Two Iqaluit men to head for North Pole

SEAN McKIBBON

IQALUIT— Two Iqaluit men will try to re-create the controversial 1909 Peary expedition to the North Pole this spring.

Paul Landry and Paul Crowley aren’t going there so much to prove that U.S. explorer Robert Peary told the truth about reaching the Pole (they believe he did), but to prove that the 30 to 40 miles per day of travel he claimed to have achieved using sled dogs are plausible.

“I know the distances he’s done with dogs are very do-able,” said Landry, a professional outfitter. The debate over whether Peary really reached the North Pole has done a disservice to the sled-dogs Peary used and to the Inuit who helped Peary reach the Pole, said Landry.

“Most of the people who criticize the distances don’t have any experience with dogs,” he said.

“We both really enjoy working with the dogs,” said Crowley. Landry pitched the idea of the expedition to Crowley shortly around Christmas and Crowley said he didn’t hesitate in accepting.

Crowley and his wife, Lynne Peplinski, own a dog team and Crowley has had experience mountaineering.

“I knew I was interested right away. Paul and I had talked about this trip an number of years ago,” said Crowley, but he said he hadn’t ever believed it would happen.

Neither of the men have been to the Pole before. But Landry has done many trips by dog sled, including an expedition to the magnetic North Pole, during which he achieved travel times comparable to Peary’s.

While there have been many successful expeditions to the geographic North Pole, few have used sled dogs, said Landry. Only two other expeditions since Peary have used dog teams, Wally Herbert’s expedition in 1968, and the Steger expedition in 1985.

The Steger expedition was trying to prove or disprove the Peary claim. The group was never able to achieve the distances Peary claimed, and that led one Steger member, Richard Weber, to conclude that Peary hadn’t told the truth, said Landry.

“They went from land to Pole without support. They had massive sleds— 1,300 pounds. Peary never travelled that heavy,” said Landry. And Peary’s expedition wasn’t exactly unsupported either, he said.

“All of the expeditions back then were what they called siege expeditions,” he said. Waves of explorers in the Peary expedition traveled north clearing a trail, dropping supplies and making igloos and then falling back so that another team could go even further to drop more food and then fall back.

Eventually, when they got far enough, Peary made a final dash for the pole with four hand-picked Inuit guides, and his assistant, Matthew Henson, Landry explained.

Landry and Crowley will use aluminum sleds weighing only 500 pounds each and having approximately the same weight when loaded as Peary’s sleds. They will also use the same number of dogs to pull the sleds, and the sleds themselves will be shaped in a similar fashion to Peary’s sleds.

Landry and Crowley will start out at the Northern tip of Ellesmere Island and re-trace Peary’s path to the pole. The pair will be re-supplied once at at a spot referred to as Bartlet Camp (87 W, 47 N), and will then attempt to match Peary’s pace to the Pole and back to Bartlet.

“It was important to us to go at least some of the way back,” said Landry. He explained that the distances claimed by Peary were even greater on the return trip, a phenomenon Landry explains with experience.

“When you turn around, the dogs know they’re going home and they pull harder,” said Landry. With a trail already in place for Peary to follow and a chain of camps already built for him it would be easy for the explorer to have covered the distances he claimed, said Landry.

“Canadian Sled Dogs can accomplish amazing distances,” said Landry.

Weber, who skied from Russia to Canada across the polar ice cap in 1988, will also be trying to test Peary’s claim this year, but he’ll be doing it on skis.

Landry said there were nine expeditions going to the pole this year, but last week one of the polar hopefuls had to withdraw from his own expedition after a training accident.

Meanwhile, Alan Bywater of England broke his leg outside Iqaluit while practicing crossing pressure ridges, forcing him to give up a an attempt to reach the North Pole on foot.

According to Landry, Bywater’s pulk (the sled he planned to use, came down the ridge too fast for Bywater and struck and broke Bywater’s leg. Bywater was later rescued by local outfitter Meeka Mike.