Record-Breaking Expedition to the North Pole with Eric Larsen

0:03The first known expeditions to reach the North Pole took place in the early 20th century. Since then, thousands of people have dreamed of traversing the vast expanses of ice, snow, and water required to reach it. For anyone planning to make a voyage to the North Pole or the South Pole, the best person to ask for guidance is Eric Larson. Eric is a groundbreaking polar explorer who made the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole. This is a monumental task because during these warmer months, the sea ice is thinner and less stable. In 2010, Eric also became the first person to visit both poles as well as Mount Everest all within one year.

0:46I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:00In the world of outdoor adventures, Eric Larson has become a well-known resource and guide for aspiring polar explorers. He has decades of experience crossing the Arctic Sea and the Antarctic ice sheet. One of the things he loves most about being on these barren tundras is the silence. Eric grew up exploring the quiet lakes and trails of the Midwest. The long days he spent biking and canoeing alone taught him to embrace solitary trips into the wilderness. I grew up just in a small town north of Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and I definitely was always trying to be outside. I loved biking. I got a paper route when I was 12 years old and saved up and bought my first bike.

1:48And I would take a map and I would go ride 60, 70, 80 miles as a 12, 13 year old and just go around. And it was my way of trying to get farther out from where I was and be out on my own. I mean, my mom would, as a parent now, I just kick myself. But, you know, my mom would be like, where are you going? You got to write down the directions. And I would write down wrong locations of where I was going because I didn't want anybody to know where I was. I just wanted to be out on my own. And so I was just going out in whatever path that I could to try to discover the world around me. This might be naive, but it seems like Wisconsin is a great place to be a kid who likes to explore.

2:33And I only say this because my niece and nephews both went to camp there this summer. and it was like the wilderness there is awesome and vast, but also fairly safe. There's not a lot of things that are going to like kill you on the trail. Yeah. I mean, I think the Midwest in general is like that. You know, you have some really different ecosystems that kind of are pretty close to one another. And so it doesn't take much travel to get into what, you know, we in the Midwest called up north. And so everybody has this idea of north, you know, as part of our unconscious. And that's where kind of like the forests are more wild and there are camps and lakes and fishing.

3:16And so I think most people in the Midwest grew up with this idea of like up north, you know, and I read a lot as a kid. So right away I was into adventure and expedition books, the age of exploration. And so for me as a kid, starting to read the history of exploration, well, what were these explorers doing? They were going to the North Pole. And that's just an extension of up north. So I'm curious, how did you then make this your job? Like, you always loved exploring. You obviously were exposed to a ton of nature as a kid. How did you decide to make a living doing this? Did you go to school? Did you study something?

3:58or would you just go right into being a guide? Yeah. I mean, if you would have asked me what I wanted to be when I was a kid, I was like, I want to be an explorer. And there's no path there. There's no training program. There's no group of people. There's none of that. Basically, I was like, I want to go on expeditions. If I start this now, I'll never go to college. I'll just keep going. And so I kind of knew that that was a good idea to try to get a college degree. But in college, I studied, you know, biology, environmental studies. I just took classes that got me outside. I was just like, how can I be outside?

4:38And as soon as I got out of college, I just was like, all right, game on. But at the time in the early 90s, the trajectory to move along any sort of career that's not like in the normal box of things was just unheard of. And so I was just like, okay, I have no money. Let me just go get jobs that are interesting and get me outside. And half of them didn't even pay. I mean, I, right when I got out of college, I was a backcountry ranger in Alaska through an organization called the Student Conservation Association. It was, you know, basically a volunteer thing. I got a$92 a week stipend. I was psyched.

5:19I thought I I was like lighting cigars with$10 bills. And my eyes just opened up, you know, as a kid from Wisconsin to see mountains, to like get charged by a moose, to go up in a float plane, to see a glacier for the first time and literally camp all summer long. And, you know, for me, that was a real eye-opening experience. One, I realized the world was much bigger than I had realized. And then I also realized that if I was able to accept risks and uncertainty and move towards things that weren't necessarily focused on financial gain, I could have a lot of really incredible experiences. That stint as a backcountry ranger was just the beginning of his patchwork career in the outdoors.

6:07After his time in Alaska, Eric worked as a bike mechanic and a whitewater guide in Colorado. While he enjoyed his adventurous lifestyle, there were also times when he felt like he was just spinning his wheels.

6:22I was living in a lot of remote places. I mean, just with nobody else around, just reading books nonstop for entertainment. My buddies would like send me VHS tapes of like Seinfeld and so that I could actually watch TV or something that was somewhat current. And I was making just so little money and it was challenging, like no health insurance and a car that barely worked and no change of clothes. And it was it was a hard life and lonely life, too. And so that's when I kind of started working on my master's degree in education and teaching environmental ed. But I, even at 29, there was no real path for me.

7:04I was living in Southern Minnesota, teaching kids about rivers and tree identification and all these other things. And I remember my girlfriend I was living with at the time. And she was like, hey, Eric, either we need to get married or I'm moving out. And I was 29. I was like, well, I want to be an explorer and go to the North Pole. And I'm sorry, Beth, if you're listening right now, because she must have thought I was crazy. But that's what I wanted. it. And I didn't know how to make it work, but I just ended up getting this job for a company that did dog sled expeditions. And so we would do dog sled expeditions and then have an educational program.

7:41And I was like, stick a fork in me, man. This is it. Like I get to do adventures where I'm not necessarily the chief cook and bottle washer. There's a bigger mission in connecting people to these places, which was really important to me. And at that time, I thought it was going to be a dog musher for the rest of my life. I mean, I was a dog musher for on and off for like 10 years. And I was like, this is amazing. You know, I would spend just hours on the back of the dog set runners days, weeks, months with no, I mean, this was before like phones and just silence, you know, just out forever. And that was really incredible.

8:18And, you know, I got very lucky because I was able to learn a little bit more about how a modern expedition was handled. And And so that was really eye-opening. And of course, we lost all of our funding. I was unemployed working at a bike shop and living in a cabin with no electricity. And I was like, oh God, how many times can I start over? You know, like how many times can I hit rock bottom and just be chasing this stupid dream that's never going to happen? And, you know, you just feel like Don Quixote chasing windmills. And people are just like, what are you doing?

9:00Eric felt like he was constantly starting from square one. He'd land a temporary seasonal job, but then the season would end and he'd be out of work again. Even getting a master's degree in education didn't take him to where he really wanted to go, the North Pole. Eventually, when he was 29, Eric moved to a small town in northern Minnesota, where a lot of his neighbors shared his appetite for adventure. There, he met Lonnie Dupree, an explorer who had made some notable Arctic expeditions by dog sled in the 90s and early 2000s. The two became friends and began hatching a plan for a record-breaking expedition to the North Pole.

9:43Our wild idea was to do the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole. And so I planned and trained for three and a half years to do, at the time, what nobody had ever done before, which was ski to the North Pole in the summertime. And so it was 72 days of some pretty challenging travel, to say the least. That's understatement because, you know, I would be skiing along and just crying because I was so scared. And it's one thing to climb Mount Everest now or even 10 or 20 years ago, because there's a path. There's people that have done it. There's a body of knowledge that exists in that. There are weather forecasts, there's a route, there's all this information.

10:28And even if you haven't done it, you're still standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, like you're taking all that information in consciously and subconsciously. And back then we just weren't able to do that. And so there's this whole other level of severity that adds to the mental strain, but also just the physical difficulty of, I mean, think about doing one thing for 72 days, you know, two and a half months with no other outlet, with a point where if something happens, you're not getting rescued. You know, we spent three years planning and preparing, developing gear and equipment, fundraising, going on all these training trips and all this other stuff.

11:13And then just launching a trip where for over a month, it would be impossible to get rescued in this environment that's so dramatic. I mean, it's hard to even describe the level of difficulty of all that because you can't even think about it in today's terms. Tell me a little bit more about this. So it took three years to prepare. Yes. Yeah. What does that mean? Like, what was your physical training? What was your mental training? Well, I had 15 years of my own adventures, dog sledding the Canadian Arctic and expeditions and being in Alaska and doing all these other things. But yet I didn't know about going to the North Pole.

11:53I didn't know about organizing a big expedition. There were still a lot of question marks. And so what I've learned since, and this is where I think kind of the intoxicating part of these expeditions come into play for me, is that you realize it's just a problem to be solved. And it's a puzzle that you don't necessarily know what the pieces are, but you have to fit them together. And so we just, what are all the variables in this trip? Okay, the North Pole, summertime. You know, how do we get up there? What equipment do we need? Like what's the physical nature of it? So it's a human powered expedition.

12:29So obviously training is a big part of it. You know, we're skiing and pulling sleds. And so just building up that kind of energy. And I have a whole bunch of philosophies about training, but you know, these are all day effort things, you know, it's not just going to a gym and working out. I mean, our sleds would weigh over 300 pounds at the beginning of the trip. The other thing we knew right away is that this was a summertime expedition in the North Pole. the Arctic Ocean from land to the North Pole is mostly ice, but in the summer, there's a lot of water. And so we knew partly from Lonnie's experience that we would need some sort of sled that would need to float really well.

13:09And so right away, we're like, oh, well, we should bring a kayak. But when we put all the gear in a kayak and then put ourselves in it, you know, the kayak sank. And so we ended up finding a whitewater canoe, which was a little bigger, and we modified those, we made sleds out of them. And so there was a lot of like engineering, I guess, not like high tech engineering, but just kind of solving these problems. You know, how much food do we need? And what's, you know, how can it be the most compact to fit in these canoes? And what's the technology at the time for communication? And fundraising was a constant thing for us.

13:45And so it's just going through all those steps and trying to cross off as many question marks as you can. And the hard part with that trip is that when we got to the starting line, there were still so many question marks that was overwhelming. And then again, there's no certainty in your path because you don't know what to expect as you move forward. Again, like to reference a mountain, like when you climb up Everest, you climb up to the Kumbu Icefall and that's kind of uncertain. But then the next time you do it, you know what to expect and then you go up to the next thing. So there's always these little incremental amounts of uncertainty that you're going into.

14:23But on a lot of these expeditions and in the Arctic Oceans very specifically, the environment is changing minute to minute because the ice is constantly moving and shifting. And so it's just really hard to find any sort of like stable base to move forward from.

14:43The expedition was extremely challenging. On their first attempt a year prior, Eric and Lonnie had to abort after 10 days due to unseasonably warm conditions. Even when they tried again the following year, the pair was constantly dealing with the threat of polar bears, melting ice, and extreme temperatures. In the end, they succeeded, arriving at the North Pole on July 2, 2006, after 62 days on the ice. what was most beautiful part of the north pole i mean i just think the environment is incredible it's unlike any other place on the planet mountains lakes rivers prairies like those exist in a lot of other areas around the globe deserts but the arctic ocean and that sea ice is just so unique.

15:39You're in this literally life and death struggle and then you see a blue chunk of ice or you see a sun halo or a snow drift that's just curved around or some hoarfrost that's frozen in this delicate flower and you're just like this is so spectacular and I'm so lucky to be here.

16:10In 2006, adventurers Eric Larson and Lonnie Dupree became the first people to ski to the North Pole during the summertime. People took note of their achievement, and when they arrived home, they were interviewed for The New York Times, The Tonight Show, CNN, CBS, and so many more. The pair had made history. But for Eric, this expedition was just the beginning of his polar adventures. He immediately started thinking about how he would make it to Antarctica. I wanted to go to the South Pole. I said I would love to do an expedition down there just for personal reasons. I said, I'm not a millionaire.

16:50There's no way I can pay for that. And so I knew I needed to do something unique. And as I started doing some more research, I realized, well, you know, maybe I could do a South Pole and North Pole trip back to back. That's kind of compelling. and then what I realized is you know Everest is kind of like a pole people consider it a pole and I was like oh that's kind of a cool and I realized that nobody had been to all three of those in in a year time frame and I was like that seems really like a great trip I had no interest in climbing Mount Everest whatsoever I'm from Wisconsin I had never even at the time probably been above like 12 or 13 ,000 feet.

17:28But I knew from a marketing standpoint that having that Everest in there would be compelling. But also for me, it was trying to do all three of those trips, which was the real challenge of it. And so that's an expedition that I called Save the Poles, which was a great kind of climate message, these iconic places of cold in our world. And so it kind of came together in a compelling way. Can you just give me like a quick highlight from each of these places, the South Pole, the North Pole and Everest in one year, this trip? I know it was a little while ago, but I'm just curious, like any memorable moments or just a memorable moment that really stuck out?

18:09Yeah. I mean, I have so many memories of those trips. I think, you know, for me, a kid from Wisconsin being in the Himalayas, just in general, hiking up to base camp. I remember being in Namche Bazaar and we were there kind of at the end of monsoon and it was raining, raining, raining. And there was like these waterfalls coming out of the top of these mountains. And it was like green clouds and then waterfalls right from the top. And I was like, that is crazy. Like where are those waterfalls starting from? Is it just like the clouds are so wet up there that they're anyway. So then one day I woke up and it was clear And there was like a whole other level of mountains above that.

18:52And my mind was just blown because I had never witnessed anything like that before. And, you know, I think to me, I'm so grateful for these expeditions because I've got to go to these places. They're so incredible. They're so vast. They're so huge. They're so spectacular. and I think you know within each of those is just being this small person in these vast places that so few people have been to maybe not Everest but the Arctic and Antarctic for sure and you know you kind of have this big scale of these places and this horizon that just goes on forever or this ice that's moving pressure ridges but then you also have on a daily basis these just little things that happen that are so incredible as well.

19:38And, you know, in Antarctica, there's these things called sestrugi, which are these like almost rock hard snowdrifts that look a little bit like a whale or a dolphin porpoiseing out of the water. And they're kind of wind scalloped and so beautiful. And you could be skiing along and they're just all around and it's like being in the middle of the ocean. And so there are just incredible things in all those places.

20:06Over the year that it took to complete the Save the Poles expedition, Eric wrote about climate change and advocated for laws focused on sustainability and clean energy. Raising awareness about the climate has been a cornerstone of his career. In fact, in 2014, Eric made yet another unsupported trip to the North Pole, which was widely considered to be the last of its kind due to melting sea ice. Since then, Eric has spent a lot of time training aspiring polar explorers, including many past guests of this show. He's also been guiding trips and continuing to go on his own expeditions. Not every outing has been a success.

20:47He has a fair amount of failures under his belt alongside his massive accomplishments. But every adventure has developed his sense of grit and determination and prepared him for an unexpected challenge. In 2021, Eric received a serious cancer diagnosis. So you recently had like a pretty big diagnosis. And you survived, obviously. You're here today. You got diagnosed with cancer, right? Initially, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer. In January 21, I mean, I was leaving for one of my polar training courses. Like three days later, I had clients that were like plane tickets in hand. And yeah, and I was given just a few years to live at the time.

21:31Luckily, after, you know, about a little over a month of some pretty stressful times, it was downgraded to stage 3B, which is still a really challenging diagnosis. So I spent a couple of really difficult years, chemo, radiation, surgery, just total hell, quite honestly. I mean, I was addicted to oxycodone for a while. I had this terrible infection. I couldn't sit in a chair for five months because I had these drains in my body. It was very challenging. That's crazy. Do you think all of your training for these polar expeditions helped you sort of get through this phase? Yeah, ironically, you know, it was funny because that was right after COVID.

22:17When COVID hit, prior to COVID, I was just going, I was doing expeditions. I don't want to say I was chasing my tail a little, but I was, my ego was pushing me and I was trying to do these things which I enjoyed but I was also simultaneously my kids were getting older and I was like man this and the nature of adventure was changing and I was like there's just more important things in the world right now so when COVID hit it was a little bit of relief and I just was kind of like I've achieved all these things maybe that's just good enough for me but when I got cancer it was surprising to me how similar that was to like an expedition, dealing with some pretty intense physical discomfort, feeling separated from the rest of the world and not having any impact on anybody, moving towards an uncertain outcome where survival is not for sure, lots of time with nothing but inward thoughts.

23:21That's a polar expedition. That's the North Pole in a nutshell, you know, and that's cancer. And so I employed a lot of those strategies, not necessarily consciously, but it was just part of what I was used to. And so like in a day, we just, you know, we wake up, we get through the first hour and a half, and then we switch leads. And then it's like halfway through the day we get the soup and you know then it's the tent a little later on and so like with chemo I had you know this long stretch of chemo and it just gets worse and worse and worse I couldn't carry an empty box across the room it was it was hell and it was just like get through the chemo thing and then I got a week where I can kind of like if I could walk that's great and then the second chemo, you know, and then I get halfway through, I'm not thinking about the end of it.

24:14And so those strategies are very similar. Where are you at now? Like, with your diagnosis? Good question. Hopelessly lost at making good time. That's what I tell everybody. Yeah, I'm, you know, so I was diagnosed in 2021. So I just had some scans, there's no cancer. so go figure but um you know my body's messed up I had 14 inches of my colon taken out I have to do an enema every night and um that was just I mean I was like I there's I can't do my job I can't even leave the house my quality of life was like zero so through a bunch of research and some Facebook groups I learned with people similar to me you can do this so now I do it in the tent at 40 below oh, it's literally a pain in the ass, but it's given me my life back and I have some function or normality, but it's just another system.

25:12But I'm good. And ironically, I'm in a good place in my mind, which I didn't think I would ever be again. And this thing that I thought I didn't want to do anymore, I kind of have this reinvigorated focus, but I also have this kind of beautiful understanding of what it means to have everything taken away and the role of compassion in life and being a supporter and all these other things that I, you know, I wasn't a jerk before, but I was like, you know, focused. And so when I look back at my cancer, I don't look at it back negatively. You know, I wish my body wasn't how it was. I wish I didn't spend years in pain.

25:59When I see all of my peers and what they were able to achieve in that time where I couldn't do anything, it's very hard. But I'm alive.

26:19your whole life you've been really attracted to these remote wilderness adventures there's something in it that gives you pleasure even though it's a suffer fest even though there's pain and heartbreak and all sorts of mistakes and so what is it about exploring these remote places? Like, what does it do for you? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think I've always felt comfortable in wilderness. So that's a given. I'm more of an introvert. So it's very, you know, like in one sense, being out on my own is easier than being at a party or some sort of social situation where I say the wrong thing.