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SPEAKER: So you became the only woman on Will Steger's expedition to the North Pole. You became the first woman to reach the North Pole across the ice.

ANN BANCROFT: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER: What is it you like to say about that? You've said a lot about that trip, and you've been interviewed many times about it. What do you say to yourself about It What are your-- what did you come away with from that expedition that, when you're thinking to yourself and you're not being interviewed, what runs through your mind?

ANN BANCROFT: Really hard question. I mostly dwell on thoughts about my performance at that age.

SPEAKER: You were--

ANN BANCROFT: I was 30 when I did that, so it's 10 years ago. I look at it now in retrospect from a standpoint of having put together my own large expedition and now have been the leader of such an expedition. I'm much more sympathetic to the leaders, to the problems and dilemmas that they faced. I was probably a big thorn in their side.

SPEAKER: Well, you don't seem like a particularly thorny person.

ANN BANCROFT: Well, I have a-- I'm very stubborn, and I have a temper. There was a lot of pressure on that trip for all of us to make it or for somebody to make it because we were a public expedition. So they were facing a lot of that. I was not very sympathetic to the public image. I was sort of, forget that. We're out here to do this. And whatever the public thinks, it's tough.

SPEAKER: You're being the rugged individualist.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah, I was the purist. There was also pressure for being the woman. There was pressure on the leaders, and there was pressure on me. And that was difficult.

SPEAKER: I mean, give me an example. What do you mean?

ANN BANCROFT: Well, there was lots of questions beforehand just when we were jumping off, What do you think of feminism? questions like that. And I was-- I was so naive. [CHUCKLES] I had never been interviewed before. And I hadn't thought a lot about some of these questions. And I just wanted to go away and do this trip. I mean, that was my take on it all and get away from all of that.

SPEAKER: And you weren't prepared to be what you ended up being, which is a role model or a public figure.

ANN BANCROFT: Oh, yeah, and they're like, what do you think about being a role model? And I'm like, I'm not a role model. I just wanted to run away from all of that. I was very uncomfortable with-- I was very, very shy, very naive. And the whole thing was pretty frightening. And then there were comments of, you really got to make this for women.

When I came home, I was singled out, having made it. And when there was success to this group, I suddenly had almost equal status to the leaders in media attention. And that was a perfect time for this group to get angry and for this group to break apart. And these guys were great, that the rest of the team-- and I'm talking about the team members here, not the two leaders. They could have been resentful, jealous. They just rode this wave and didn't take it personally.

SPEAKER: Let's talk just for a second about the difference between these two expeditions. The 1986 North Pole trip, you were a team member, as you say, a grunt. That was with dogsleds and one woman and seven guys in 1993. And you were-- your aim was to cross Antarctica without the aid of anything but yourselves and some equipment. But no animals, no mechanized devices.

So you pulled-- you skied, and you pulled sleds behind you with your provisions. You were your own dogs in this experience. And it was an all-women team. So there were a bunch of different firsts that were underway on this second expedition. And you were the leader at that time.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah. And geographically, I mean, you're not only poles apart. But it's very, very different. The ice is nothing alike. The North Pole sits out on an Arctic Ocean, and so we travel during a very different season. We travel at the very beginnings of spring, so early March. And we go like crazy to get there by early May before that ice starts to break up and melt and the ocean becomes ocean as we know it.

So in order to dog sled, you've got a very tight window of opportunity in which to get there. If you go before March, it's totally dark. Temperatures are terribly unreasonable. And expeditions that have tried in the past have failed because of this darkness and the incredible cold temperatures.

The Antarctic is a continent. It's an enormous continent. In fact, it's the size of the United States and Mexico combined. So the ice is on top of land. So it's a very different kind of ice. And we travel in the Antarctic summer, which is November through February. So you're getting very different temperatures. You're getting very different ice conditions.

SPEAKER: What are the temperatures?

ANN BANCROFT: The temperatures for us were extremely mild. In fact, I felt like Antarctica gave us a very nice season. The coldest was 40 below 0 standing air temperature with a 70 below wind chill at times.

SPEAKER: Seems completely reasonable.

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah, northern Minnesota.

SPEAKER: Right, and the warm? What was that?

ANN BANCROFT: The warm, it would-- oh, it even got up to 0 at one point--

SPEAKER: Ah, toasty.

ANN BANCROFT: --so balmy, in fact, very uncomfortable if you're pulling a 200-pounds sled.

SPEAKER: Sure, because you're sweating like a fiend and--

ANN BANCROFT: Yeah, you're just too warm.

SPEAKER: And you're wearing a lot of heavy clothing. Now, is the ice a different color? Is it a different texture?

ANN BANCROFT: It's a very different texture. It's--

SPEAKER: The North Pole is like what?

ANN BANCROFT: The North Pole would be-- at times, it would lurch up. It would move sometimes as we were on it. It was very exciting to travel on. And when it would-- when you were going through churned-up ice, you would see shades of blues and bluey greys.

You were actually seeing color in the ice, striations. And then there's a snow surface on top, usually. The Antarctic ice was churned up by the wind. It wasn't lurched up by the currents of the ocean, so you weren't seeing that kind of color oftentimes.

SPEAKER: What kind of color was it?

ANN BANCROFT: Oh, it was different kinds of whites and grays. And you would run into snowdrifts, huge snowdrifts, sometimes 30 feet tall on occasion. And they're called sastrugi. And they're actually carved from that ever-present wind that is out there.

SPEAKER: The way water carves a rock.

ANN BANCROFT: In fact, you look out, and you see hundreds of miles of these sastrugi waves, as we would call them. And you felt like you were on a frozen ocean. I mean, you would get a sensation occasionally. Or other times, you'd see these huge snowdrifts. And you could use your imagination, and you'd see a breaching whales or porpoises. So figurines were out there on the ice. It was dramatic.

SPEAKER: I would guess, that skiing and pulling your own sled, you also had a much more, if you will, intimate relationship to the ice.

ANN BANCROFT: We are not going fast.

[TRUDGING THROUGH SNOW]

We were going about a mile, a mile and a half per hour on our skis. So, yes, you see every little grain of snow going across your ski tips. You get very intimate with the subtle changes. And if you're not the kind of personality that gets into that, you're going to go stir crazy.

SPEAKER: You say when you went-- started out on the North Pole, you didn't have any big feminist ax to grind or point to make, or at least not one that you had articulated to yourself at the time. What was the point for the all-women's trip. Was there a mission in that regard?

ANN BANCROFT: Well, I think so. I mean, we were deliberately sexist. [CHUCKLES] I learned a lot from my North Pole experience in regard to being the only woman and in experiencing the subtle sexism that I did experience from them.

So I have a team of dogs, it was Will's team of dogs, all by myself. And I'm in heaven because I'm away from everybody else. You're looking for a time to get away from your team members. You need a breather. And I love this team of dogs.

We've got a good relationship going, so we're having a good time. We're pulling sleds. And there's a team of dogs behind me run by a guy named Jeff, the biggest member physically of our team, who is about 6 feet tall. He's over 200 pounds, just a-- he's a massive guy.

And he's running an unruly bunch of Inuit dogs, dogs that we had actually rented, believe it or not, to go on this trip. And they don't respond to English commands very well. They're just tough to run. And because he's the biggest, he gets to run them.

The interesting thing about that is that he, before this trip, had never run dogs either. This was not his Forte. He was a skier, a biologist, and just basically a big guy. So he gets assigned to this team of dogs.

When I come in at night, or a team member, well-intended, comes up to me and said, my, you're running dogs well. Because we just come scooting in, park, have dinner. Jeff comes in about 15, 20 minutes after me, always the last sled every day of this excursion, every day. And no one says anything to him.

And I'm irked by the fact that this guy-- I know he's well-intended, but I'm-- It bugs me because I've had 30 days of this sort of tone in someone's voice of surprise. And what I'm thinking inside is that, it's 30-some days out here on the ice. By Jove, I better be running dogs well, or I shouldn't be on this trip. And it's this well-intended, condescending tone.

And then Jeff comes in, and no one says anything. They don't say, "You're running dogs well," or "Hi," or "Are you pooped?" Or "Are you sick of running?" Nobody acknowledges him. I'm getting a kind of attention that other people aren't getting.

And in fact, Jeff is experiencing reverse sexism. No one pays any attention to him because he's so large, and they just expect him to endure that and to do it and to do it fairly well. So in a sense, I'm not just another team member.