Ooooh man, I'm getting chills just reading the intro.
Last week, I finished Reinhold Messner's book "Wild" which is an excellent narration of Shakleton's (and Frank Wild's) adventures in the Antarctica.<p>This sparked my interest in pole expeditions, and I was surprised to learn that:<p>1) Amundsen was not only the first person to reach the geographic south pole, but also most likely the first to reach the geographic north pole. Today, the two expeditions that claimed to have reached the north pole prior to him are both thought to have missed the pole by several hundred kilometers.<p>2) He reached the north pole in a rigid air ship with Umberto Nobile, my new explorer hero, who later rescued his Jewish girlfriend in fascist Italy and went on to build air ships for the Soviet Union and later teach aerodynamics in the United States.<p>EDIT: And I'm getting more chills just thinking about Sjaak Lucasson's planned north pole expedition with a modified Yamaha R1 motorcycle pulling a huge sled full of fuel [1]<p>EDIT 2: Funnily enough, the navigator on Shackleton's boat sailing to the attempted pole traversal was also called Worsley.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sjaaklucassen.nl/en/noordpool-2017-intro/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sjaaklucassen.nl/en/noordpool-2017-intro/</a>