In two months and a half there would be a festive salute. Ten shorts from a carabine in honour of:

– Dmitry Shparo, leader of the expedition, Yuri Khmelevski and Vladimir Ledenev, Anatoly Melnikov and Vladimir Rakhmanov, Vasily Shishkarev and Vladimir Davydov! In honour of their VICTORY!!!

But let us return back. On March 16, 1979 the seven participants of the expedition of the Komsomolskaia Pravda came down a steep slope of the small Henrietta Island to the broken ice of the East-Siberian Sea and made the first steps towards the North Pole. Almost one thousand and five hundred kilometres separated the start from the finish. One and a half million steps over the rippled ice, over the pressure ridges and fissures of open water.

On May 31, 1979 these seven men hugged one another at the top of the Earth. They were striving for their triumph for no less than 10 years. After return to the land these seven explorers were decorated with the highest State orders of the USSR, the Prizewinners, and their achievement was registered in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Many people had visited the North Pole before them. But this team for the first time in history reached the North Pole on foot, by ski and not by an airplane, dog sleds or snow mobiles. Every day efforts in the course of the ten years of preparation of this expedition were concentrated in seventy-seven days of their route. The last spring day became the hour of triumph for every one of these seven men and it stillhas remained the same for the last twenty five years.

After the North Pole they were dreaming about the South Pole. But they did not manage to visit the Antarctica. There followed two remarkable achievements in our Hemisphere. In 1986 there was a ski crossing during the polar night from one drifting scientific polar station to another via the Pole of Inaccessibility. And in two years they again visited their North Pole. A joint Soviet-Canadian team crossed on skis the Arctic Ocean from the shores of the USSR to the Canadian Ward Hunt Island.

The public high latitude expedition of the Komsomolskaia Pravda newspaper stopped its existence in 1989 and our Adventure Club was founded in its place.

The photographs from the archives of Dmitry Shparo