day 55—May 1—we were within 20 miles of the Pole, and we could no longer hide our elation. We frolicked along like kids on parade. The dogs caught our spirit and pulled the nearly empty sleds along at a fast clip. Pressure ridges became our playgrounds. We maneuvered the sleds through them with as much bravado as we could muster, while an imaginary panel of judges scored our performance. Every mark was an E for Excellence.

Near midnight one of Paul's fixes placed us within ten miles of the Pole—realization of our objective in the Arctic's vast reaches. Even so, we traveled on for several hours and stopped to sleep by the sleds, planning to check our position in the morning.

At 9:00 a.m. on Day 56, Paul got up to take a sun shot. We awaited word on how far we had still to go. But Brent, who was outside, got the word from Paul first. The next thing we heard was an explosion—Brent had set off a "bear scare," a small charge to frighten away polar bears, in celebration:

We were at the Top of the World!

Content with the victory but too exhausted to celebrate, we treated ourselves to the greatest luxury of all—we crawled into our bags and went back to sleep.

The next day—Day 57—Jim Gasperini confirmed by radio that we had indeed reached the Pole. Three ski-equipped Twin Otters left Resolute for the 11-hour flight to pick us up. Within a day four of us were back in Minneapolis, enjoying a hero's welcome.

The celebration left us feeling honored, overwhelmed—and a little curious. Why had our expedition caught the imagination of so many people? It was neither the first nor the longest polar journey, nor would it, surely, be the last.

As we looked over newspapers for the time since mid-January that we had been out of touch, we began to get a clue: The world had been stunned by disasters—particularly the loss of the Challenger shuttle and the Soviet nuclear accident at Chernobyl. We realized that man's faith in technological wizardry had been badly shaken.

By contrast, we six had pushed long and hard to meet our goal through sheer determination and the collective will of our dogs and us together. For many people our journey symbolized a reaffirmation of that will—the power of the human spirit.

Just before we reached the Pole, we had put down our thoughts in a brief declaration that Ann had read aloud the morning the pickup planes arrived. It said in part:

"As we, six adventurers from different parts of the world, stand where the lines of longitude of all countries meet, we believe this journey stands for hope—hope that other seemingly impossible goals can be met by people everywhere."

Perhaps that says it all.