Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Monday, July 03, 2006
Dupre and Larson reach North Pole
GRAND MARAIS, Minn. (AP) — Adventurers Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen of Grand Marais have reached the North Pole after pulling and paddling modified canoes over 1,000 miles of ice and open water.
Dupre and Larsen reached the pole around noon on Saturday, two months after taking off from Ward Hunt Island in Canada, according to their Web journal.
Theirs is the first expedition to reach the North Pole during the summer. Their success comes after years of preparation and one aborted mission.
Dupre, 45, and Larsen, 35, are making the trip to bring attention to global warming issues. They plan to produce a book and documentary.
The environmental organization Greenpeace is a major sponsor of the trip. The expedition has been receiving airdrops of supplies.
They planned to spend a few days at the pole, then travel south to Greenland. They expect to end the trek in late August or early September.
The men wrote on their Web site that reaching the pole was a bit anticlimactic, but a recent encounter with a polar bear outside their tent stuck in their minds.
``We find it difficult to not draw a deep significance from this encounter,'' they wrote. ``Just maybe, it was a messenger from the rest of its race sent to remind us that the fate of the polar bear lies in all our hands.''
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