After an eight-year closure, the North Pole has become an even more exclusive ... and when there were no luxury toilet facilities at 89 degrees north. People flew in on the old AN-2s, refueling ...

But reindeer populations in the northern lands closest to the North Pole have been falling rapidly ... The year-round facility opened in 1976 as part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

As Erling Kagge relates in his thrilling book, The North Pole, the world’s northernmost point has been a lifelong and nearly fatal obsession Where is the North Pole? On one level, the answer is ...