Ralph Plaisted

The adventurer who reached the North Pole by snowmobile

Ralph Plaisted

1927–2008

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For decades, Robert E. Peary was widely regarded as the leader of the first successful conquest of the North Pole, in 1909. But many historians now believe he missed by up to 120 miles. In 1968, a team led by Ralph Plaisted, who died last week at 80, became the first to unquestionably make it to the top of the world.

An insurance agent in St. Paul, Minn., Plaisted was also an avid outdoorsman, said The New York Times. He loved snowmobiles, once driving one “nonstop for 14 hours, in temperatures as low as 41 degrees below zero.” A friend “suggested jokingly that if he thought they were so great, he should take one to the North Pole.” Plaisted tried just that in 1967, organizing an expedition that was forced back “when unexpected warm weather in April caused the ice to begin breaking up.”

Plaisted was undaunted, said The Washington Post. The next year, he and five companions set out from Ward Hunt Island in Canada on snowmobiles outfitted with extra fuel tanks for distance and golf cleats for traction. “They encountered frozen fjords as well as daunting ice ridges more than 40 feet high.” More than once, they fell through the ice. But after 825 miles, the team reached latitude 90 degrees north on April 19. “The next day, a U.S. Air Force weather plane verified their position. ‘Plaisted,’ the pilot radioed, ‘every direction from where you are is south.’”

Guinness World Records and other authoritative sources credited Plaisted with the earliest indisputable overland North Pole conquest, said the St. Paul Pioneer Press. But first he had to overcome considerable skepticism. In 1967, he recalled, the National Geographic Society told him, “No insurance man from Minnesota is going to make it to the North Pole with a bunch of old cronies.”

Plaisted is survived by his three children, with whom he lived off the land in Saskatchewan in the early 1970s. The family caught fish, ate wild berries and moose meat, and operated a sawmill that ran off a snowmobile engine.