It began, as many great adventures do, with a small clue left without an explanation. In the summer of 2015, a couple stepped quietly through the door of my Exploration Museum in Húsavík. They paid for two tickets, wandered the exhibits, and without a word, left a red folder on the counter on their way out.
Inside were photographs, expedition notes, and correspondence with Neil Armstrong and Sir Edmund Hillary about an expedition to the North Pole in 1985. At the center of it all was Mike Dunn, the man who I later found had left this gift to my museum. Mike was a professional expedition leader during the 1980s who had taken Armstrong and Hillary to the North Pole on a journey kept deliberately out of the public eye at Armstrong’s request.
I didn’t know it then, but that folder would become the beginning of one of the greatest adventures of my life, and a ten year quest to piece together this untold chapter of exploration history.
On a mild arctic morning this July, I stood on the quay in Longyearbyen with Mike Dunn, joined by Neil’s son Mark Armstrong, Ed’s son Peter Hillary and Peter’s son Alexander. With us were Dr. Ann Hartry, fellow Explorers Club members David Concannon, Alex Waibel, and Alfred Hagen. Most importantly, I was joined by my friends, my Icelandic film team, Rafnar Orri and Elvar Örn.
We were there to document a return to the Pole with the families of the legends who had gone there privately 40 years earlier, and to tell this incredible story for the first time in a documentary film.
Our vessel was Le Commandant Charcot, Ponant’s hybrid-electric polar icebreaker, powered by liquefied natural gas and designed as a floating scientific station and hotel. She bears the name of Jean-Baptiste Charcot, the French Arctic explorer who forged deep ties with my home country of Iceland and perished off its western coast in 1936. Charcot’s father had often asked him why he wanted to sail the seas, to which he always replied “pourquoi pas?”, french for “why not?” I could feel this question at the heart of why we were there that day, waiting to start our own journey to the North Pole.
Captain Étienne Garcia, the french pioneering polar captain, commanded the Charcot with precision. Garcia’s English was thick with french accent, and his voice unforgettable, warm and full of excitement, especially when it came over the PA in the still hours, with the two most memorable words of our journey: “Night bear!”
Though the Arctic summer sun never set, Garcia’s summons mostly happened at night. It seemed that was the time the polar bears were the most active.
Out on the shifting ice floes, a pale figure moved with silent authority. Sometimes a lone wanderer, other times a mother with her cub. The Charcot slowed, her engines dropping to a murmur so that we could hear the faint splash of paws on slush and the crack of ice under weight.
As we reached further into the pack ice, navigation grew more complex. The Charcot, with her reinforced hull, wove between open leads and broken floes. In 1985, Armstrong and Hillary, along with mountaineer Pat Morrow, balloonist Steve Fossett and Ed’ son, polar explorer and mountaineer Peter Hillary, had reached the North Pole by Twin Otter ski-planes. Today, landing a plane on the ice is nearly impossible. Forty years of change lay in plain sight.
We arrived at the North Pole in the late afternoon of July 26. Feelings had grown stronger as we got closer to the Pole, and it was a joyous moment to watch Captain Garcia navigate Charcot to exactly 90 degrees.
There, using Starlink, I called my 98-year-old grandmother in Iceland. She had grown up in a house without electricity or running water, but with fascination for stories of explorers. Speaking to her from the top of the world was a moment I will never forget.
The next day, the ice itself became our terrain. As a film crew, we were allowed to venture farther from the ship than most, under the guidance of expedition leader Ryo Ijichi. I watched Peter Hillary walk far out on the ice with Alexander for a private moment between father and son, just as he had shared with his own father, Edmund Hillary, forty years earlier.
On the original expedition, Armstrong and Hillary had faced a harsh storm on their way back and the team was stuck in a hut at Lake Hazen for three days. During that time, these pioneers of exploration had the chance to share stories of their own adventures, and of those who had inspired them. What I would have give to be a fly on the wall of that cabin. Leading up to the expedition, Neil had spent many nights in front of his 1980s Macintosh computer, writing notes on expedition of the past that he shared with his friends in that cabin, and with the help of Neil’s sons Rick and Mark, we were able to locate Neil’s notes and bring them back to the pole.
On day 2 on the Ice, we gathered again to hear Mark read from nine pages of notes his father had prepared about S.A. Andrée’s doomed balloon attempt of 1897. This time it was Mark telling the story to Peter and Alexander as the wind whispered over the floes. It was a moment of continuity. three generations tied together by latitude, history, and ice.
“It is not a little strange to be floating here above the Polar Sea. To be the first that have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors?” Andrée wrote in his diary, and in the notes Neil Armstrong added “I think he was a worthy forbearer to our humble expedition”
The North Pole and the stories it taught me will always have a special place in my heart.
On July 29 we turned the bow south. The next morning, Peter Hillary stood before the ship’s guests to tell the story of his father, conquering mountains and building schools and hospitals in Nepal. And on July 31, Mark Armstrong screened the documentary film Armstrong about his father, taking questions from the audience afterward in an emotional and personal session. I felt proud that our presence had brought something special to the other guests, or new friends onboard Charcot.
Just before midnight that night, the Charcot reached the edge of the ice. Captain Garcia stopped her engines. Under the soft midnight sun, the helideck became a stage for a dance, filmed against a blue and white horizon, another unexpected contrast in our journey. When telling stories in film, me and my fellow filmmaker Rafnar always like to include one sequence mid way through the film that allows our audience to breathe, to think and to digest what they have learned.
On August 2, we reached the northern tip of Svalbard, the cliffs of Alkefjellet alive with seabirds. Over the next three days, we paid tribute to Roald Amundsen in Ny-Ålesund from where he started his Norge Airship Expedition, explored the glaciers of Alkhornet, and visited the area of Spitsbergen where Andrée began his fatal flight. There we were joined by Ida Olsson from Gränna, Andrée’s birthplace in Sweden, who told us his story with great passion.
Throughout the voyage, scientists from CNRS measured seawater salinity, temperature, and the presence of nanoplastics. Mark Armstrong and Dr. Ann Hartry interviewed them in their lab, learning how each vial of water was a data point in a changing Arctic.
This trip, even aboard a ship of comfort and technology, was an exploration of the human spirit: a journey of contrasts, of continuity, of change.
As we sailed south, I thought of the red folder left on my desk a decade earlier. It had been more than a clue, it had been a map. A map to a story that began in silence, unfolded in two eras of polar travel, and came to rest here, passed from one generation to the next. I can’t wait to show you our film.
An International Member of The Explorers Club, documentary filmmaker, and founder of The Exploration Museum in Húsavík, Iceland, Örlygur Örlygsson has led expeditions into Iceland’s new lava fields, and documented the history of exploration from the Vikings, on to the Apollo astronauts training in Iceland, and to the North Pole, retracing an extraordinary but little-known chapter in the lives of two of the greatest explorers of the 20th century. This article first appeared in the Explorers Journal, (Vol. 103 No. 2 2025).
