Reprinted from Outside magazine
Last year’s contenders in the race to reach the North Pole—losers all—included a Japanese actress on a snowmobile, another Japanese on a motorcycle, a Frenchman on skis, and an Austrian who set off on foot.
The more auspicious Steger North Pole Dogsled Expedition, which ventured forth March 8, used dogsleds for the first time since Naomi Uemera’s 1978 attempt. Unlike Uemura, the eight-member Steger group did without cache drops. They became the eighth expedition to reach the top of the world, the first confirmed attempt by dogsled without resupply.
Under those circumstances, the odds against success were high—about ten to one, according to one experienced outfitter who runs commercial air-supplied trips to the Pole. Thirty-one-hundred pounds of the 5,000-pound load were devoted to food for 49 dogs and even that wasn’t enough. The crew shared leftovers with the dogs for the final four days. When they were picked up May 2, there were 10 pounds of provisions left. Team member Geoff Carroll called it “a fantastic, miserable, and wonderful trip.”
Coleader and master planner Will Steger, 41, who logged a record 5,000 dogsled miles in the Arctic just last year, said “In 20 years of experience in mountaineering and Arctic travel, I’ve never seen such conditions. It was brutal.” Temperatures reached 70 below (before the thermometer stopped working), head winds 60 miles an hour.
Although the five-sled team hoped to make 15 miles a day, they had forged through only 18 after the first week. Open water and 40-foot-high pressure ridges forced them to make frequent detours and shuttle supplies turning a 500-mile trip into a 1,000-mile one, New Zealander Robert McKerrow cracked two ribs when a sled careened out of control going over a 40-foot ice wall. Arrangements were made to fly him out April 2; seven injured dogs went with him.
Seven days later, 21 more dogs, no longer necessary to pull the ever-lighter loads, were also flown out. This had been decided beforehand. The team felt it was a humane alternative to slaughtering them, the practice on previous expeditions.
Dog trainer Robert Mantell, who had passed on the airlifts despite his toes becoming black from frostbite, finally agreed to being evacuated April 15, just as the team got over the worst of the pressure ridges and onto the smoother ice of the mid-Arctic Ocean. Reduced to six people and 21 dogs, the team began to make up for lost time. They put in 14-hour workdays—the sun never set after they reached the 85th parallel—zigzagging through a maze of leads, or patches of open water. Because their canoe had split in the cold, the team used an iceberg to cross one 100-foot lead of water. Ann Bancroft, the only woman in the group, fell in another lead. The team hastily pitched a tent stoked a wood-burning stove with dogsled slats, and dried her out.
Not long after Bancroft’s accident, a team of dogs got stranded on a block of unstable ice that let out a thunderous pop and crack. “I’ll never forget the looks on the dogs’ faces,” says Bancroft. “They were attached to the sled. I think they knew they would have gone straight down.” In the end, the trip did count one fatality: Critter, Mantell’s lead dog, went into convulsions and died inexplicably the day before reaching the Pole. Critter had never pulled well after Mantell left.
The Pole—no easy spot to find under any circumstances—was foggy and overcast when the team arrived. The weather finally cleared May 1; a French satellite confirmed the position that coleader Paul Schurke had determined by maritime sextant, the same instrument Commander Robert E. Peary had used when he allegedly reached the Pole by dogsled in 1909.
In part, this expedition set out to prove that Peary came within a mile and six-tenths of the Pole, though a definitive study by British geographer J. Gordon Hayes concluded that Peary couldn’t possibly have logged the necessary 50 dogsled miles a day during the time he was out of the sight of witnesses. Steger’s team logged no ore than 38 on their best day; they averaged only 20.
Though Peary had to bring enough supplies for a round trip, he reduced his own effort to a relay race between camps that another party had set up; the final dash was made with a fresh team of dogs. Steger, who’d planned on being flown out upon reaching the Pole, made a straight run. “The same dogs were on the front line every day,” he points out. “We were a self-reliant group from start to finish.”
For the future, Steger has his sights set on the bottom of the world—a dogsled crossing of the Antarctic ice cap, with a stop at the South Pole en route.
