Cancer Survivor Becomes First African-American Woman to the North Pole

Filed in archive Adventure on May 6, 2007

Age ain't nothing but a number. And Barbara Hillary approved that by skiing to the North Pole, at the age of 75. Even more, Hillary, a lung cancer survivor, was the first African-American women to accomplish this feat.

A few weeks ago, we learned that Leslie Mass, a retired early childhood director, hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail alone. It seems the traditional idea of retirement and growing old has changed.

Hillary, of Averne, N.Y., grew up in Harlem and devoted herself to a nursing career and community activism. At 67 and during retirement, she battled lung cancer. Five years later, she went dog sledding in Quebec and photographed polar bears in Manitoba.

Then she heard that a black woman had never made it to the North Pole.

"I said, `What's wrong with this picture?'" she said. "So I sort of rolled into this, shall we say."

In 1909, Matthew Henson made history as the first black man to reach the Pole, though his accomplishment was not officially recognized for decades - it was overshadowed by the presence of his white colleague, Robert Peary.

"It's not like there's a guest book when you get up there and you sign it," said Robert Russell, founder of Eagles Cry Adventures, Inc., the travel company that leads thrill-seekers like Hillary to the farthest corners of the globe. Russell conducted six months' worth of research, interviewing fellow polar expedition contractors and digging through history books, but failed to find a black woman who had completed the trek.

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