|
 Cliff Buchan
News Editor
Ralph Plaisted has no problem with the cold and snow of a Minnesota winter — as long as he is not the one shoveling the snow.
Surviving a Minnesota winter is a snap for the 80-year-old Linwood Township man. For a fellow who made history by traveling to the North Pole, a Minnesota winter is nothing.
Ralph Plaisted, left, is pictured with a poster board of photos
from the 1968 Plaisted Polar Expedition. The Plaisted journey 40 years
ago is today recognized as the first successful attempt to reach the
North Pole on April 20, 1968. Plaisted is a resident of Linwood
Township.
(Photo By Cliff Buchan)
Enduring temperatures that are a minus 65 degrees and blizzard-like conditions is something far different than a Minnesota winter.
It is such weather conditions that are now a memory for Plaisted who 40 years ago led the Plaisted Polar Expedition across the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean. Today, Plaisted’s team is recognized as the first expedition to reach the North Pole, a feat once claimed by Robert Peary, the 1906 explorer whose claim has been debunked.
On April 19, 1968, Plaisted’s four-member team, after 43 days on snowmobiles, reached the North Pole. On April 20, a navigational fix provided by a U.S. Air Force weather plane verified that the team was at the top of the world.
It was an amazing accomplishment, Plaisted said, thinking back on that important event in 1968. His team, made up mostly of Minnesota men, had accomplished a goal that few believed could be done.
The group made its first attempt in March of 1967 and failed, only to return in a year more determined and prepared to complete the journey.
How it started
Growing up in Bruno of Pine County, Plaisted never pictured himself as a world class explorer. He was 15 when he first tried to join the military during World War II. He succeeded when he was 17 and served in the Navy during the final months of the war.
He never lacked for a strong work ethic. Coupled with a pleasing personality, Plaisted landed in the insurance business in 1949 when he formed Plaisted Insurance Agency in St. Paul.
“I made good money,” he said of the insurance agency. “They accused me of using hypnosis.”
For more than a decade, Plaisted worked at building his agency. In the early 1960s with the introduction of snowmobiles, he found himself an avid rider and with free time to play.
It was 1963 when a friend, Art Aufderheide, challenged Plaisted to expand his plans for a seal hunt in the far northern regions of Canada to include a trip to the North Pole.
It took several years of thought and planning but Plaisted liked the challenge. His research of Peary’s expedition led him to believe the feat had not been accomplished.
“It had never been done before,” he said. “We [like most others] thought Peary had gone to the North Pole with the dogs.”
By 1966, Plaisted found himself in Ottawa, meeting with Canadian leaders seeking permission to undertake the expedition and getting the approvals to move men and supplies to Ward Hunt Island, the jumping off point on the north coast of Ellesmere Island, one of the northernmost points of land in Canada.
Success in 1968
The journey across ice was difficult, but putting the trip together was equally challenging, Plaisted said.
Using his people skills, he was able to raise $200,000 in business sponsorships in 1967 and repeated that fund-raising goal for the second trip in 1968.
The funds were raised despite some setbacks, including rejection by National Geographic, which had backed Peary’s trip and had never formally rejected the 1906 claim as a false. Plaisted said National Geographic offered no help to his expedition and doubted that Plaisted’s group of Minnesotans could succeed.
The rejection served as motivation that a “bunch of old cronies from Minnesota” could in fact be successful, he said.
Bolstered by Bombardier Ski-Doo’s donation of machines and with CBS and Charles Kuralt part of the team, the 1967 expedition was launched. “We got started too late,” Plaisted said of the March 28 start.
Blizzard conditions and open water spelled failure and the trip ended on May 4, short of the North Pole. But the lessons learned became valuable a year later.
In 1968, the expedition left Ward Hunt Island on March 7 in four 16 horse power Ski-Doo machines that pulled sleds packed with gear. The machines were improvements over the 10 HP snowmobiles used in 1967.
The North Pole destination was 472 miles as a crow would fly, but when the team reached the pole on April 19, the trip had covered 825 miles thanks to the east-west runs that were necessary to find easier travel and avoid open water.
Tough going
Covering 825 miles on snowmobiles in subzero temperatures was anything but easy, Plaisted recalled. The expedition moved on when it was 65 degrees below zero. A temp of 25 degrees below zero was moderate.
“The ice was moving all the time,” he said of the polar ice cap that had to be traversed. The goal was to keep moving.
“We were fighting the calendar and the clock” he said of the two-month window of time before open water in the Arctic would mean failure.
The finely tuned snowmobiles posed few problems and the four-member team came through the trip with no major accidents or injuries, short of the frostbite on finger tips and cheeks.
But the men were dressed for the journey with specially-made suits of clothing that cost $1000 each. “We had great clothing,” Plaisted said of the Eskimo synthetic parkas that had wolverine fur around the collars. Hats, boots and mittens were all specially made to combat the cold.
The group slept in tents at night, fully clothed inside six-pound goosedown-filled sleeping bags. Small heaters were used inside the tents until sleep time. “When we crawled inside the bags, we shut everything down,” he said.
The team traveled from 8 in the morning to 5 or 6 in the afternoon. Coleman burners were used to cook meals. “We tested the foods for the Apollo flights,” Plaisted said of the NASA space program’s help.
The meals consisted of 6000 calories a day and the men feasted on ham and apples, beef stroganoff and chicken as main entrees with piping hot oatmeal a morning staple. The men consumed tea, coffee and Tang — as much as three quarts of liquid a day.
But it was taxing. Plaisted said he lost 22 pounds over two months in 1968. “We were two months without a bath, including 43 days on the ice.”
The group was resupplied seven times by air drops during the 1968 expedition.
On April 19, 1968 at 4 p.m., the expedition reached the North Pole. Navigator Jerry Pitzl took readings with his sextant to verify that the group was at 90 degrees North and a U.S. Air Force weather plane at 9:30 a.m. on April 20 provided key navigational readings verifying the spot as it passed overhead. After two days on the pole, the men and three of the snowmobiles were airlifted out.
Plaisted, Pitzl, mechanic Walter Pederson and Canadian lead driver Jean-Luc Bombardier, the nephew of the founder of the Bombardier business empire, had earned their spot in history. The remaining six team members at base camp were also deserving and each played an important part, Plaisted said.
The aftermath
Plaisted said there was satisfaction in proving the so-called experts wrong. His team was hardly a bunch of “cronies,” he said.
Pederson owned a Ski-Doo dealership in St. Cloud and was expedition mechanic. Pitzl, the navigator and ice radioman, was a professor of geography at Macalester College in St. Paul.
Aufderheide, the fellow who made the initial challenge to Plaisted, was a pathologist in Duluth and one of two members who spent two weeks on the ice before returning to basecamp. He was joined by Don Powellek, an electrical engineer from St. Paul who was base camp radioman.
Other team members who remained at base camp included John Moriorty of St. Paul, radioman Andy Horton of Washington, D.C., pilot Weldy Phipps of St. Paul, Dr. Wes Cook, MD., of South Carolina, and camp cook George Cavouras of St. Paul.
Along with Plaisted, other surviving members today include Pitzl, Pederson, Moriorty and Cavouras.
Returning home in 1968, Plaisted recalls being met at the airport by an official from the National Geographic Society, now interested in helping Plaisted. Plaisted sold the story of the expedition to Life Magazine for $20,000.
He stayed with the insurance business for another five years before selling it in 1973. He spent more than a decade speaking and lecturing to organizations and schools, including one visit to MIT in Boston. Not bad, he says, for a kid with only two years of high school education.
Plaisted came close to undertaking another major expedition — a trek to the South Pole. But when he weighed the task of securing the $500,000 needed for the trip and the chances of succeeding, he backed off. He has no regrets of not giving it a go.
His work on the expedition of 1968 is not yet finished.
He has 50 minutes of color 16 mm film from the expedition that has been preserved and will form the basis of a new film he hopes to have out within the next year. The film project would come hand and in hand with a new book on the journey that is being finished by Keith A. Pickering of Watertown.
Pickering picked up the book after the original author, C.J. Ramsted, was killed in a car crash in 2007.
Plaisted history
Plaisted continues to enjoy retirement in Linwood where he has lived the past 27 years. He turns 81 on Sept. 30 and remains active.
That could be a throwback to his early days in Bruno. When he was 15 he was driving an ice truck and working in a pool hall. “I got my night schooling in the pool hall,” he says with a smile.
He served in the Navy for about a year at the end of World War II where he was trained as a baker. “Anyone can cook,” he says wryly. “It takes brains to be a baker.”
He spent 13 months in Alaska working as a baker in a construction camp before returning home to sell Watkins Products as his father had done. He spent two years living in North Branch where he was the justice of the peace.
By the time he was 20, he and his wife, Leora, were the parents of a daughter born in 1947. She died in 1959 and a second wife, Rose, passed away in 1998. He has three daughters.
His love of the outdoors remains strong. For the past 30 years he has owned and operated the Plaisted Fish Camp on Russell Lake in Saskatchewan which is a 1200 mile journey by car and plane from his home.
He works the fishing camp from early June to mid-August. In September and October, he spends time at a goose camp near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border in Lloydminister.
Plaisted today
Plaisted says he takes pride in the accomplishment of 40 years ago and the fact that the establishment now recognizes that his expedition, not Peary’s, was the first to reach the North Pole.
Experts had questioned Peary’s claims but the debate wasn’t fully resolved until 1991 when Peary’s records of his 1906 trip were evaluated. “When they opened them, there was nothing there [to validate the claim],” Plaisted said.
Explaining why he took on the challenge in 1967 is complex, Plaisted said.
“Why do people climb mountains? I had been riding snowmobiles and no one had ever crossed the Arctic Circle. It was a challenge.
“Some thought that we couldn’t do it — that it was too difficult. You just have to go and do it.”
|
