The Race of Will Steger's Life

"The most beautiful thing in the world ever would be to transport myself 150 years back so that I could walk through the virgin forest of Minnesota,” Will Steger says. “Or explore the west with Lewis and Clark. That would be heaven.”

There are few better ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than to enter Will Steger’s world. Steger, the Minnesota-based polar explorer who is now 80 years old, looks as fit and wiry as he was 20 years ago when I first met him. Today he’s in good spirits at the tail end of the Thanksgiving holiday, relaxed and removed from his peopled life in St. Paul, where he lives in a moored houseboat on the Mississippi River.

We’re enjoying a lunch of garbanzo bean soup and sourdough bread in his cabin perched on a cliff overlooking Picketts Lake, almost a stone’s throw from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness northwest of Ely. Outside, there’s enough snow on the ground that it feels like winter. Steger bought his first 28 acres of land here when he was 19 years old. Over the decades he expanded that acreage to 230.
“Ely is the only place in the Lower 48 I could have lived,” says Steger, who grew up in Richfield with his parents and nine siblings. “I always wanted to live in the wilderness, have a small cabin, and be self-sufficient.”

Sixty years after he built it, Steger’s cabin still has no running water. To do the dishes, he scoops snow or water cached in a rain barrel outside, then heats it in a kettle on his woodstove. Most of his energy is solar. The closest power line is five miles away.

The cabin is an oasis of simple elegance. The door opening into his bedroom is inlaid with a stained-glass window he designed and soldered. He also built the slatted-wood chairs we’re sitting on. Above us is a loft with skylights for optimal night sky viewing. On his bookshelves are titles ranging from the The Iliad to Bob Dylan Lyrics.

Hanging over the wood-burning stove is an architectural sketch of a five-story building with a stone foundation, round turrets, and a soaring atrium. Steger drew it back in 1988 while holed up in a tent crossing Antarctica, waiting for howling storms to pass. Reminiscent of a castle built to withstand an Arctic winter, the building looks otherworldly. It would be hard to fathom a realized version had I not passed it on my walk in. The Steger Center is the most ambitious project of the explorer’s life, and he is racing against the clock to finish it.

Educator and Explorer. The world knows Will Steger as the greatest living polar explorer. In 1986 he led the first confirmed dogsled expedition to the North Pole without resupply. In 1988 he completed a 1,600-mile south-north traverse of Greenland, the longest unsupported dogsled expedition in history. In 1989 to 1990 he co-led the first dogsled traverse of Antarctica, the 3,471-mile International Trans-Antarctica Expedition. And in 1995 he made the first dogsled traverse of the Arctic Ocean in one season from Russia to Canada’s Ellesmere Island.

To put his explorations in context, the National Geographic Society in 1995 awarded Steger the John Oliver La Gorce Medal for “accomplishments in geographic exploration, in the sciences, and for public service to advance international understanding.” He shares the honor with Amelia Earhart, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau. In 2007, the prestigious New York City–based Explorers Club, founded in 1904, bestowed on Steger the Lowell Thomas award, an honor he shares with Sir Edmund Hillary, Sylvia Earle, and Yvon Chouinard.

Before Steger was an explorer, he was an educator, and the two callings have been inextricably intertwined ever since. After graduating from the University of St. Thomas with a bachelor’s degree in geology and a master’s degree in education, he taught high school science for three years. In 1970 he moved to Ely to open a winter survival school, teaching students to travel across the wilderness using dog teams and skis.

“I had a vocation to be a teacher,” Steger says, “but I felt I wasn’t reaching enough people, so I started doing these major expeditions.”

On his expeditions, Steger used his platform to educate followers about climate change that he was witnessing in real time, pioneering the use of cutting-edge technology to reach millions of people around the world while exploring the most hostile conditions on the planet. His International Trans-Antarctica Expedition had more than 16 million global followers via satellite updates long before the internet became a common tool for broadcasting such adventures. Steger leveraged that massive audience to convince international leaders to preserve Antarctica from mineral exploration.

In 2006 he was invited to testify before the Minnesota Legislature. His eyewitness accounts of climate change in the polar regions eventually led to the passing of bipartisan policies in Minnesota, including a renewable electricity standard and an economy-wide greenhouse-gas-reduction law. The same year, Steger started Climate Generation, a nonprofit that empowers youth across the state to act on climate justice.

“Will had the credibility to reach people who might not otherwise show up for a talk by scientists,” says Nicole Rom, Climate Generation’s former executive director. “Part of his legacy is the number of people who have been inspired by him. There are always people who come up to him and say, ‘You changed my life.’”

Patti Steger is among those whose life was changed. “Will knows more about the environment than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s brilliant,” says Will’s former wife and the founder of Steger Mukluks.

In the early 1980s she traveled with Will on a 1,000-mile portion of a 6,000-mile dogsled expedition through the Canadian Arctic and Alaska. Will safely navigated through whiteout conditions during a blizzard for 25 miles to a tiny island using only a compass and his sense of where the wind was hitting his hood to determine the correct declination—the angle of difference between true north and magnetic north that can lose polar explorers forever if incorrectly calculated.

“Will is the toughest man I’ve ever met, both physically and mentally,” says Patti. “It’s unbelievable.”

Staying Put, Staying Focused. Steger has tried to retire from expeditions. But it hasn’t stuck. In 2008, when he was 64, he kite-skied across Greenland to document glacial ice thaw due to climate change. Until 2023 Steger set out every spring on solo expeditions by ski and canoe, timing his trips to navigate ice breaking up on lakes and rivers in the Boundary Waters, the Quetico, and farther north. These risky undertakings forced him “to be in the moment all the time,” he once told me. “That’s the only way to survive.”

This summer, however, Steger is staying put at his cabin to finally complete the five-story building he broke ground on in 1988. This “Camp David of the Wilderness,” as he calls it, is a place where he envisions leaders from around the globe gathering to solve seemingly insolvable problems.  

Steger is so committed to the project that three years ago he donated all but 10 of his 230 acres to the nonprofit retreat.
“All my expeditions, all the education, all the nonprofits that I’ve formed—all of those were a means to an end to create the center,” Steger tells me as we head out the door and up a set of stone steps sculpted into the hillside to check out his progress since the last time I toured it in 2018.

“I have two big challenges,” he says. “How will the center make money? And who will come?”

He estimates it will cost $2 million to complete the structure and execute the programming—funds he hopes to raise through grants and individual donors. Steger is still formalizing the curriculum.

He is clear, however, that he will invite no more than 12 people to the center at a time—top-level leaders who are committed to solving the issues of climate change. Steger has a dream list of candidates, heads of state, and other high-level policymakers, like the dignitaries he worked with to ratify the Antarctic Treaty in 1991, but he prefers not to divulge names until the kinks of the center are worked out, which he estimates will take four years.  

One piece of the puzzle Steger has already solved: The center will not be open to the public for practical reasons. It’s off the grid near a wilderness and does not have the capacity for crowds. He has already created a covenant that sets a limit of 10,000 total annual visitors, which will include staff, volunteers, board members, guests, relatives, and personal friends.

“This place is not for gawking. I want to work on some of these almost insolvable problems that we’re facing,” says Steger. “We’re in a crisis right now, and crisis number one is that we’re all giving up. We need to change that trajectory.”

I ponder this as I gape at the massive structure that feels even taller than its five stories because it’s built on a rise. As I follow Steger inside and up the winding staircase, I struggle to keep up with his pace. Like his cabin, the Steger Center has meticulously designed elements, like a soaring glass atrium that aligns with certain constellations. When the plumbing for the atrium’s reflecting pools and gardens is finished, Steger will plant Lebanon cedars, a tree symbolizing strength and resilience, in the space.

As we climb even higher, past what will be two guest bedrooms, a library, and a third-floor kitchen, Steger mutters to himself about projects that need to be completed, like connecting exposed orange electrical wires and finishing rooms where bare studs are still exposed.

“It’s getting better,” Steger says, almost as if to reassure himself. “By the end of the summer, we’ll have plumbing.”

‘I’ve Got to Finish This.’ It’s an overwhelming project. To speed up the progress and stay aligned with his core value of education, every summer for a decade Steger has hired students from Summit Academy, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit school that teaches work skills like carpentry. Alongside local carpenters, craftsmen, and Steger himself, the Summit Academy students have roofed buildings, built bunkhouses, and assisted master craftsmen in building stone walls. Steger also works with stone-masonry students through the Ely Folk School, founded by his old North Pole expedition mate Paul Schurke.

This summer’s project, a slight detour, is to build the Shackleton Hut, a replica of the shelter that polar explorer Ernest Shackleton built to house his party on South Georgia Island to overwinter in 1908. This outbuilding will join many others scattered across the Steger compound that also include a kitchen, a sawmill, multiple bunkhouses, a sauna, and a few private quarters for long-term staffers.

“It’s symbiotic in that both the students and the Steger Center benefit,” Beth Halverson, a carpentry instructor from Summit Academy, says. But even with their help, it’s evident Steger still has a way to go before he can extend invitations to world leaders.

As I take in the progress it seems almost like blasphemy to question Steger, a man who has summitted mountains in Antarctica by dogsled to accomplish what were considered impossible goals.

But one must ask: Does he have enough time to complete this massive final act?

“I’m 80 years old,” Steger tells me when I broach the topic. “I’m not living in a cloud that I’m going to be around forever. But I’m realistic in that I’ve got to finish this. I’m hoping I can get six more years with a good mind.”

Friends and colleagues vary in their own responses to the same question.

“It’s been the longest-haul project I’ve ever seen,” says Patti Steger, who explains that Will struggles to balance lofty long-term goals with his day-to-day roles, including ongoing involvement with the students from Summit Academy, some of whom have never experienced such a remote wilderness setting. In addition to teaching them carpentry skills, Patti says, “teaching people how to relate to the earth is very important to Will.” All of this takes time.

Nicole Rom, who consulted with Steger on organizational strategy and development for the center, has this perspective: “Will has accomplished incredible things, it’s hard to doubt him, and he’s always had bold and audacious goals,” she says. “But some days I wonder: Does he really want to finish it? He feels pressure, but at his core he’s a lifelong learner, and he’s always tinkering with stained glass and wood design. It’s hard for him to step away from it.”  

Fellow Minnesota native and explorer Dan Buettner is positive that Steger will finish the job. Buettner met Steger on a fluke at the San Diego Zoo as he was cycling more than 15,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina in 1987 and has been close friends with him ever since.

“Will has more proven resolve than anyone in living history,” Buettner tells me. “He’s a man of gentle pressure, relentlessly applied. That is the kind of power that wears down mountain ranges and makes them into prairies. That’s the same force Will is harnessing now. He will not stop.”

Back at the center, Steger and I finally reach his favorite spot—a small deck off the fifth floor with a forever view into the dense forest canopy of the Boundary Waters. The temperature is in the low teens and the wind is blowing, but Steger is bareheaded and his decades-old red North Face parka, the one he wore to cross Greenland, is unzipped. Steger is smiling contentedly, reveling in this view despite the stress it has cost him to build a five-story building to reach it.

“I have the utmost confidence in two things,” he says with characteristic soft-spoken humility. “One is the human spirit. The other is the beauty, awe, wonder, and depth of nature. If you combine those two things together in a space like the Steger Center,” he continues, “a committed group of leaders can have life-changing insights that can break all barriers. That’s where the 
answers are.”