Word: uemura
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...Though Uemura's one-man conquest of the North Pole is unique, his expedition was the fifth to succeed since the U.S. Navy's Robert E. Peary and his six-man team first attained the North Pole in 1909. Like Peary, Uemura had set off from Ellesmere Island, now part of Canada's Northwest Territories. Early in the trip, 30-ft.-high formations of compressed ice known as pressure ridges blocked his route across the frozen Arctic Ocean obliging him to hack passageways through the ice to make way for his 882-lb. sledge. Temperatures dropping...
...dawn on the fourth day out, Uemura was awakened by the frantic barking of his dogs, then by heavy, shuffling footsteps and loud sniffing sounds. Peering out of his tent, he saw a giant white polar bear coming toward him. Uemura decided to play dead in his sleeping bag. After destroying the tent and gobbling up the food supply of frozen seal and whale blubber, the bear poked at the sleeping bag with his snout and turned it over while Uemura burrowed deep inside, then wandered off. Next morning, when the bear reappeared, the explorer coolly shot...
...Uemura resumed the trek after a new tent and fresh food supplies were airdropped. Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., were able to pinpoint Uemura's positions by monitoring signals from a 3½-lb. transmitter mounted on his sledge. The transmissions were picked up by a Nimbus 6 meteorological satellite as it passed over the Pole every 108 minutes and relayed by a NASA tracking station in Fairbanks, Alaska, to Greenbelt...
...Uemura had also been supplied by sponsors of the expedition with devices to take snow, ice and air samples for scientific study in Japan. As it turned out, he had little time for research. On the 35th day of the expedition, for example, a husky named Shiro gave birth to six pups. After acting as midwife, Uemura placed the mother and her litter in a cardboard supply box, wrapped it in caribou skins and lashed it to the sledge. He then called for eleven fresh dogs; they replaced the weariest huskies, which were sent back to base camp with Shiro...
Later, when the surrounding ice field began to break up, Uemura found himself trapped on a moving floe with his dogs and sledge. "It is really scary," he noted in his diary. "Huge pieces of ice are slowly revolving around me. Cracks are opening up amidst a roaring, splintering sound." Detouring to skirt the danger area, he was confronted by huge open stretches of water. Overnight, new ice about 10 inches thick formed over the open water. "I made a dash over the new ice," he wrote, "and in about 2½ hours I had made it across to solid...