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It’s late morning on the polar ice when Eric Larsen unzips his tent to find white-out conditions obscuring everything from view. He’s had just a few hours of sleep, and he still overslept. Today he and his expedition partner, Ryan Waters, are making their final push to the North Pole, less than four miles away. But the whipping wind is pushing the big ice floe where they set up camp southward, and every moment counts.
At this point, the two veteran adventurers have spent 53 days inching across the Arctic sea ice, and today will be another slog through slushy leads and over hummocks. When they began planning this expedition, they expected it to be treacherous. That was the point. They wanted to show the world how climate change was already wreaking havoc on the North Pole in fact, they’re calling this the Last North Expedition. They predict that their method of reaching the Pole on foot will soon be impossible.
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It’s April 1968, and an insurance salesman from Minnesota named Ralph Plaisted is looking down at his feet. He’s standing on an ice floe in the Arctic, with 10,000 feet of frigid water below.
And the ice is getting softer.
Plaisted looks around. Miles of ice-covered ocean surround him in all directions. He’s only days into his attempt to reach the North Pole and things look as grim as they’ve ever been. Plaisted and his team of amateur explorers have endured fuel shortages, howling storms, and forgotten supplies. But now, just a few inches of precarious ice separates them from a watery grave.
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On most days of the year in the early 1900s, Battle Harbour, on Labrador’s rugged coast, is pretty quiet. The busiest this cod-fishing station gets is when a big catch of fish comes in, and the air buzzes with excitement and activity as the haul is brought ashore.
But in September 1909, a buzz of a different kind fills the salty air. The tiny village, population 300, finds itself at the center of a media frenzy it hasn t seen before or since.
Against a backdrop of fishing boats bobbing expectantly in the harbor, dozens of reporters wearing hats and long, thick coats to guard against the chill have descended on the wooden dock, waiting for a press conference with Robert E. Peary. These men have one goal: To get the scoop from Peary on the historic first conquest of the North Pole.
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It’s April 6, 1909, and Robert E. Peary and his assistant Matthew Henson are settling in at yet another camp during their third attempt to reach the North Pole. It’s something they’ve done countless times during the course of their journeys together, but on this otherwise unremarkable stretch of ice, their once-elusive goal is now within reach.
As they and the Inughuit guides unpack their supplies, tend to the dogs, and begin food preparations, Peary unfurls an American flag that his wife Josephine had sewn for him years earlier. He fastens it to the top of the camp’s igloo. Henson watches as the star-spangled silk springs to life on a polar breeze, a symbol of their triumph.
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It’s summer, 1895, in the northernmost reaches of Greenland. The temperature hovers around freezing. American explorer Robert E. Peary and his assistant Matthew Henson are on a backbreaking journey by dogsled across the ice cap, from Independence Bay, a large fjord on Greenland’s northeastern corner, to their base camp at Bowdoin Bay on the west coast. They’re nearly out of food, and they’re desperately searching for a herd of musk ox to stave off their deaths by starvation.
The animals they’re stalking weigh up to 800 pounds and are built like battering rams, with a coat of shaggy hair and sharp, curved horns. Musk ox are powerful and unpredictable, and they’re Peary’s and Henson’s last hope for survival. All day, they look for snags of the oxen’s hair on rough rocks and scan the snow for tracks. Finally, they locate hoofprints and follow them across a valley, anticipating fresh meat.