You’re the greatest living explorer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Peary, and Amelia Earhardt. Now you’re heading back to the Arctic.
I see dead deer everywhere, their yawning red abdomens, stiffening legs, their black eyes. It’s one of the hazards of driving around Ely on opening weekend. I went literally to the end of the road in northern Minnesota, to the homestead of Will Steger, and I found hundreds of men already there, in the woods, in blaze orange. With high-powered rifles.
An outdoorsy guy from the city starts to develop a neurotic view of wilderness, that it’s growing too scarce, that the cities are too crowded and they’re spilling over. An outdoorsy guy from the Range laughs and says relax. You can go days—weeks—without seeing another soul up here. It’s still possible to get lost in this world. Even with GPS and cell phones and Gore-tex, nature is a dangerous thing. Somehow that’s reassuring.
Still, everyone around here knows where Will lives. He is a legend and a local hero, even if he is a bit of a lefty and a treehugger. Even the rednecks can appreciate what Steger has done in his decorated career as an arctic explorer. Later, sitting with Steger in the Ely steakhouse among quietly gawking admirers and spoiling roughnecks alike, I am not surprised to learn that Steger has never been in a fistfight in the forty years since he moved to Ely from Minneapolis. He is not surprised to hear me ask it.
There is no other way to describe Will Steger than to say he is a sort of self-taught Zen master. His life in the harshest climates seems to have softened his soul like the silkiest chamois from deer hide. He is a modest and compassionate man, a natural leader with brilliantly disguised management skills and a mind for a million details. And somehow he seems not to have aged in his twenty-year career as a professional explorer. The skin on his face is taut, the crow’s-feet around his eyes have been there since his thirties, his body is lithe and powerful.
Steger shuffles around his property in an unspeakably filthy mountaineering jacket, his long hair feathering into a kind of salt-and-pepper halo. Iron Will has been unofficially retired from exploration since 1997, when he aborted a solo trek that would have taken him from the North Pole to Ellesmere Island, towing and paddling a kayak sledge. After the rescue ship was called, he told himself he’d never return to the Pole. He’s been hanging out on his property ever since. Until now.
And what a property it is. Today, it stretches to three hundred acres and includes numerous cabins, a sauna, a boathouse, a lodge, a guesthouse, and countless barns and shops. It is, as they say, entirely off the grid. Solar panels and wood stoves provide for the most quotidian needs. But there are numerous gasoline-powered generators, and a recently installed satellite uplink for serious Internet access available for moments like this—when the homestead is buzzing with volunteers, staffers, and expedition members. In a sense, this is precisely what this place was built for. What the man himself was built for.
Sitting in the middle, at the highest point of Steger’s rolling, rocky property, is “The Castle.” It is a Gothic, Cinderella edifice built with raw timber, glass, and granite, with flying buttresses, balconies, cupolas, and a riot of copper-plated dormers. The physical reality of this building—so nearly complete, in its twentieth year—goads Steger. It represents the hard reality of a dream he’s had since his first polar expedition in 1986: To not only go into the wide open spaces and conquer them, but to bring people of the world together. Never has that vision and mission felt more focused than now. As an educator, scientist, explorer, and writer, Steger is absolutely convinced of the reality of global warming. He’s just as convinced that a quick and effective response is not merely possible; it’s the only morally responsible thing to do.
Last year at this time, Steger was feeling restless. He’d written four books, he occasionally lectured, but he pretty much lived in isolation at the end of the road. He’d seen the Internet coming for years, and saw the brilliant possibilities it offered. At the same time, he was increasingly disturbed by global warming, now an established fact that only the most stubborn and selfish politicians deny.
Meanwhile, the growing field of adventure education intrigued him. In 1999, Steger was approached by Dr. Aaron Doering, an education professional at the University of Minnesota who specializes in information systems. At the same time, Paul Pregont and Mille Porsild were in touch. Down in Grand Marais, they’d founded NOMADS and PolarHusky.com, an online education program connected to their dogsled expeditions. The four discussed the possibility of a new expedition. But funding was scarce. They came close to landing a major sponsorship from Coca-Cola, but it all fell apart after September 11th. By spring of 2002, it looked like a bust.
Then last December, Steger was in Minneapolis for the holidays when he accidentally bumped into another legend of exploration, the trans-global cyclist Dan Buettner. Their brief conversation was the final, decisive push Steger needed to go ahead—with or without the funding in place. He realized his restlessness of the previous year had had a purpose. On a personal level, he wanted to get back on the ice and into the headspace of a long arctic expedition. On a professional level, he wanted to prove what could be done with all the modern tools of adventure education.
Arctic Transect is a massive educational undertaking—as much an epic classroom curriculum as a dogsled adventure. An estimated ten million children from kindergarten to twelfth grade will be tuning in on the Web. This kind of approach is not new. NOMADS has been doing it with dogsleds since 1999. Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen had online components on their last two expeditions. Dan Buettner’s most recent exploits have been webcast through ClassroomConnect.com. In fact, way back in the dark ages of 1997, Steger himself had one of the earliest satellite uplinks to the Internet on his solo North Pole trip.
Arctic Transect will travel 3,000 miles through five communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The expedition leaves Yellowknife on December 15 and arrives next spring at Pangnirtung, Nunavut, on the Arctic Ocean—with any luck, before the ice begins to break up. Transect’s mission is to show how connectivity is changing our world—both for better and for worse. But the real goal is not the Arctic Ocean before the ice breaks up. It is human understanding before global breakup.