Solo Arctic explorer survived bear attacks and ice collapse
Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura completed the first solo trek to the North Pole 40 years ago.
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ATTACKEDby a polar bear, which the next day became dog meat, stranded on an island of cracked ice, hacking through ice hills and cajoling a brawling dog-sled team.
Still, Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura says he only twice thought about quitting his quest to travel solo to the North Pole.
He arrived 40 years ago, on April 29, 1978, with assigned photographer Ira Block meeting him on May 1 to document his achievement.
Uemura’s 800km trek to the pole had begun on March 5 at Cape Columbia on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, when he planned to sled a similar distance on a return journey across Greenland. He left with a team of 19 dogs, and immediately encountered ice formations that limited his progress to just 10 miles in 10 days.
His pace then quickened, but four of his dogs were fighters and had to be released to run free, although they still returned to the team each night to be fed. When another Husky, Shiro, whelped, 11 new dogs were flown in and 13, including two newborn puppies, were evacuated.
The ambitious $410,000 project, which included regular airdrops of supplies costing $10,000 a time, was funded by National Geographic magazine, a Japanese newspaper, magazines and television station and a dog-food company, which helped supply Uemura’s dogs. Block later explained that in 1978 there was no budget for National Geographic stories; regardless of cost, “You just went out and did them,” he said.
Uemura also carried a battery-powered beacon on his sled to transmit his exact location once a minute to NASA’s Nimbus-6 satellite, which transmitted data to a tracking station in Fairbanks, Alaska. Data on ice and air samples Uemera collected was available to the Smithsonian Institute and Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research every 12 hours. Uemura’s tracking data was also used to evaluate his “dead reckoning and celestial navigation techniques”, which were particularly challenging in polar regions.
The youngest of six children, Uemura was born on February 12, 1941, in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, where his father made tatami mats.
His quest for adventure began with mountain climbing while studying agriculture at Meiji University in Tokyo, where he was uncomfortable with the dense, concrete cityscape.
Uemura later explained he was also shy and slight, standing 1.63m, when he joined the university mountaineering club, hoping the pursuit would boost his confidence and physical stature. Then an agricultural bureaucrat, in 1964 he was selected for a university expedition to the Himalayas. He returned to quit his career, intent on climbing the world’s most famous mountains. He earned enough from fruit-picking in California to fly to France, where he worked at a ski resort near Mt Blanc, which he climbed solo in July 1966. He scaled Mt Kilimanjaro in Africa in October, and Aconcagua in Argentina in February 1968. Next he sailed solo for almost 4000 miles down the Amazon.
In 1970 he was the first member in a Japanese team of 39 climbers to reach the summit of Mt Everest. Uemura’s next adventure was living with Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, where he learned survival techniques and a little of the language. Wearing bearskin trousers, sealskin mittens and boots, and driving an Inuit sled he travelled solo for 3200km along the coast of Greenland, then 12,000km solo from Greenland across the Canadian Arctic to Alaska. It was estimated Uemera lost 50 dogs to drowning, overwork and dog fights on his Arctic excursions.
On his polar trek Uemera had to unload and backpack supplies over 10m-high ridges, then pull the dogs and sled over. Drinking water had to be melted on a kerosene stove. Every evening he ate raw meat with his dogs.
On the fourth day a polar bear invaded his camp, ate his supplies and poked his nose against the sleeping bag where Uemura lay, frozen still. The bear returned the next day, when Uemura shot it dead, feeding the meat to his dogs. On the 35th day, Uemura was woken by a roar of breaking ice and woke to find the floe he had camped on had shattered. He and his dogs were stranded on a 100sq/m island of ice. Next morning, he found a metre-wide ice bridge and rushed to safety. Another day, when six dogs fell through the ice Uemura risked his life to drag them out, patting them dry with his wool-and-fur mittens before they froze to death.
An account of his expedition appeared on the National Geographic cover in September 1978.
By then, Uemura had also trekked to a mountain 3.5km west of the inland icecap in Greenland, again alone by dogsled in August 1978.
Uemura vanished in February 1984 after becoming the first person to make a solo winter climb up Denali, or Mt McKinley, in Alaska. In a radio conversation he told Japanese photographers he had made it to the top and descended back to 5500m. He planned to reach base camp in another two days, but never made it, one of almost 100 climbers to perish on the mountain since 1932.
Originally published as Solo Arctic explorer survived bear attacks and ice collapse
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