Stories from the North Pole: an adventure hatched in Ely

ELY- Forty years after their dog sled expedition became the first unsupported trip to reach the North Pole, six of its eight members took the stage at the Ely State Theater. Some of their stories had never made it into the official account.
Forty years ago, Will Steger, Paul Schurke, and six other arctic adventurers set out by dog sled, crossing over 1,000 miles of shifting sea ice without any resupply. The eight, along with 49 sled dogs, spent just shy of two months recreating the journey Robert Peary took in 1909. Peary’s trip was thought to be the first expedition to reach the North Pole, though whether he got to the actual spot on the globe has been questioned.
The expedition was the culmination of three years of planning and fundraising, along with several months of training in the Arctic. Planning and fundraising began in Ely, home to both Steger and Schurke.
The event included a screening of “North to the Pole,” a documentary produced by a Twin Cities television station using footage team members shot on the ice. It was the first time the documentary had been shown on a movie screen, and the expedition members had not seen it in almost 40 years. Watching it brought back old memories.
Afterward, Steger, Schurke, Ann Bancroft, Richard Weber, Geoff Carroll, and Bob Mantell took turns reminiscing and answering questions from the audience.
A flying kennel
The logistics were colorful from the start. Schurke described the flight that took the team from Baffin Island to Ellesmere Island, where the journey would begin. The team loaded 49 dogs, eight people, and all their gear and food onto a freight plane. The plane turned out to be overweight, so they had to charter a second one, at a cost of $12,000 (which they didn’t have).
The plane also had a first-time flight attendant. She had signed up thinking it looked fun, not realizing she would be crammed into a plane full of sled dogs, with the noise and smells of a flying kennel.
As she climbed into the plane and looked around, “she started to cry,” Schurke recalled.
Life on the ice
Team members talked about living in the relentless cold, often crammed into one tent with no privacy. They used their fuel to melt snow for drinking and for the dogs, not to keep the tent warm. Frostbite was a danger even while sleeping, and one team member suffered when his face covering fell off overnight.
Carroll was hired for his experience working on the ice and ended up being the team’s main dog runner, responsible for keeping the dogs fed and watered.
“One night it was too cold to ignite the fuel needed to melt snow into water,” he said. “I had to stick the fuel canister in my underwear to warm it up.”
The expedition was mostly low-tech. The team navigated with a traditional sextant, a skill Schurke had mastered. A radio phone allowed check-ins every few days, but time was limited and messages were brief. The radio batteries would freeze and had to be warmed in a pot of boiling water.
Some days the connection wouldn’t work at all. On others, the link to base camp a thousand miles away was filled with static. Schurke recounted a day when he kept hearing “2T, 2T,” and the team had no idea what was being said. It turned out his young daughter Bria had her first two teeth.
Bancroft, the only woman on the expedition, said the question she fielded most over the years was how they went to the bathroom. The answer was complicated. Peeling off layers and dropping the seat of one’s pants meant taking off mittens and gloves, then trying to get everything back together with frozen fingers. Sometimes it took help from other team members.
Sweet tooth
Rations were strictly limited. Though each team member was eating 6,000 to 8,000 calories a day, hunger was an issue. Each person was allowed 100 ounces of special rations, two ounces each for 50 days.
“Will blew through his right away,” said Schurke, noting Steger’s reputation for having a sweet tooth. “But others still had a good stash.”
Steger had, for some reason, brought cash along. Late in the trip he started “wheeling and dealing.”
“He bought a handful of Werther’s candies from Richard for $50,” Schurke said, “and some brown sugar from Ann.”
When it was his turn, Steger insisted he had brought Jack Daniels, limes, and dried seal meat for his special rations.
“The Jack Daniels never thawed,” said Steger. “But I added it to my tea.”
Touch and go
Steger spoke about the responsibilities he shared with Schurke as team leaders.
“They sleep and you don’t,” he said. “There was a lot of touch and go at the end.”
Two team members had already left the trip midway after suffering injuries. A planned mid-expedition plane rendezvous also took back some of the dogs, since the lighter sleds didn’t need as many.
As the group neared the pole, food was running dangerously low. The two leaders discussed sending the rest of the team back by plane and continuing on their own. But the others, who didn’t know of these discussions, showed enough spirit that the two decided to keep the entire team going.
Then, possibly only days from the pole, the sextant failed. Using a Swiss army knife, Schurke took the very delicate tool apart and found the problem: ice frozen inside the mechanism.
“Paul fixed the sextant,” said Steger, “and then we knew were going to make it.”
On what turned out to be the second-to-last day, Steger and Schurke sent the other four members ahead. “Paul and I were skiing,” Will Steger told the sold-out crowd. “And Paul pulled out a joint.” Steger said he was amazed Schurke had kept it a secret for two months. Schurke, sitting right in front of him in the theater as Steger recounted the story, let out a huge guffaw. The joint did get shared, and the two skied on to catch up with the others.
With their food literally running out, the team went to bed thinking they had one more day of travel ahead. When they woke, Schurke found the sextant showing no more north. Any direction he pointed it, no north. The ice beneath their tent had carried them directly over the pole while they slept.
Changed lives
Several expedition members talked about how the trip shaped their lives. One ended up running a tourism lodge in the Arctic, a career he’s kept for the last 40 years and where he raised his family.
“It’s been a heck of a ride.”
Another assembled his own sled dog team, using dogs related to the North Pole team. He traveled by dog sled for the next 30 years, working as a fish and game biologist in northern Alaska.
Bancroft said the trip changed the trajectory of her life. As a kid she always looked to the north for adventure, and she started doing her own first expeditions as a young girl in her St. Paul backyard. Reading about the Shackleton expedition gave her visions of ice and sled dogs, camaraderie, and teamwork.
“The idea of going as far north as possible,” she said, was something she wasn’t going to let go.
“I was so shy and then after the trip I was thrust into speaking at events like this,” she said.
“It’s been a joy to know these guys, all stellar humans,” she said. “But the dogs, they were our heroes.”
After the trip, the North Pole dogs found homes, many near Ely and some at the Voyageur Outward Bound School. Schurke went on to run a sled dog outfitting business outside of Ely.
Steger told of a stray that started following the team during a training run. The team spent several months training on Baffin Island, testing gear and dogs and getting acclimated to life in the cold.
“This dog tracked behind us for days,” Steger said, “and eventually joined the team.” That dog later became part of a sled dog team on another Steger expedition, this one to the South Pole. So, Steger said, the dog traveled to both ends of the earth and then retired in Ely.
Paul’s wife, Sue, took a turn at the microphone to answer questions about having her spouse away.
“I had a lot of fun while he was gone,” she laughed. “We decided to have a baby.”
Sue moved back home to Red Wing for a while but made frequent trips back to the Arctic, both during the training and at the end of the expedition. Their daughter Bria took three trips to the Arctic before she turned one.
The evening ended with a dance party featuring the Stoney River Band. It was a chance to recreate the Ely send-off party held in December 1985.
“We had a big party at Will’s place with the best band on the Iron Range,” said Schurke, “The Vermilion Varmints.”