#patrick morrow

When Neil Armstrong and Edmund Hillary Took a Trip to the North Pole

It sounds like the plot of a comic book — Sir Edmund Hillary and Neil Armstrong at the North Pole — but in fact it was one of those spectacular crossroads of history. In the lonely, desolate arctic, these two great explorers — who had never met before — got in a tiny bush plane and took off for the top of the Earth in 1985. Here's how it happened.

One morning in the mid–1980s, professional expedition leader Mike Dunn decided he wanted to take the day’s greatest explorers to the North Pole. According to Sir Edmund Hillary's son Peter, himself an accomplished mountaineer who came on the trip, Dunn was a colorful character, the kind of man who didn’t mind ringing up people like first man on the moon Neil Armstrong and saying, “How about this?” 

Hillary, legendary for being the first to scale Mount Everest with teammate Tenzing Norgay, was on board, and Armstrong was, too, saying he was curious to see what the North Pole looked like from ground level, as he'd only seen it from the moon. Astronaut problems.

The party also included Steve Fosset — the first man to fly a balloon around the world — and Patrick Morrow — the first person to climb the highest peaks of all seven continents.