Eric Larsen is a pioneering polar explorer who completed the first-ever summer expedition to the North Pole, navigating thin, unstable sea ice and miles of open water. In 2010, he became the first person to reach both poles and summit Mount Everest within a single year. With decades of experience crossing the Arctic Ocean and Antarctic ice sheet, Eric has become a trusted resource and guide for aspiring polar adventurers.
Eric Larsen is a pioneering polar explorer who completed the first-ever summer expedition to the North Pole, navigating thin, unstable sea ice and miles of open water. In 2010, he became the first person to reach both poles and summit Mount Everest within a single year. With decades of experience crossing the Arctic Ocean and Antarctic ice sheet, Eric has become a trusted resource and guide for aspiring polar adventurers.
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Shelby Stanger:
The first known expeditions to reach the North Pole took place in the early 20th century. Since then, thousands of people have dreamed of traversing the vast expanses of ice, snow, and water required to reach it.
For anyone planning to make a voyage to the North Pole or the South Pole, the best person to ask for guidance is Eric Larsen. Eric is a groundbreaking polar explorer who made the first ever summer expedition to the North Pole. This is a monumental task because during these warmer months, the sea ice is thinner and less stable.
In 2010, Eric also became the first person to visit both poles as well as Mount Everest all within one year. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.
In the world of outdoor adventurers, Eric Larsen has become a well-known resource and guide for aspiring polar explorers. He has decades of experience crossing the Arctic Sea and the Antarctic ice sheet. One of the things he loves most about being on these barren tundras is the silence. Eric grew up exploring the quiet lakes and trails of the Midwest. The long days he spent biking and canoeing alone taught him to embrace solitary trips into the wilderness.
Eric Larsen:
I grew up just in a small town north of Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, and I definitely was always trying to be outside. I loved biking. I got a paper route when I was 12 years old and saved up and bought my first bike. And I would take a map and I would go ride 60, 70, 80 miles as a 12, 13 year old and just go around. And it was my way of trying to get farther out from where I was and be out on my own.
I mean, as a parent now, I just kick myself, but my mom would be like, "Where are you going? You got to write down the directions." And I would write down wrong locations of where I was going because I didn't want anybody to know where I was. I just wanted to be out on my own. And so I was just going out in whatever path that I could to try to discover the world around me.
Shelby Stanger:
This might be naive, but it seems like Wisconsin is a great place to be a kid who likes to explore. And I only say this because my niece and nephews both went to camp there this summer. And it was like the wilderness there is awesome and vast, but also fairly safe. There's not a lot of things that are going to kill you on the trail.
Eric Larsen:
Yeah. I mean, I think the Midwest in general is like that. You have some really different ecosystems that kind of are pretty close to one another. And so it doesn't take much travel to get into what we in the Midwest call "up north." And so everybody has this idea of north as part of our unconscious. And that's where the forests are more wild and there are camps and lakes and fishing.
And so I think most people in the Midwest grew up with this idea of "up north." And I read a lot as a kid. So right away I was into adventure and expedition books, the age of exploration. And so for me as a kid, starting to read the history of exploration, well, what were these explorers doing? They were going to the North Pole and that's just an extension of "up north."
Shelby Stanger:
So I'm curious, how did you then make this your job? You always loved exploring. You obviously were exposed to a ton of nature as a kid. How did you decide to make a living doing this? Did you go to school? Did you study something or did you just go right into being a guide?
Eric Larsen:
Yeah. I mean, if you would've asked me what I wanted to be when I was a kid, I was like, "I want to be an explorer." And there's no path there. There's no training program. There's no group of people. There's none of that. Basically, I was like, "I want to go on expeditions. If I start this now, I'll never go to college. I'll just keep going."
And so I knew that that was a good idea to try to get a college degree. But in college, I studied biology, environmental studies. I just took classes that got me outside. I was just like, "How can I be outside?" And as soon as I got out of college, I just was like, "All right, game on." But at the time in the early '90s, the trajectory to move along any sort of career that's not in the normal box of things was just unheard of. And so I was just like, "Okay, I have no money. Let me just go get jobs that are interesting and get me outside." And half of them didn't even pay.
I mean, right when I got out of college, I was a backcountry ranger in Alaska through an organization called the Student Conservation Association. It was basically a volunteer thing. I got a $92 a week stipend. I was psyched. I thought I was lighting cigars with $10 bills. And my eyes just opened up as a kid from Wisconsin to see mountains, to get charged by a moose, to go up in a floatplane, to see a glacier for the first time, and literally camp all summer long.
And for me, that was a real eye-opening experience. One, I realized the world was much bigger than I had realized. And then I also realized that if I was able to accept risks and uncertainty and move towards things that weren't necessarily focused on financial gain, I could have a lot of really incredible experiences.
Shelby Stanger:
That stint as a backcountry ranger was just the beginning of his patchwork career in the outdoors. After his time in Alaska, Eric worked as a bike mechanic and a whitewater guide in Colorado. While he enjoyed his adventurous lifestyle, there were also times when he felt like he was just spinning his wheels.
Eric Larsen:
I was living in a lot of remote places. I mean, just with nobody else around, just reading books nonstop for entertainment. My buddies would send me VHS tapes of Seinfeld so that I could actually watch TV or something that was somewhat current. And I was making just so little money and it was challenging, no health insurance and a car that barely worked and no change of clothes.
And it was a hard and lonely life too. And so that's when I started working on my master's degree in education and teaching in environmental ed. But even at 29, there was no real path for me. I was living in Southern Minnesota, teaching kids about rivers and tree identification and all these other things. And I remember my girlfriend I was living with at the time, and she was like, "Hey, Eric, either we need to get married or I'm moving out."
And I was 29. I was like, "Well, I want to be an explorer and go to the North Pole." And I'm sorry, Beth, if you're listening right now, because she must have thought I was crazy, but that's what I wanted. And I didn't know how to make it work, but I just ended up getting this job for a company that did dog sled expeditions. And so we would do dog sled expeditions and then have an educational program. And I was like, "Stick a fork-
Shelby Stanger:
Cool.
Eric Larsen:
... in me, man. This is it." I get to do adventures where I'm not necessarily the chief cook and bottle washer. There's a bigger mission in connecting people to these places, which was really important to me. And at that time, I thought I was going to be a dog musher for the rest of my life. I mean, I was a dog musher on and off for 10 years and I was like, "This is amazing." I would spend just hours on the back of the dog sled runners, days, weeks, months with no ... I mean, this was before phones and just silence, just out forever.
And that was really incredible. And I got very lucky because I was able to learn a little bit more about how a modern expedition was handled. And so that was really eye-opening. And of course, we lost all of our funding. I was unemployed working at a bike shop and living in a cabin with no electricity. And I was like, "Oh, God, how many times can I start over? How many times can I hit rock bottom and just be chasing this stupid dream that's never going to happen?" And you just feel like Don Quijote, chasing windmills and people are just like, "What are you doing?"
Shelby Stanger:
Eric felt like he was constantly starting from square one. He'd land a temporary seasonal job, but then the season would end and he'd be out of work again. Even getting a master's degree in education didn't take him to where he really wanted to go, the North Pole.
Eventually when he was 29, Eric moved to a small town in Northern Minnesota where a lot of his neighbors shared his appetite for adventure. There, he met Lonnie Dupre, an explorer who had made some notable Arctic expeditions by dog sled in the 90s and early 2000s. The two became friends and began hatching a plan for a record-breaking expedition to the North Pole.
Eric Larsen:
Our wild idea was to do the first ever summer expedition of the North Pole. And so I planned and trained for three and a half years to do, at the time, what nobody had ever done before, which was ski to the North Pole in the summertime. And so it was 72 days of some pretty challenging travel, to say the least. That's an understatement because I would be skiing along and just crying because I was so scared.
And it's one thing to climb Mount Everest now or even 10 or 20 years ago because there's a path. There's people that have done it. There's a body of knowledge that exists in that there are weather forecasts, there's a route, there's all this information. And even if you haven't done it, you're still standing on the shoulders of giants. You're taking all that information in consciously and subconsciously.
And back then, we just weren't able to do that. And so there's this whole other level of severity that adds to the mental strain, but also just the physical difficulty of, I mean, think about doing one thing for 72 days, two and a half months with no other outlet, with a point where if something happens, you're not getting rescued.
We spent three years planning and preparing, developing gear and equipment, fundraising, going on all these training trips and all this other stuff. And then just launching a trip where for over a month it would be impossible to get rescued in this environment that's so ... I mean, it's hard to even describe the level of difficulty of all that because you can't even think about it in today's terms.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me a little bit more about this. So it took three years to prepare.
Eric Larsen:
Yes. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
What does that mean? What was your physical training? What was your mental training?
Eric Larsen:
Well, I had 15 years of my own adventures, dog sledding the Canadian Arctic and expeditions and being in Alaska and doing all these other things, but yet I didn't know about going to the North Pole. I didn't know about organizing a big expedition. There were still a lot of question marks.
And so what I've learned since, and this is where I think the intoxicating part of these expeditions come into play for me is that you realize it's just a problem to be solved. And it's a puzzle that you don't necessarily know what the pieces are, but you have to fit them together. And so we just, what are all the variables in this trip? Okay, the North Pole, summertime. How do we get up there? What equipment do we need? What's the physical nature of it?
So it's a human-powered expedition. So obviously training is a big part of it. We're skiing and pulling sleds. And so just building up that kind of energy. And I have a whole bunch of philosophies about training, but these are all day effort things. It's not just going to a gym and working out. I mean, our sleds would weigh over 300 pounds at the beginning of the trip.
The other thing we knew right away is that this was a summertime expedition to the North Pole. The Arctic Ocean from land to the North Pole was mostly ice, but in the summer, there's a lot of water. And so we knew partly from Lonnie's experience that we would need some sort of sled that would need to float really well. And so right away we're like, "Oh, well, we should bring a kayak." But when we put all the gear in a kayak and then put ourselves in it, the kayak sank.
And so we ended up finding a whitewater canoe, which was a little bigger, and we modified those. We made sleds out of them. And so there was a lot of engineering, I guess, not high-tech engineering, but just kind of solving these problems. How much food do we need? And how can it be the most compact to fit in these canoes? And what's the technology at the time for communication? And fundraising was a constant thing for us. And so it's just going through all those steps and trying to cross off as many question marks as you can.
The hard part with that trip is that when we got to the starting line, there were still so many question marks that was overwhelming. And then again, there's no certainty in your path because you don't know what to expect as you move forward. Again, to reference a mountain, like when you climb up Everest, you climb up the Khumbu Icefall. And that's uncertain, but then the next time you do it, you know what to expect and then you go up to the next thing.
So there's always these little incremental amounts of uncertainty that you're going into. But on a lot of these expeditions and in the Arctic Ocean very specifically, the environment is changing minute to minute because the ice is constantly moving and shifting. And so it's just really hard to find any sort of like... stable base to move forward from.
Shelby Stanger:
The expedition was extremely challenging. On their first attempt a year prior, Eric and Lonnie had to abort after 10 days due to unseasonably warm conditions. Even when they tried again the following year, the pair was constantly dealing with the threat of polar bears, melting ice and extreme temperatures. In the end, they succeeded, arriving at the North Pole on July 2nd, 2006 after 62 days on the ice.
What was the most beautiful part of the North Pole?
Eric Larsen:
I mean, I just think the environment is incredible. It's unlike any other place on the planet. Mountains, lakes, rivers, prairies. Those exist in a lot of other areas around the globe, deserts. But the Arctic Ocean and that sea ice is just so unique. You're in this literally life and death struggle and then you see a blue chunk of ice or you see a sun halo or a snow drift that's just curved around or some hoar frost that's frozen in this delicate flower. And you're just like, "This is so spectacular and I'm so lucky to be here."
Shelby Stanger:
In 2006, adventurers Eric Larsen and Lonnie Dupre became the first people to ski to the North Pole during the summertime. People took a note of their achievement. And when they arrived home, they were interviewed for The New York Times, The Tonight Show, CNN, CBS, and so many more. The pair had made history, but for Eric, this expedition was just the beginning of his polar adventures. He immediately started thinking about how he would make it to Antarctica.
Eric Larsen:
I wanted to go to the South Pole. I said, "I would love to do an expedition down there," just for personal reasons. I said, "I'm not a millionaire. There's no way I can pay for that. " And so I knew I needed to do something unique. And as I started doing some more research, I realized, well, maybe I could do a South Pole and a North Pole trip back to back. That's kind of compelling.
And then what I realized is Everest is like a pole. People consider it a pole. And I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." And I realized that nobody had been to all three of those in a year timeframe. And I was like, "That seems really like a great trip." I had no interest in climbing Mount Everest whatsoever. I'm from Wisconsin. I had never even, at the time, probably been above 12 or 13,000 feet, but I knew from a marketing standpoint that having that Everest in there would be compelling.
But also for me, it was trying to do all three of those trips, which was the real challenge of it. And so that's an expedition that I called Save the Poles, which was a great climate message, these iconic places of cold in our world. And so it came together in a compelling way.
Shelby Stanger:
Can you just give me a quick highlight from each of these places? The South Pole, the North Pole and Everest in one year, this trip. I know it was a little while ago, but I'm just curious, any memorable moments or just a memorable moment that really stuck out?
Eric Larsen:
Yeah. I mean, I have so many memories of those trips. I think for me, a kid from Wisconsin, being in the Himalayas, just in general, hiking up to base camp. I remember being in Namche Bazar. And we were there at the end of monsoon and it was raining, raining, raining. And there was these waterfalls coming out of the top of these mountains and it was green clouds and then waterfalls right from the top. And I was like, "That is crazy. Where are those waterfalls starting from? Is it just like the clouds are so wet up there that they're..."
Anyway, so then one day I woke up and it was clear and there was a whole other level of mountains above that. And my mind was just blown because I had never witnessed anything like that before. And I think to me, I'm so grateful for these expeditions because I've got to go to these places. They're so incredible. They're so vast. They're so huge. They're so spectacular.
And I think within each of those is just being this small person in these vast places that so few people have been to, maybe not Everest, but the Arctic and Antarctic for sure. And you have this big scale of these places and this horizon that just goes on forever or this ice that's moving pressure ridges. But then you also have on a daily basis, these just little things that happen that are so incredible as well.
And in Antarctica, there's these things called sastrugi, which are these almost rock hard snow drifts that look a little bit like a whale or a dolphin porpoising out of the water. And they're wind scalloped and so beautiful. And you could be skiing along and they're just all around and it's like being in the middle of the ocean. And so there are just incredible things in all those places.
Shelby Stanger:
Over the year that it took to complete the Save the Poles expedition, Eric wrote about climate change and advocated for laws focused on sustainability and clean energy. Raising awareness about the climate has been a cornerstone of his career. In fact, in 2014, Eric made yet another unsupported trip to the North Pole, which was widely considered to be the last of its kind due to melting sea ice.
Since then, Eric has spent a lot of time training aspiring polar explorers, including many past guests of this show. He's also been guiding trips and continuing to go on his own expeditions. Not every outing has been a success. He has a fair amount of failures under his belt alongside his massive accomplishments, but every adventure has developed his sense of grit and determination and prepared him for an unexpected challenge.
In 2021, Eric received a serious cancer diagnosis. So you recently had a pretty big diagnosis and you survived, obviously. You're here today. You got diagnosed with cancer, right?
Eric Larsen:
Initially, I was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer in January '21. I mean, I was leaving for one of my polar training courses three days later, I had clients that were plane tickets in hand. Yeah. And I was given just a few years to live at the time.
Luckily, after about a little over a month of some pretty stressful times, it was downgraded to stage 3B, which is still a really challenging diagnosis. So I spent a couple really difficult years, chemo, radiation, surgery. Just total hell, quite honestly. I mean, I was addicted to oxycodone for a while. I had this terrible infection. I couldn't sit in a chair for five months because I had these drains in my body. It was very challenging.
Shelby Stanger:
That's crazy. Do you think all of your training for these polar expeditions helped you get through this phase?
Eric Larsen:
Yeah, ironically. It was funny because that was right after COVID. When COVID hit, prior to COVID, I was just going. I was doing expeditions. I don't want to say I was chasing my tail a little, but my ego was pushing me and I was trying to do these things which I enjoyed. But I was also simultaneously, my kids were getting older and I was like, "Man," and the nature of adventure was changing.
And I was like, "There's just more important things in the world right now." So when COVID hit, it was a little bit of relief and I just was like, "I've achieved all these things. Maybe that's just good enough for me." But when I got cancer, it was surprising to me how similar that was to an expedition, dealing with some pretty intense physical discomfort. Feeling separated from the rest of the world and not having any impact on anybody, moving towards an uncertain outcome where survival is not for sure. Lots of time with nothing but inward thoughts.
That's a polar expedition. That's the North Pole in a nutshell. And that's cancer. And so I employed a lot of those strategies, not necessarily consciously, but it was just part of what I was used to. And so in a day, we wake up, we get through the first hour and a half, and then we switch leads. And then it's like halfway through the day we get the soup. And then it's the tent a little later on.
And so with chemo, I had this long stretch of chemo and it just gets worse and worse and worse. I couldn't carry an empty box across the room. It was hell. And it was just like, "Get through the chemo thing." And then I got a week where I can kinda like... "If I could walk, that's great." And then the second chemo, and then I get halfway through. I'm not thinking about the end of it. And so those strategies are very similar.
Shelby Stanger:
Where are you at now with your diagnosis?
Eric Larsen:
Good question. Hopelessly lost and making good time, that's what I tell everybody. Yeah. So I was diagnosed in 2021, so I just had some scans. There's no cancer, so go figure. But my body's messed up. I had 14 inches of my colon taken out. I have to do an enema every night. That was just... I mean I was like, I can't do my job. I can't even leave the house. My quality of life was zero.
So through a bunch of research and some Facebook groups, I learned with people similar to me, you can do this. So now I do it in the tent. At 40 below, it's literally a pain in the ass, but it's given me my life back. And I have some function and normality, but it's just another system. But I'm good. And ironically, I'm in a good place in my mind, which I didn't think I would ever be again.
And this thing that I thought I didn't want to do anymore, I have this reinvigorated focus. But I also have this beautiful understanding of what it means to have everything taken away and the role of compassion in life and being a supporter and all these other things that I ... I wasn't a jerk before, but I was focused.
And so when I look back at my cancer, I don't look at it back negatively. I wish my body wasn't how it was. I wish I didn't spend years in pain. When I see all of my peers and what they were able to achieve in that time where I couldn't do anything, it's very hard. But I'm alive.
Shelby Stanger:
Your whole life, you've been really attracted to these remote wilderness adventures. There's something in it that gives you pleasure, even though it's a suffer fest, even though there's pain and heartbreak and all sorts of mistakes. And so what is it about exploring these remote places? What does it do for you?
Eric Larsen:
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think I've always felt comfortable in wilderness, so that's a given. I'm more of an introvert. So it's very ... In one sense, being out on my own is easier than being at a party or some sort of social situation where I say the wrong thing.
I think I'm curious about the world around me. And when I look at a map or read about a place, I want to know what it's like to be there. And I think as you get older and you start to see the things that really make you work through difficult situations, I don't want to say it's a drug because I don't like that. It's just more of a positive feedback loop that you just ... It's very fulfilling physically and philosophically. And I feel like I've been chasing that feeling for my whole life.
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to keep up with Eric and his adventures or go on a winter training trip, you can find him on Instagram @elexplore. That's E-L Explore. He also has a book about his 2014 expedition to the North Pole called On Thin Ice. You can find it wherever you buy your books.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.