The Man Who Walked the Earth

Thirty years ago, Erling Kagge became the first person to reach the so-called “three poles” — the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest — on foot. He now admits that he was partly motivated by “unsympathetic reasons” like competitiveness and thirst for recognition. That said, he got to know the ends of the earth — and extremes of human experience — in a way that few of us ever do. 

In 1990, with fellow Norwegian explorer Børge Ousland, Kagge completed the world’s first unsupported journey — no resupplies, hauling everything they used on sleds — to the North Pole. During a moment of shattering hunger and exhaustion, a raisin fell to the ground from Kagge’s mitten. He dropped to his knees, retrieved the raisin with his tongue, and proceeded to savor every molecule of it. He considers it the most joyful meal of his life.

The raisin incident — which Kagge recounts in his new book, After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice, out in the U.S. and U.K. this month — isn’t just a vivid memory; it’s a parable about pushing yourself to create space for greater pleasure. The hardest part of his polar journeying was abandoning the warmth of the sleeping bag each morning. For that reason, he writes, he tries to tackle the most disagreeable tasks of the workday first.

When he walked to the South Pole in 1993, becoming the first person to do so unaccompanied and unsupported, Kagge carried a radio at the insistence of his sponsors. What they didn’t know was that he’d discarded the batteries before embarking. “Antarctica is the quietest place I’ve ever been,” he later wrote, and his solitude ended up being as pure as that silence. 

Less pristine was the pair of woolen underwear that he wore for 63 straight days. Naturally, I have to ask him about this when we log on for our interview. Kagge flashes a toothy smile. “I think it’s exaggerated, all this washing. I shower every day in Oslo, because I go into the office and I wash myself to be kind [to others]. But when I’m by myself, I hardly wash at all. Out on the ice, it’s so cold that it hardly smells anyway.” The man is nothing if not practical.

Kagge gave up expeditioning after his ascent of Everest, in 1994, secured him his record-setting third “pole.” He continued to hike and ski and sail, as Norwegians do, and wandered around a bit professionally, leaving a fledgling career in corporate law to study philosophy at Cambridge, then abandoning the prospect of an academic career to launch a publishing house. He became a father; the youngest of his three daughters is still in college and lives with him in his lovingly renovated Modernist landmark house in Oslo.

Middle age can be hard on explorers, but few of them reinvent themselves as effectively as Kagge has. His book business thrived. (He was the original publisher of Lars Mytting’s Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, which has been translated into 22 languages and sold 700,000 copies worldwide. Kagge sold 70 percent of the company to a Danish publishing house in 2021, for a reported $20 million.) In an apparently one-of-a-kind transition, one of Scandinavia’s best-known explorers morphed into one of its most successful publishers and collectors of contemporary art. Kagge has become an internationally recognized author too, urging readers in books like Walking (2020) and Silence (2017) to unplug from their phones and lead fuller lives. 

In the crowded field of pop philosophy, Kagge’s most-interesting-man-in-the-world credentials set him apart. How many other self-help authors have both flipped a Richard Prince artwork for $5 million and devised a secret method — which can’t be shared in mixed company, by the way — for conserving toilet paper in subzero temperatures?

Asked to explain his multifaceted success, Kagge points to his childhood dyslexia. “If you can’t read or talk properly, can’t write, and the teacher is trying to help you, but still it doesn’t work, then you learn the hard way that you can’t trust authority — the teacher or anyone else — because what they’re telling you doesn’t work for you. You need to find your own path,” he says. Being a victim of childhood bullying exposed him to the “brutality of the world,” he adds, for which he’s glad. “As my friend the philosopher Arne Naess said, ‘The earlier you [endure hardship], the better.’ Because if you do it early, it can shape your life. Thirty or 40 years later, most likely it doesn’t — it’s just negative.”

Kagge insists that he’s not that special; it’s simply that the rest of us hold ourselves back. “Most people underestimate their own possibilities, and we also have this tendency to try to make our life easier,” he says. He has done the opposite at nearly every juncture, including with After the North Pole, which took him six years to write and is his most heavily researched work to date. 

The book narrates the centuries-old history of that elusive place, a story that begins with the North Star used by ancient navigators and the imagined far-off land of Hyperborea, “where people were happy and lived for a thousand years, where there was only sunrise and sunset each year.” Although the North Pole has interested scholars from Ptolemy to Isaac Newton, it wasn’t until the 17th century that explorers started trying to go there — with often disastrous results. The Arctic has claimed far more lives than the Antarctic, and materially, at least, its frozen seas have provided far less in return for all that suffering. 

For Kagge and others, of course, that only makes it shine all the brighter. His assessment of previous expeditions teems with Nordic practicality and occasionally winking understatement. “I would certainly eat a friend who was already dead if the alternative was to starve to death,” he deadpans. He celebrates the mental fortitude of explorers’ wives and argues that it often takes more courage to turn back — and face the ignominy of failure — than to push on at risk of dying nobly. Unlike his chest-thumping predecessors, he is almost apologetic about the time he and Ousland had to shoot a charging polar bear. “I am not keen on killing animals, and we were in her territory, but we both knew it was a question of who was going to eat who for dinner, so we had little choice,” he writes. The bear dropped dead less than 30 feet away.

“I would certainly eat a friend who was already dead if the alternative was to starve to death.”

Kagge’s passing descriptions of travel in the Far North enliven the story and establish a dialogue of sorts across the eras. He points out that unlike the silent Antarctic, the Arctic is alive with the groans and rumbles of shifting ice, and finds it curious that few explorers dwell on this. He recalls how on dark mornings he was forced to taste the ice to determine how newly frozen it was, and adopted a special breathing technique to unstick his tongue from it.

After the North Pole ends in the present, with the Arctic considerably demystified and its melting ice a grim reminder of man-made climate change. “The more I see, read, and learn about this place, the clearer it seems that the history of the North Pole is the story of our ongoing relationship with nature — our changing feelings and respect for an environment that has not been created by or for people,” he writes. 

As he has argued before, one of the easiest ways to restore that relationship is by walking. Do it for long enough at a time — without your phone in your hand, at least — and the colors and aromas of your surroundings seem to multiply. Body, mind, and physical surroundings start to merge. Food and wine taste better afterward. Walking is a “miracle,” Kagge says, and “the only sure medicine in the world.” While thinkers from Socrates to Steve Jobs have understood that walking coaxes out new ideas, he prefers to emphasize how it can empty the mind, enabling us to connect with both our physical surroundings and the moment.

Kagge will have more time than usual for long walks in 2025. He recently sold the remaining 30 percent of his publishing company and has been finding himself drawn to pilgrimages; he’s contemplating visits to the Camino de Santiago and holy sites in India. For now, though, he’s simply enjoying the luxury of contemplating the next big journey.

He’ll take shorter walks in the meantime, and urges others to do the same — stop overthinking the fancy hiking gear and get on with it, he says. “A great expedition is about putting one leg in front of the other.”

The cliché that often attaches itself to such seize-the-moment sentiments is that life is short. Kagge, who has made so much of his 62 years on earth, is proof of the contrary. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca observed: “Life is long if you know how to use it.”

Darrell Hartman is Further’s Special Correspondent, and the author of Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of News Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media. He lives in New York City and Livingston Manor, N.Y.