Journey to the Top of the World

Japanese explorer makes first solo trip to the North Pole

On the 57th day of his perilous 477-mile trek along the jagged ice fields of the Arctic Ocean, Japanese Explorer Naomi Uemura last week took a sextant sighting, then another and another. At last he was sure. With the 17 huskies who had pulled his sledge, he was at the top of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole alone by way of the frozen Arctic.

Standing on a dazzling white plain of ice that stretched southward in every direction, the diminutive (5 ft. 3 in., 130 Ibs.) explorer planted the Japanese flag on the pole. The next morning, jubilant members of his support team, who had made five airdrops of supplies along the way, landed beside him in a small plane. Uemura, 37, was full of apologies for taking two weeks longer than he had anticipated to make the grueling journey. Said he: "I'm awfully sorry I was delayed, but I finally got here."

Such diffidence is familiar to those who know Uemura. A national hero in Japan, he has retained the retiring, unassuming ways of the rice-farming community where he was born. Most of his spectacular feats, past and present, have been undertaken alone. These include having climbed four of the highest mountains in the world: Mont Blanc in France, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Aconcagua in Argentina and Mount McKinley in the U.S. To train for his conquest of the North Pole, he made a 7,500-mile trek from Greenland to Alaska by dos sledge.

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 to as low as --68DEG F., gale-force winds and a blizzard also slowed down Uemura Though he wore modern thermal underwear, most of his clothing was Eskimo gear; bearskin trousers, sealskin mittens and fur-lined boots.

At 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 him at a range of 55 yards. Said Uemura's wife Kimiko in Tokyo when she heard about his encounter: "He is a continual surprise to me. At home he's afraid of cockroaches. Out there, he will confront a bear."

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 3 1/2-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 and her puppies.

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 2 1/2 hours I had made it across to solid ice again. I felt weak with relief." On the 52nd day, severe winds again forced him to stop.

Reaching the North Pole on May 1, he remained for two days and was then airlifted back to Ellesmere Island. Following a one-week respite, he is scheduled to leave on yet another pioneering dog-sledge journey that will take him 1,660 miles on a north-south trek through the icy interior of Greenland.

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