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ANN BANCROFT: Well, the interesting thing is that there is $68 worth of dry cleaning. That's my trade during the winter, which is speaking to corporate groups and schools. So that's my-- those are my outfits for the winter time, the tools of the corporate trade, and then stuffed in there our snowshoes, and paddles, and the parkas, and sleds on top. So I mean, it-- I mean, this load really speaks to who I am and what I do.

SPEAKER: Ann Bancroft and I walked between the weed-covered horse corrals to sit beneath a venerable oak tree next to a barn. The old farm place shoulders up against the St. Croix River, south of Taylors Falls. Bancroft is completely renovating the house. When that's done, she'd like to get some horses on the farm again. Given that she spends much of her time writing a book about the South Pole trip, speaking to groups, and living the bucolic life, I asked Ann Bancroft if she can still call herself an explorer.

ANN BANCROFT: I would say immediately yes because I've viewed the exploring that I do on the ice as an internal exploration. The South Pole was already discovered.

SPEAKER: You were the first woman to get there, though.

ANN BANCROFT: I was the first woman to get to both poles. A woman had already gotten to the South Pole across the ice on a guided expedition. So through a mountain travel trip, she got a lot of help, but they got there. We were the first all women's group to get to the South Pole.

SPEAKER: And you're the first woman to get to both, as you said.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah, across the ice.

SPEAKER: Across the ice.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Being a person who has, I think in some ways, the rare public quality-- I mean, everybody can be a first at something in their life. That's clear. You can be the first person in your family to do a certain thing. Or you can be the first, in some ways, the first person to walk across a patch of isolated ground if you go out far enough into the wilderness. You can put your foot on something that probably no one else has before. But you're a first in the world record books. You're a first in history twice. Did you set out wanting to be a first at something?

ANN BANCROFT: From a very early age, I read about early explorers. I saw movies of early explorers and the Jack London stories kind of thing. And it just fed my imagination. And I wanted to be a Scott, or an Amundsen, or a Peary, or a Cook, or a Shackleton. I wanted to venture out and not so much explore a polar region or a northern region. Because I'm from Minnesota, I tended to look north for the adventure more.

SPEAKER: Than, for example, the Amazon.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah, but not for my country or any of that. But I wanted to put together a team. And I wanted to do something that no one else had ever done in the wilderness. And I wasn't quite sure if that was going to be dog sledding or kayaking or where it was going to be. But I certainly wanted to do that.

In putting together the Antarctic trip, it started to come back, and I started to remember concretely saying this as a kid. I really fantasized about these kinds of things. I feel like I am doing what I am meant to be doing. And I couldn't have said that after the North Pole trip. I didn't realize it until, oddly enough, Antarctica.

SPEAKER: I want to ask you about the process of creating the person who ended up being one of the people holding that AWE banner down there at the South Pole. Who are your parents? And how did your growing up, do you think, prepare you to be the first woman on both the North and the South Pole?

ANN BANCROFT: We grew up in Mendota Heights. And when I was very young, my father was an insurance agent. My mom was a homemaker. And when I finished the fourth grade, my parents decided to take a very big risk, and that was to pack us all up. At that time, there were four kids. We were-- I'm the second oldest, so we were all pretty young.

And we went off to Kenya, East Africa to live for two years. And they volunteered, pretty much did social work through the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. And that changed our lives dramatically.

SPEAKER: Did your family-- did you grow up climbing mountains, and hacking your way through forests, and doing the kinds of things that one might imagine?

ANN BANCROFT: Oddly enough, we didn't do a whole lot of family camping trips, which is probably why we all love the wilderness so much. They didn't haul us off together

SPEAKER: To a state park and the Coleman stove, right?

ANN BANCROFT: That's right. It was-- I mean, I did do, when I was young, some trips with my father. He introduced me to the boundary waters for the first time. But we lived in a rural setting, very much like this one, had lots of animals in and out, wild and domestic. And it was a marvelous place to start trying out skills and learning about how to sleep out first the summer and then the winter, and playing in the out-of-doors. So it's very natural to all my family members.

SPEAKER: And what do you view as your first expedition, if you will, your first exploration? When did you first become an explorer?

ANN BANCROFT: The first one that I really remember acutely was sleeping out in the orchard of our backyard with the family dog in the winter. And at that time, the sleeping bags were cotton. And so I had lots of sleeping bags and lots of blankets. And I tried building a pseudo snow shelter.

And I'm sure my father checked on me many, many times during the night, although he was a sport and didn't burst my bubble. But getting through the-- probably it was about 10 below or so. Who knows? And eating a can of frozen peaches in the morning for breakfast and--

SPEAKER: How old were you?

ANN BANCROFT: I was about 12.

SPEAKER: And was it fun?

ANN BANCROFT: It was pretty miserable. I had smoke in my eyes all night long from green sumac. And I was frozen most of the time. And then I started trying to convince friends. For some reason, it must have been at least somewhat fun because I went back and did it again.

And then I would get a friend to do it with me. And then they'd last a night. And that was the end of that friend, so I'd have to find another friend or cousin. So I went through a few people in my efforts to try and find companionship with this obsession of being an Inuit individual.

SPEAKER: On the South Pole trip, along with the heavy weather gear, the skis and provisions, Ann Bancroft carried a tape recorder to collect her impressions.

ANN BANCROFT: I am awestruck at times at what we're doing. I'm watching a childhood dream of mine unfold.

SPEAKER: Let's back up a little bit and talk about the expedition in chronological order, the two big ones, the first one being 1986, the expedition to the North Pole. How did you get roped into doing that in the first place? How did you end up on that trip?

ANN BANCROFT: Oh, boy, I was very, very lucky, I think. I was a teacher in South Minneapolis at an elementary school, Clara Barton open school, and thought I'd stay there for the next 20 years, loved the place. And I was also moonlighting at Midwest mountaineering to feed my other habit.

SPEAKER: That's a sort of outfitter equipment store.

ANN BANCROFT: An outdoor store, lots of gear, lots of folks that like to do what I like to do. And Will Steger would come in occasionally and barter with the store owner and try and trade slideshows of his adventures for equipment that he needed. And he walked through the door one night. And I knew exactly who he was. I had been following him, in fact.

SPEAKER: Who was he?

ANN BANCROFT: Well, he's a crazy outdoor adventurer. He lives up in Ely in a homestead, and at that time a very rustic homestead, no road. You had to paddle in or hike in. It turned out-- basically, to make a long story shorter-- that we had a friend in common. And I had climbed Mount McKinley or Denali in Alaska with this individual. And he had, years before, dogsledded with Will.

And once Will found out that we had some friends in common, he started chatting with them. I had no idea this was going on. He was deliberately looking for a woman to fill the eighth person on his eight-person team, that slot. And pretty soon I got a phone call when I was working one night. And he said, this is Will Steger. Would you like to come up for an interview for the North Pole expedition that I'm planning in 1986? Well, my knees went weak, and I said, you bet.

SPEAKER: Hollywood's calling.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah.

SPEAKER: I mean, in the realm of explorer, this is Hollywood, really, yeah.

- ANN BANCROFT: This is it. And I found myself packing a pack and hiking his mile trail into his homestead. And I spent three days with him. I think I had more questions for Will than he had for me. Very nervous about getting into the whole thing. I didn't want to be the weak link. I didn't want to hold this group back.

He sent me on my way and said, don't call me, I'll call you. And he called me. And I knew he was interviewing other women and other people, and so I just felt like I had struck gold.