DULUTH, Minn.-
Minnesotans Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen achieved their goal of becoming the first men to trek to the North Pole during the summer, but fast-melting ice and a back injury forced them to cut short their return trip.
The two men asked to be evacuated by helicopter to a Russian icebreaker after they determined they would not be able to hike and paddle to northern Greenland as originally planned.
John Huston, the Minnesota-based manager of the expedition, told The Associated Press that Dupre and Larsen reached the ship on July 7, but he had few other details of how their evacuation went.
The explorers intended to hitch a ride on the icebreaker to Siberia then fly to Helsinki, Finland. From there, they would fly home to Minnesota.
"Making the first summer expedition to the North Pole was enough for us," Dupre told the Duluth News-Tribune via a satellite phone from the North Pole.
Larsen said, "to continue would, I think, be too dangerous."
The pair's trek, called the One World Expedition, was sponsored by the environmental group Greenpeace, and was to highlight the effects of global warming on the Arctic ice cap and the threats facing polar bears due to the changing environment.
Dupre, 45, and Larsen, 35, paddled and pulled modified canoes. However, Dupre said the stretches of open water they faced on the way back were too big for the canoes to safely cross.
The men said they expected the first 300 miles out from Ward Hunt Island, Canada, to be the most difficult, with the final 180 miles considerably easier. They were wrong.
"It was an emotional roller coaster because we ran into conditions far more severe than we could have imagined," Larsen said. In the whiteout storms, they could not tell the ice from the sky.
To top it off, he hurt his back on the tenth day of the trip. His left leg has been "a little numb" and he's been taking medications to keep down the swelling.
For details about the trip, visit .
