Wally Herbert leads the first confirmed crossing to the North Pole

Story: 1969 C.E.  |  Last updated: April 6, 1969

On April 6, 1969 C.E., British explorer Wally Herbert and his three-man team reached the North Pole after 15 months of travel across 3,800 miles of shifting Arctic ice — completing what many historians had called the last great journey on Earth. No human beings had ever been confirmed to have reached the Pole by surface travel before. Herbert’s North Pole expedition didn’t just close a chapter in polar history. It opened a new understanding of what human endurance, preparation, and partnership with the Arctic environment could achieve.

Key facts

• North Pole expedition: Herbert led the British Trans-Arctic Expedition from Alaska to Spitsbergen via the Pole of Inaccessibility, covering 3,800 miles over 15 months from 1968 to 1969 C.E.
• Dog sled crossing: The team — Herbert, Allan Gill, Roy Koerner, and Kenneth Hedges — traveled entirely by dog sled and open boat, relying on Inuit techniques Herbert had learned in Greenland years earlier.
• Polar recognition: Prime Minister Harold Wilson called the achievement “a feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history,” and Prince Philip described it as ranking “among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance.”

How the journey came together

Herbert’s path to the Arctic began in Antarctica. In 1955 C.E., at age 21, he joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, where he became expert in dog sledding along the Antarctic Peninsula. He later worked with the New Zealand Antarctic programme, traveling to Greenland specifically to purchase sled dogs — and while there, he learned Inuit methods of dog driving directly from the people who had mastered Arctic travel over thousands of years.

That knowledge proved essential. When Herbert designed the Trans-Arctic Expedition, he wasn’t simply applying European mountaineering tradition to a new environment. He was drawing on Indigenous Arctic expertise that mainstream polar history has often left out of the story. The dogs, the techniques, the understanding of ice behavior — all of it traced back to Inuit knowledge systems that no Western expedition could have replicated from scratch.

The team departed Point Barrow, Alaska, in February 1968 C.E. By July they had covered roughly 1,200 miles of rough, drifting sea ice — but found themselves unable to reach a position where the natural drift of the trans-Arctic ice stream would carry them toward their goal. Rather than risk failure or disaster, Herbert made the decision to winter on the ice, camping as they drifted slowly around the Pole through the Arctic night. It was a calculated gamble. When sunlight returned, they pushed on.

The day they reached the Pole

April 6, 1969 C.E. — exactly 60 years after Robert Peary had claimed to reach the North Pole in 1909 C.E. — Herbert’s team arrived at 90 degrees north. The timing was coincidental, but the contrast was stark. Peary’s claim had never been independently verified and remains disputed to this day. Herbert’s crossing was documented, witnessed, and recognized by geographical societies around the world.

Herbert received the Founders’ Medal of the Royal Geographical Society — one of the most prestigious honors in exploration — along with gold medals from several geographical societies and the Explorers Medal of the Explorers Club. A mountain range and a plateau in Antarctica were named after him. The most northerly mountain in Svalbard bears his name.

He was knighted in 2000 C.E. for his polar achievements. Fellow explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes called him “the greatest polar explorer of our time.”

Lasting impact

Herbert’s expedition demonstrated that a full surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean was humanly possible — something that had been theorized, attempted, and failed many times before. The route he pioneered, through some of the most hostile terrain on Earth, has informed every subsequent serious Arctic expedition.

His work extended well beyond the 1969 C.E. crossing. He spent years living among the Inuit and Saami peoples of Greenland, Norway, and Sweden with his wife Marie Herbert, and he drew some of the first landscape artworks of the North Pole region. He illustrated all of his own books, combining scientific documentation with genuine artistic vision in a tradition that stretches back to the great naturalist-explorers of earlier centuries.

Herbert also made a lasting contribution to the historical record. Hired by the National Geographic Society to assess Robert Peary’s private diary and astronomical observations — documents that had been inaccessible to researchers for decades — he concluded that Peary had not actually reached the Pole and had likely falsified his records. The National Geographic Society, which had originally backed Peary, eventually accepted Herbert’s findings. It was a rare and significant act: a celebrated explorer using his expertise not to inflate his own reputation, but to correct someone else’s inflated one.

His 1989 C.E. book The Noose of Laurels: The Race to the North Pole sparked fierce debate that continues among historians and geographers. The question of who first reached the North Pole — if anyone before Herbert — remains genuinely open.

Blindspots and limits

Herbert’s expedition was British-led, state-supported, and celebrated primarily within Western exploration institutions — while the Inuit knowledge and traditions that made Arctic surface travel possible over millennia received, and continue to receive, far less recognition in the formal record. The framing of “first to reach the North Pole” also reflects a particular definition of achievement: the Pole as a geographic coordinate to be conquered, a framework that sits uneasily alongside Indigenous relationships with the Arctic as a living landscape rather than a destination.

Herbert himself seemed aware of this tension. His years living with Arctic Indigenous communities, and his insistence on crediting Inuit dog-driving methods, suggest a more complicated view of exploration than the medals and monuments convey. Still, the honors went to him — and the Scott Polar Research Institute, which holds much of the historical record, remains a predominantly Western institution interpreting a predominantly Western story.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Wally Herbert

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