- The Big Idea, as it became known, was born in a pub called the Pickwick overlooking Lake Superior in Duluth in 1966. Ralph Plaisted, a barrel-chested 39-year-old insurance salesman, was having a beer with an acquaintance, a local doctor named Art Aufderheide. They were discussing plans for a seal-hunting trip by dog sled in the far north of Canada.
Tall and husky, with a walruslike mustache, Plaisted suggested they should go on snowmobiles, which were then a newfangled winter recreational vehicle; he was convinced that the machines, branded Ski-Doos, would transform life for the Inuit in the region. Aufderheide didn’t care for snowmobiles. He thought the noisy machines would intrude on the solemn silence of the Arctic.
‘‘If you get hungry, you can’t eat a snowmobile,’’ Aufderheide said — the totemic last resort of Arctic lore. But Plaisted insisted on the virtues of these ‘‘iron dogs.’’
‘‘If snowmobiles are so good,’’ Aufderheide countered, ‘‘why couldn’t you do something really spectacular with one — like drive it to the North Pole?’’
Plaisted didn’t speak. He’d grown up reading about polar adventures in the pages of National Geographic magazine. Now, apparently in the throes of a midlife crisis, he sat looking at his beer and imagined himself in The Minneapolis Star Tribune. The year before, he drove his snowmobile 250 miles along the highway from his cabin in Ely to his home in White Bear Lake, a deed he accomplished in minus-30-degree temperatures. How much harder could it be in the high Arctic?
‘‘To hell with seal hunting,’’ Plaisted said. ‘‘Let’s go to the North Pole!’’