The night Art Aufderheide threw down the challenge that rewrote polar history, he wasn’t thinking about the North Pole or who’d been there first. He just wanted to go seal hunting.
It was March 1966, and Aufderheide was at the Pickwick, a pub in Duluth, Minnesota, overlooking Lake Superior’s gritty shoreline, to gather some beta on Canadian hunting spots from a man named Ralph Plaisted. Plaisted, an affable thirty-nine-year-old high school dropout from Bruno, Minnesota, had recently made the local papers for piloting a snowmobile, then a newfangled invention, two hundred fifty miles in one day from the Canadian border to St. Paul. Big-shouldered and with a drooping mustache, he had an infectious enthusiasm for winter travel, and a mutual friend connected them so they could talk shop.
Plaisted spent much of the evening praising the merits of the snowmobile. He was a uniquely gifted salesman, a trait honed selling insurance, and he tried to convince Aufderheide, a meticulous and well-organized physician, to
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