I didn’t sell it to them.”Īfter Plaisted returned, he grew antsy with the lecture circuit. “After we made it in 1968, the National Geographic man was waiting to meet me in Montreal. “National Geographic said to me at the time, ‘No insurance man from Minnesota is going to make it to the North Pole with a bunch of old cronies,’ ” Plaisted said. In 1967, Plaisted’s expedition had to turn back because of softening, late-season ice. Plaisted said in a 1993 Pioneer Press interview that doubters in the National Geographic Society did much to inadvertently egg on his group, after a failure the year before. The Guinness Book of World Records notes doubts about the Peary expedition and credits Plaisted with the “earliest indisputable attainment of the North Pole over the sea of ice.” “Over the years since the expedition, the team accomplishment really never got recognized.” It’s just preposterous,” said Jerry Pitzl, the Plaisted expedition’s navigator. “If he made it back in 17 days - the credibility gets lost right there as far as I’m concerned. Many arctic historians have also cast doubt on Peary’s claim. Plaisted argued Peary could never have made it in 37 days without a snowmobile - much less back in a mere 17 days, as Peary claimed. ![]() “I think that was the best day of our lives,” said daughter Jackie Hafner, who was listening from the family home in White Bear Lake.Īn earlier alleged expedition to the pole in 1909 by Robert Peary was never validated by anyone outside Peary’s party. “Everyplace I look is south,” Plaisted said by radio. Plaisted estimated polar ice moves about five miles every two days. Just as an Air Force plane was picking up his expedition, a break started widening in the mile-diameter ice pan that constituted the exact spot of the Pole. His family worried he’d never return from the frozen north. Paul insurance salesman who at the age of 40 dropped everything to take a trip to the top of the world, died of natural causes Monday at his home in Wyoming, Minn. “I don’t know why anyone would want to do it again.” Plaisted gasped days after returning from the first surface expedition to indisputably reach the North Pole. Getting wet on a daily basis - and occasionally falling below the frigid landscape - with temperatures reaching 65 below zero. ![]() Days of waiting for a two-mile-wide stretch of water to freeze enough for safe crossing.
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