National Geographic History – January 2020

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Think fast: Who was the first person to trek to the North Pole? Some may think it’s American Robert Peary in 1909, but more than seven decades later, a reexamination of Peary’s records by the National Geographic History magazine revealed he hadn’t made it as far north as he thought. For most of the 20th century the world believed the surface approach had been achieved by Peary. Others later reached the North Pole by air and by submarine, but the overland approach had been largely abandoned—until the 1960s, when a joke between friends inspired a ragtag group of Minnesotans to brave the Arctic.
One night over beers, insurance man Ralph Plaisted was raving about snowmobiles, and a friend kidded that if Plaisted loved them so much, he should ride one all the way to the North Pole. He took up his friend’s challenge: In April 1968, 40-year-old Plaisted and his buddies successfully snowmobiled to the top of the world, their position verified by the United States Air Force.
Since the 1980s Plaisted’s trip is widely accepted as the first surface voyage to the North Pole, and Plaisted himself gave the best explanation for why people stopped trying to reach the pole after Peary claimed to have done it. With his mission accomplished, Plaisted told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press: “Boy, it’s cold up there. I don’t know why anyone would want to do it again.”

Amy Briggs, Executive Editor