CRESTED BUTTE — About six years ago, polar exploring legend Eric Larsen was wondering if it was time to close the book on his storied 30-year career.
He’d had high-profile missions fall short but still made it to the North Pole three times, including a grueling 53-day expedition in 2014 that many explorers touted as the last time a human will walk across the melting Arctic ice. He’d climbed Mount Everest and trekked to the South Pole and North Pole in a 365-day span, pedaled, hiked and skied across great spans and spent long weeks in subzero temperatures.
His kids were growing and he was missing a lot during his chilly multimonth expeditions. He was wondering about the purpose of his audacious feats.
“All the sudden I wake up and it doesn’t really seem that important,” says the 54-year-old.
And then the pandemic descended and reshuffled all kinds of global priorities. Then, in 2021, he was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer.
“And all I was hoping for was to be around for another day,” he says.
He describes the last five years “like getting Maytagged,” which in whitewater kayaking parlance means throttled and spun in a violent hole that will not release you. He had chemotherapy, radiation, surgeries and infections. He spent weeks in hospitals and even longer bedridden.
“It was brutal. It was dark. I was in that for what felt like forever and then I got spit out,” he says.
So now what? The cancer is gone. He’s back in shape, ready to relaunch his life. He’s been down to the South Pole a couple times in the last year. Those same questions about purpose are returning. But this time, they have a different hue.
He says he’s ready to move past “cancer survivor“ and regain that crown of cold-weather badass.
“Simultaneously, I also don’t want to forget many of the lessons I learned and the kindness I was shown,” he says.
A lot has changed in polar exploration in the last decade, many of those changes sparked by his decades of hard lessons. A few months ago he returned to the South Pole guiding clients on what is called “the last degree.” It’s a seven-day haul — not 50-plus days like a full-blown expedition across Antarctica — across the final leg of a frozen path to the pole.
Not surprisingly, he had a blast.
“It’s sort of all I know,” he says. “I’m a spaceship in outer space that ran out of fuel. Unless something hits me, I’m going in the same direction forever.”
From record-setter to climate activist to cancer warrior
Larsen has wrapped his polar expeditions in a few different parkas over the years.
In the beginning of his icy adventuring career, he was chasing history and exploring places few humans have been. A modern-day Ernest Shackleton, he was at the leading edge of ice-cold imagination, bringing back photos and stories of survival from places that do not accommodate humans. He notched iconic firsts and lasts. He spent years planning and fundraising for his polar feats and then more years sharing his inspiring stories of grit and perseverance in the harshest landscapes.
In the late aughts, he was climate advocate, sharing insights into melting and shifting landscapes as a warming planet erases the northern ice cap. His 53-day 2014 expedition to the North Pole was likely the last now that the 500-mile route now includes vast expanses of open ocean as the Arctic ice cap dissolves.
Then he was a cancer survivor, blending inspirational lessons from a life on ice into his medical journey.
And now he’s returning full circle. He’s tapping his original inspiration from the 1990s when an audacious 20-something kid from Wisconsin wanted to share the awe and wonder found in the wildest, coldest corners of the world.
Back then he would land on the edge of the polar ice cap with a heavy sled and a single GPS waypoint to a buried cache of food. He would ski — or pedal a fat tire bike — for weeks to that point, resupply and push toward the pole. There were long stretches when he was unreachable and could not even call for help.
Today, polar treks include detailed maps showing every step. Ski-shod adventurers have internet access and can share videos and even livestream their experience. The trips are still challenging “but it’s adventure tourism,” says Larsen, who has spent years helping clients train and prepare for sustained expeditions across frozen moonscapes.
“It’s still an amazing challenge but it’s not really exploring. You are exploring the place for yourself, which is valuable. But that is the changing nature of adventure today,” he says.
He’s not critical of folks wanting to push themselves in extreme situations. Interest is high for trips across Antarctica, he says, especially in an era when more people are chasing goals and checking boxes on iconic pursuits like reaching the top or the end of the world.
“The less it happens, the more people are interested,” he says.
And the shorter trips to the South Pole in Antarctica are a bit more pleasant.
“Fifty days down there? It gets boring. You want to know what a full expedition is like? Stare at a white sheet of paper for two months straight while sitting in a bathtub full of ice,” he says, laughing. “There’s no scenery. When the horizon line is closer, you are going uphill. When it’s farther away, you are going downhill.”
And at the end, there’s a heated facility with a cook and drinks. The National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is a bustling, year-round laboratory for scientists from across the world.
“I was already getting to this place where I was wondering about the purpose of these adventures. And I find myself coming back to the start,” he says. “We have become so disconnected from difficulty, risk, challenge, adversity, uncertainty and figuring things out and now I wonder if this stuff is actually more important now than it’s ever been.”
“My wheelhouse is failure”
As a longtime resident of a mountain town, Larsen knows the mental health challenges that are threatening communities. He wonders if the lessons of a polar adventure can translate into ways to ease those challenges.
“It seems like people are getting into difficult situations and it’s overwhelming them because it’s the first time something hard has happened in their lives. Or it’s their first experience with failure,” he says. “My wheelhouse is failure. That’s a Tuesday for me.
“I look back at my cancer and all these overwhelming moments in my life as I moved toward an uncertain destination with an uncertain outcome and that’s a North Pole expedition. Just getting out there and having adventures and experiencing awe about our natural world, I think it’s something we all could use right now.”
Larsen has spent 30 years revealing the unique challenges of navigating endless frozen fields, dodging polar bears and swimming across slushy spans in pursuit of a reading on a GPS device at the ends of the world. His stories from the coldest corners convey the grit, mindfulness and patience required to take hundreds of thousand steps over two months, each almost identical to the last.
Larsen reaches into his pack and pulls out what looks like VR goggles and a palm-sized drone. He passes over the headgear and fires up a 360-degree, bird’s-eye video of his December trip to the South Pole. Turn your head and the perspective changes. The blue sky melts into white in a horizon that seems to have no end.
“Isn’t this crazy? I’m talking about real world things and here we are in the virtual world,” he says.
For the past couple years Larsen has been working with Living Journeys, a nonprofit that helps Gunnison County residents weather cancer diagnoses with financial aid, events and support.
He brought “a depth of empathy and resilience” to Living Journeys as the group worked with locals navigating cancer, says Living Journeys Executive Director Julie Reid.
“He does understand endurance and what it takes to keep moving forward through some of the toughest conditions,” Reid says. “He’s always focused on helping to ensure that everyone in our community is supported and understood. He brings courage and compassion to Living Journeys.”
Reid sees his return to adventure as another chapter in Larsen’s inspiring story and yet another way he can deliver hope to overwhelmed cancer fighters.
“I think he’s already given more than I think he will ever realize and he’s going to continue to help so many others,” she said. “People will see him and say ‘I can get back to adventuring and all the things that bring joy into my life after cancer.’”