North Pole Tenderfoot. Doug Hall

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North Pole Tenderfoot - Doug Hall

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scuba diver, white-water rafter, and a cross-country and downhill skier.

      On the pole trip, Craig was a rookie like me. He’d done a few trips at Paul’s lodge but nothing to compare to the high adventure of a real Arctic expedition.

      We agreed to provide each other with the inspiration or motivation necessary to make the trip a success.

      “We might need to give each other a kick in the butt sometimes,” Craig said. “There won’t be time for feeling hurt or letting personal feelings get in the way.”

      As we traveled to Minnesota, we also agreed that we felt privileged to be part of a trip of this magnitude. From what we’d read about our teammates in the e-mails prior to this “try out” trip, we were in over our heads. We would be stepping into a brave new world.

      Our plane landed in Hibbing, Minnesota, the birthplace of the bus industry in the United States. It started in 1914 when miners were transported to and from the Iron Range towns and developed into the Greyhound bus company, a story told through exhibits and memorabilia at the Greyhound Museum. Sadly, our timing didn’t allow a visit to this local landmark.

      For a small town, Hibbing has a healthy share of famous sons, from folk singer Bob Dylan to sports stars Roger Marris and Kevin McCale to Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor in the Charles Manson case who later became an acclaimed author. More relevant to my taste buds, it’s also the home of food entrepreneur Jeno Paulucci, creator of over eighty food brands, including Jeno’s Pizza Rolls, Chun King, and RJR foods.

      From Hibbing we pointed our rental car north to Ely, population 3,968. Ely is literally the end of the road. Its primary fame is as the leaping off point for summer canoe camping trips into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which has over a million acres of wilderness and waterways. It’s famous for spectacular views and black flies. Fortunately, we visited during the off season so there was no need for bug spray.

      Not to be outdone by Hibbing, Ely has its own famous sites, including the Native American Heritage Center, which celebrates the life and ways of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Visitors also can see the International Wolf Center, a multimillion-dollar complex dedicated to wolves. The independent spirit of Ely also comes to life at the Dorothy Molter Museum. Known as the Root Beer Lady, Dorothy’s cabins were a famous stop-over point for canoeists who would come for a sip of her homemade root beer. Dorothy was the last resident of the Boundary Waters. After she died in 1986, her two cabins were transported out of the Boundary Waters and made into a museum.

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      Foregoing all of these points of interest, we headed to Paul Schurke’s lodge, where we parked the car with the windshield wipers flipped up to keep them from freezing to the windshield. The winter sun cast dim rays over White Iron Lake as we walked the gravel road from the parking lot to the lodge. Along the way, I thought about my first visit here a few years earlier. I’d signed up for a lodge-to-lodge “comfort class” trip, with dogsledding during the day followed by a hot shower, a gourmet meal, and a warm bed. At night in the comfort of the lodges, Paul showed video from his Arctic trips. On one of those nights I caught Arctic Fever, burning up with the idea that I could and should be part of one of those trips.

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      Paul Schurke

      Paul Schurke was a large part of the reason my wife, Debbie, was confident I would return safely from my polar adventure. In a world of ten-minute heroes, Paul is the genuine article. He’s been featured in cover stories in National Geographic magazine and various television specials. Outside magazine has named him “person of the year” and Backpacker magazine named him the king of cool for his passion for winter camping.

      He’s led four dogsled adventures to the North Pole—three of which were successful. His landmark 1986 journey, which included adventurer Will Steger, was the first surface trek to the pole without resupply since Admiral Peary in 1909.

      In 1989 he led the Bering Bridge expedition, a twelve-hundred-mile dogsled and ski trek with a twelve-member Soviet-American team, from Siberia to Alaska via the Bering Strait to reestablish cultural connections among Arctic natives long separated by the Cold War.

      Paul’s excursions depart from most so-called adventure trips, where clients fork over big bucks to have Sherpas schlep their gear up mountaintops and provide whatever is needed. With Paul, I paid handsomely to be a grunt bearing the brunt of the load. I figured that after I got over the pain, the trip would provide massive bragging rights in the world of macho exploration.

      If the North Pole has a PR man, Paul is it. In an interview for our Expedition Web site, Paul was clear about his preferences for the North Pole versus the other two major adventures—Antarctica and Everest.

      “Trekking to the top of the world represents one of the world’s greatest geographic challenges,” he said. “Of course, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the rewards, and I’ve always considered my polar successes to be a marvelous gift. They’re a resource I draw on each time I tackle other personal or business goals. The North Pole puts all other challenges in perspective and, for me, has made many other dreams achievable.

      “A South Pole trek is obscenely expensive—upwards of one hundred thousand dollars per person. It’s also boring. The South Pole sits amid an absolutely featureless expanse of ice. And it’s anticlimactic. You arrive there to find a research station staffed by hundreds.

      “An Everest climb is nearly as expensive and insanely dangerous. One of eight climbers is injured or killed. Besides, climbing Everest has been accomplished by a whole lot more people than the North Pole.”

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      As we entered the lodge, I felt confident about my abilities. Over the previous few months, I’d exercised like crazy, working overtime to make myself as fit as possible for the expedition. I had also read numerous books about the world of Arctic explorers with particular emphasis on the admiral.

      But over the course of the next few hours, as I met my fellow North Pole adventurers, my confidence melted away.

      The first prospective teammate I met was David Golibersuch, Ph.D. He said he was a Hivernaut.

      “A what?” I asked.

      “Hivernaut,” David said, pronouncing it EE-ver-not. “Paul coined it. ‘Hiver’ is French for ‘winter’ and ‘naut’ is Greek for ‘explorer.’”

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      David Golibersuch

      I nodded, peering at him to determine if he was joking. He wasn’t. He was serious.

      David was fifty-six, a native of Buffalo, New York, unmarried with two daughters. Since 1970 he’d worked in corporate research and development for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. An experienced cross-country skier, he made his first journey to the high Arctic in the spring of 1998, on a Schurke-led excursion to Ellesmere Island.

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      Mike Warren

      Next, I met Mike Warren, fifty-one, a real estate developer in Gainesville, Florida. He had climbed Mt. Rainier and trekked to Kala Patar in Nepal. He told stories of climbing the Rainier, becoming

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