"It is a commonplace of Arctic lore and indeed self-evident that so long as sledges hauled by dogs, men or motors are used for Arctic exploration, that point will be most difficult to reach which is farthest away from the ultimate goal of a ship where the sledge traveling has to begin. If this ultimate ship base is 450 miles from the Pole in Grant Land, or Franz Josef Land, about 800 miles at Cape Chelyuskin on the north tip of Siberia, and over 1,100 miles near Point Barrow on the north tip of

Alaska, it becomes evident that the point in the Arctic hardest to get at, which we may call the "Pole of Inaccessibility", by no means coincides with the North Pole but lies about four hundred miles away from it in the direction towards Alaska. This coincided roughly with the center of the unexplored area in the polar regions when we sailed north, an area of over a million square miles then, and still to be reckoned as at least seven hundred thousand square miles.

The region is unexplored, partly through its inherent Inaccessibility, but partly also for two other reasons.
The first of these reasons is that the civilization of our time has developed on the two shores of the Atlantic, and that the sailors of this ocean have been the chief explorers of the North.

It was natural they should attack the problem along the frontier nearest home, and that is one reason why knowledge has advanced into the inaccessible area more rapidly from the Atlantic than from the Pacific side. Incidentally, those who went north with a desire to find a way from their homes to the Indies naturally struck onto the unexplored area on a promising route to attain this purpose, which again was the frontier nearest home.

But a second reason has been the glamour of the search for the Pole. Even when you realize that it is comparatively easy of access, it is still ninety degrees away from the equator, and unique. The sentiment surrounding the idea of uniqueness might have been weakened had people realized that as a known mathematical point the North Pole was obliged to be comparatively accessible.

But that bit of knowledge has succeeded in maintaining itself as the exclusive property of a few specialists, and the world in general has imagined the North Pole to be to the Arctic what the mountain top is to the mountain. That analogy is true when applied to the Pole of Inaccessibility but not when applied to the geographic North Pole.

But false views when strongly held are as powerful in their effect upon human conduct as any true views can be, and this has been another reason why men brought up on the shores of the Atlantic have striven into the polar area with the latitude of 90 degrees North as their goal, but with the practical result of progressively uncovering vast areas that lay between.

In the process of removing the imaginary Arctic from our minds, we come to the proposition that all land in the far north is covered with eternal ice.
Permanent ice on land is another name for a glacier. When we stop to think of it, glaciers exist in any part of the world with the proper combination of the high altitude and heavy precipitation.
Mount Kenya in Africa, the top of which is considered to be about seven miles from the equator, has "eternal ice" upon it, a glacier of considerable area

There are known to be huge glaciers in subtropical Asia and lesser ones in South America. They are eternal on the mountain tops of Mexico; in California they come a little nearer sea level, as they do in Switzerland. They come lower yet in the state of Washington, not primarily because it is farther north but chiefly because of the heavier precipitation.

British Columbia is the warmest province in all Canada, and yet it contains three-quarters of all the glaciers of continental Canada, again because of the heavy precipitation. The south coast of Alaska has a climate not very different from that of British Columbia or of Scotland, though somewhat more rainy than Scotland. A comparatively warm country, southern Alaska contains huge glaciers which in some instances reach to the ocean and break off,

forming icebergs that float away to be rapidly melted by the warm waters of the Pacific. But if you travel seven or eight hundred miles overland from the glacier-infested south coast northward you come to the prairies bordering the Alaskan north coast. Here is a comparatively cold climate; but on the great triangular coastal plain of Fifty thousand square miles there are no mountains, consequently no glaciers.