After he disappeared trying to rescue a fellow explorer in 1928, Popular Science published a tribute to the lost adventurer, calling him “the last of the vikings” who, of all humans, “alone had stood at both frozen tips of our spinning world.” As a Boy Scout of today hunts out sparse woodland near our cities to practice “frontier” life, so young Amundsen practiced living as an Arctic explorer. He began to train his body to endure hardships. Because he insisted upon sleeping with his windows wide open to the blasts of a Norwegian winter, he was regarded as a freak by neighbors… Read the full story of Amundsen’s boyhood, and his famous expeditions, in our December 1928 issue.
