The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Dan Buettner is best known as a writer and extreme adventurer who rode his bike around the world from east to west and from north to south through the Americas and Africa and Europe and Asia. He has crossed the roadless Sahara desert, numerous jungles, and active war zones. He has contracted dozens of diseases and hosted plenty of parasites. He has written three books, and has had his every move monitored by millions of schoolchildren. But Dan Buettner really got his start in croquet.

 

1944
Will Steger born and raised in Richfield, the second of eight children


1959
Steger, a freshman at Benilde, buys a motorboat and, with his brother, drives it down the Missippippi–and back


1963
Steger devises a kayak trek to the headwaters of the Yukon River. It involves a long portage—over the Rocky Mountains


1967
Steger graduates from St. Thomas with a degree in geology


1970

Mille Porsild agrees that the life of an explorer can seem awfully selfish. “You think about it all the time, leaving your loved ones behind,” she says. Most of Porsild’s immediate family is halfway around the world in her native Denmark. But some of them are right here: Her husband Paul Pregont and, arguably the most important part of the team, their thirty sled dogs. Like most modern explorers, Porsild and Pregont wrestle all the time with balancing a spiritual love of wide open (empty) spaces with a professional calling to educate and interact.

You’re the greatest living explorer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Peary, and Amelia Earhardt. Now you’re heading back to the Arctic.


I see dead deer everywhere, their yawning red abdomens, stiffening legs, their black eyes. It’s one of the hazards of driving around Ely on opening weekend. I went literally to the end of the road in northern Minnesota, to the homestead of Will Steger, and I found hundreds of men already there, in the woods, in blaze orange. With high-powered rifles.