THE OUTDOORS : His Future Is on Ice : Polar Explorer Will Steger Prepares for 5,000-Mile Trek Across Antarctica

The waiter served tea for three, requiring a truckload of silver, china cups, saucers, bowls and linen napkins, spread out on an ironed pink tablecloth on a table the size of an on-deck circle.

Will Steger liked it. The North Pole seemed a long way away.

Sometimes when he serves tea, it is brewed laboriously in a tiny pot over a single flame, with shivering hands and none of the amenities, and there is no reporter or public relations person present. He is not sitting on the plush patio of a big-city hotel but in a tent on an icepack, thousands of miles from anywhere.

This was nice.

“Being an explorer, you have to adapt to whatever comes,” Steger said while visiting Los Angeles recently. “I don’t know if I would want to live full-time in the city, but I like what the city has to offer.”

Two years ago Steger, 43, and five others trekked 1,450 miles by dog sled to 90 degrees north latitude--the North Pole--without resupply or outside radio input, although they did transmit reports to the outside world and sent two exhausted companions and several worn-out dogs out by airplane.

The group also included co-leader Paul Schurke, 30, and Minnesota schoolteacher Ann Bancroft, 30, the first woman to reach the pole on foot. It was the first confirmed unaided expedition to make it to the pole.

The operative word is confirmed, because recent disclosures of Adm. Robert E. Peary’s private papers cast considerable doubt on whether he got there at all in 1909, as he claimed. In recent years, polar claims have been verified by more sophisticated methods of navigation than were available in Peary’s time.

Steger grew up in Minneapolis and now lives 250 miles north of it in Ely, Minn., near the Canadian border. And whereas 2 years ago he was on top of the world, next year he expects to be at the bottom, which demonstrates how things go in the exploring business.

Ever restless, Steger walked 1,500 miles across Greenland last spring in a tuneup for his goal, a trek of 5,000 miles across the similar landscape of Antarctica next year with skis, 42 sled dogs and companions of five other nationalities.

For those whose busy schedules may deter them from ever making such a trip, Steger offered an insight.

“It will be like skiing a marathon every day for 7 months, without coming into a building and sleeping every night,” he said. “You’re continually putting up with the cold. It is truly an athletic event.”

Steger is aware that most Americans relate more readily to athletic events performed in confined spaces, especially those measuring 19 inches diagonally. But Steger is neither a performer nor a spectator. He is a doer whose ambitions apparently know no bounds.

If fame and fortune fall his way, fine, but he’s not counting on either.

“The United States is not real attuned to expeditions and adventures,” Steger said. “You go to France or England, and they are. We live more vicariously.

“The boys I grew up with were the same as I was. We all liked rafting and outdoor things. I was fortunate to have parents who allowed me to pursue my adventures.

“My parents have never camped outside in their lives, but when I was 15, I took a motorboat down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans and back with my older brother. That was my first and last mechanized adventure. My mode of travel now is to do it in a self-sufficient manner, and the easy route is not usually the route I would take.”

It’s not easy finding new adventures these days. Hey, almost nobody goes to Everest anymore.

“Everest has really been worn out,” Steger said. “We got our first American women up now. The North Pole is never going to be that big.

“But you have to do a trip like a North Pole or an Everest that the American public recognizes. No one’s interested unless it’s the first or the highest.”

The rewards are mostly in personal satisfaction.

“I have an old ’77 pink Cadillac,” Steger said. “It has 245,000 miles on it. I got into the big leagues with the North Pole expedition. That did open up other opportunities in writing and lecturing and photography. But I put all my energy afterward into the Antarctic expedition and personally didn’t capitalize on it.”

Steger’s South Pole budget is $8 million, including $3.5 million for a 136-foot support vessel being built in France. Du Pont is providing equipment and sponsorship, and ABC may help by doing three telecasts, including a live one from the pole.

The expedition got its impetus on Steger’s chance meeting with Jean-Louis Etienne of France when both were en route to the North Pole in 1986. Etienne was skiing to the pole alone, which sounds incredibly difficult, since it is uphill.

“We were a month out on the ice in this Arctic Ocean the size of the United States, blocks of ice all over so you can’t see more than a quarter-mile,” Steger said. “I was, as usual, pushing my dog sled, and all of a sudden they veered to the right, and 20 yards up the ridge was a man.”

It was Etienne, who was camped on the other side, heard Steger’s dogs and got up to investigate.

“It was like Stanley and Livingstone meeting on the ice,” Steger said.

In the conversation that ensued, Steger said, the men learned that they had the same dream of traversing Antarctica.

“We thought our next expedition had to have more of a social consequence than just adventure,” Steger said. “We talked late into the night in his tent.”

They decided to invite along a Soviet, an Englishman, a Chinese and a Japanese.

What is it that draws these men to the ends of the earth?

“Our goal is not only to traverse this route that’s never been crossed on foot, but we want to draw attention to Antarctica and its importance to our future--make Antarctica famous,” Steger said.

He is concerned about the “greenhouse effect”--the warming of the earth’s atmosphere--and other man-made dangers to that unspoiled land.

Most people hardly give it a second thought. They have a general idea where Antarctica is but know little about it. If you have seen one pole, haven’t you seen them all?

Actually, in terms of similarity, the poles are poles apart.

The Arctic has polar bears. Antarctica has none.

Antarctica has penguins near the coasts. The Arctic has none.

The Arctic is an ocean covered with ice. Antarctica is a land mass covered with ice, like a thickly frosted cake, with mountain peaks rising higher than 15,000 feet and an average elevation of 7,500 feet, the highest of any continent.

The elevation at the South Pole is 10,500 feet. “And it’s as flat as a football field,” Steger said. “Like the desert or the Great Plains.”

It’s about 35 degrees colder than the North Pole. In the winter, a temperature of minus-129 degrees Fahrenheit has been recorded, and the wind can gust up to 200 m.p.h. Steger will be traveling in the summer, however.

It’s also one of the driest places on earth, averaging only 10 inches of snow annually, the equivalent of 2 or 3 inches of rain, only slightly more than falls in the Sahara.

For travelers on foot, the biggest difference in Antarctica is that they don’t have to worry about falling through the surface, except for the occasional crevasse. In the Arctic, Steger worried about that a lot.

The Arctic ice, he said, varies from a few inches to 10 or 12 feet thick and “is constantly moving and shifting, totally unpredictable. The ice could open under your tent.”

The thin stuff, called sheet ice, is tricky.

“Terrifying,” Steger said. “I’m an expert on freshwater ice, but sea ice was totally new to me. When sea ice freezes 3 or 4 inches thick, it’s rubbery, like a water bed. Your first feeling is absolute panic, especially with a dog team. If that sled goes in, it’s all going to go 10,000 feet to the bottom.”

Looking at perhaps a half-mile of this undulating surface, with no way around, a person checks his commitment to his goal.

“You travel on the barest edge of safety,” Steger said. “As long as the dogs are moving, the sled isn’t going to go in. You have this standing wave of ice moving in front of your sled. The runners are cutting through and kicking up rooster tails.

“That’s real adventure. I like situations that challenge my spirit, my abilities.”

Steger, Etienne and the others will not be the first to set foot on both poles, although most of their predecessors got there with airplanes or snowmobiles. For years, after Frederick A. Cook’s claim that he had reached the North Pole in 1908 was dismissed as a fraud, schoolchildren were taught that Peary “discovered” the pole in 1909. Later, that also was disputed.

“I had my opinions on the controversy,” Steger said. “But I thought I first would have to travel to the North Pole similar to the way those men did.

“It wasn’t until we were north of 88 degrees (latitude) and short on supplies that I started to understand what was possible. Peary came close. . . . I think perhaps within 30 miles.”

More recently, historian Dennis Rawlins of Baltimore, working from Peary’s navigational notes, concluded that Peary, on his third try, never got closer than 121 miles. That didn’t diminish Steger’s admiration for Peary.

“To me, it was important just to do it the way (Peary) did it,” Steger said.

There were two major differences, he added.

“(Peary) was going into the total unknown,” Steger said. “I spent 2 days in Washington studying satellite photography of the North Pole area and learned more about the flow of the ice and the wind direction than Peary learned in 20 years. We knew what we were up against.”

Also, Steger’s party didn’t have to walk home.

“We were picked up (by airplane) at the pole,” he said.

Roald Amundson of Norway is credited with reaching the South Pole on foot in 1911. After Peary, Adm. Richard E. Byrd flew over both poles and did extensive exploring from his Little America base in Antarctica.

Steger plans to start his journey on the Atlantic side of Antarctica next Aug. 1 and reach a Soviet base on the Indian Ocean by March 1. He will have supplies dropped from airplanes along the route.

On such a trek, Steger said, the biggest challenge is boredom. “At home, day to day, our minds are filled with balancing checkbooks and dates and times. Your mind clears out after a week or two. Life is real simple.

“It’s a calculated risk. You put everything on the line. If I fail, I could lose my home, everything. That’s what makes it exciting.

“But I’m not one to take risks with my life or with other people’s money. I’m not depending on luck to get us across.”

The most foolish thing he has done recently was to blow off the end of his left thumb with a firecracker on the Fourth of July.

“We were celebrating our safe return from Greenland and my photographer gave me a firecracker,” Steger said. “I lit it, and it had a short fuse-- bam! “

Steger, who was three miles from the nearest road, picked up the end of his thumb from the ground and carried it into town by canoe, motorboat and car.

“They sewed it back on,” he said. “It’s going to bother me in Antarctica some, but I can put up with it.”

Times researcher Greg Rice contributed to this story.