HOUSE MEMORIAL 91

53rd legislature - STATE OF NEW MEXICO - second session, 2018

INTRODUCED BY

Jason C. Harper and Brian Egolf

A MEMORIAL

RECOGNIZING AND HONORING GERALD "JERRY" PITZL, PH.D., AS A MEMBER OF THE FIRST EXPEDITION TO INDISPUTABLY REACH THE NORTH POLE BY SURFACE TRAVEL; REQUESTING THAT THE GOVERNOR PROCLAIM APRIL 20, 2018 "GERALD 'JERRY' PITZL DAY" IN NEW MEXICO.

     WHEREAS, Guinness world records recognizes that the earliest indisputable attainment of the north pole by surface travel over the sea-ice took place when expedition leader Ralph Plaisted, an insurance salesman, accompanied by Walter Pederson, the trip mechanic, Gerald "Jerry" Pitzl, a high school geography teacher turned expedition navigator, and Jean Luc Bombardier, a Canadian and member of the Bombardier family, founders of Bombardier, incorporated, reached the pole after a forty-five-day trek on four sixteen-horsepower Bombardier-manufactured Ski-Doo snowmobiles; and

     WHEREAS, the expedition team members were not experienced explorers, but ordinary men who endured temperatures that dipped to minus sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit and rarely rose above minus forty, and who suffered through two forty-mile-per-hour wind storms that confined them to their tents for a week at a time; and

     WHEREAS, the team spent months preparing for the expedition, including sleeping on a frozen Minnesota lake and engineering ingenious clothing — an inner parka made of poplin with a wolverine fur hood layered underneath a duck canvas exterior parka, each dyed a different color so the men could identify each other in conditions of low visibility; and

     WHEREAS, more than fifty companies assisted the expedition, including the Minnesota-based Pillsbury flour mills company, which allowed the team to test dehydrated food that it was developing for the Apollo space program; and

     WHEREAS, the first attempt departed on March 18, 1967 from Ellesmere island, Canada, six hundred miles from the north pole; and

     WHEREAS, none of the men had set foot on Arctic ice, and, after a month of travel, the team was trapped for a week by a storm and forced to abandon the attempt several hundred miles short of the pole, but which resulted in a Columbia broadcasting system, incorporated, television documentary entitled "To the Top of the World", by Charles Kuralt, who had accompanied the expedition; and

     WHEREAS, on March 7, 1968, the team departed again, this time from Ward Hunt island, Canada, a four-hundred-twelve-mile traverse to the north pole; and

     WHEREAS, the team faced numerous obstacles, including only five hours of daylight each day; polar bears; desolate moonscapes of ice boulders; pack ice whose constant motion created steep pressure ridges and stretches of open water known as leads; and eerie sounds from the ice, including ghoulish groans as ice floes shifted, followed by artillery-like reports as the ice sheets collided and cracked, threatening to open yawning fissures beneath their feet at any moment; and

     WHEREAS, the team was forced to zigzag through a patchwork of pressure ridges, constantly at risk of breaking through the frozen mantle to perish in the glacial sea beneath; and

     WHEREAS, the expedition reached its final camp on the evening of April 18, 1968; and

     WHEREAS, Gerald Pitzl, as the expedition navigator, made hourly sextant sightings to confirm their location, and on the morning of April 20, 1968, the expedition traveled the final four miles to the pole and signaled a United States air force C-130 weather reconnaissance aircraft; and

     WHEREAS, the C-130 flew overhead confirming that the team was located exactly at the north pole, and the pilot radioed the team: "This is Lark 47 on approach to the North Pole. I see them dead ahead. Four, three, two, one, North Pole. Dead on. Every direction from where you fellows are is south."; and

     WHEREAS, a March 17, 2016 New York Times Magazine article entitled "An Insurance Salesman and a Doctor Walk Into a Bar, and End Up at the North Pole" renewed interest in the expedition, and Sony pictures entertainment has reportedly purchased the rights to make the story into a feature-length film; and

     WHEREAS, Gerald Pitzl is now the only living member of the expedition and is a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico; and

     WHEREAS, Gerald Pitzl served as a professor of geography at Macalester college in St. Paul, Minnesota, for thirty years, then moved to New Mexico where he worked for the public education department for nine years and the higher education department for three years and is now retired; and

     WHEREAS, Gerald Pitzl wrote in his diary, "We strive for an elusive and imaginary point ... it has nothing to do with the Arctic and the wilds of the north. It's the drive to capture something that defies capture.";

     NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO that Gerald "Jerry" Pitzl, Ph.D., be recognized and honored for his significant achievement in reaching the north pole in 1968, and that the governor be requested to proclaim April 20, 2018 "Gerald 'Jerry' Pitzl Day" in New Mexico; and

     BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that copies of this memorial be transmitted to the governor and to Gerald "Jerry" Pitzl, Ph.D.

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