IN 1927, a student at Harvard read the newspaper headline “Byrd to the South Pole”, and knew instinctively that he must somehow find a place on the proposed American expedition to the Antarctic of Admiral Richard Byrd, the first since that of Charles Wilkes in 1842.

So began the lifelong career of adventure of Norman Vaughan, which culminated at the age of 88 when, as the world’s senior explorer, he returned south to climb the mountain named after him 70 years before on that same journey of discovery.

Vaughan, who already had some experience of sledding in Canada, secured his place on Byrd’s team by volunteering to train for a year the dogs that would be needed to carry the explorers and 650 tons of stores and equipment. He faced two problems even before he and his 97 dogs reached the Bay of Whales, on the Ross Ice Shelf, early in 1929. The first was that the 40 tons of dog food was found to contain floor sweepings such as nails and glass, and so while stopping over in New Zealand Vaughan spent three weeks making up replacement feed, mixing it at night in a chocolate factory.

His second, more serious difficulty was that he had incurred the enmity of Arthur Walden, the expedition’s chief dog driver until the advent of the young and cocky Vaughan. The latter became convinced that Walden would try to kill him, and during a three-month long expedition to the Queen Maud Mountains that he, Walden and four others made in the winter of 1929-30, Vaughan took to sleeping outside where his rival could not find him, even though it was so cold that his face froze to the rim of his goggles.

Despite this handicap, their 1,500-mile journey across the ice, guided by Vaughan and his dogs, made important geological, botanical and cartographical discoveries and also found a message left in a cairn by Roald Amundsen in 1911. Nonetheless, it was overshadowed in the public’s imagination by Byrd’s flight over the South Pole, the first to be made, and one that matched his feat over the northern mark. On their return in 1930, the expedition was given a ticker-tape parade through New York. It was the final hurrah of the golden age of exploration, of which Vaughan would in time be the last survivor.

Norman Vaughan was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1905, the son of a prosperous leather tanner who had made his fortune by patenting a white polish for nurses’ shoes. He was educated at Milton Academy, where he excelled at American football, but even as a boy he was drawn by tales of adventure to the outdoors life. Aged 12, his first dog team consisted of his pet German shepherd and a one-eyed St Bernard bought from a pound.

After entering Harvard, he spent a year in Labrador as a volunteer with Sir Wilfred Grenfell, an English doctor whose itinerant practice among the region’s isolated fishing villages was conducted by sled. It was this experience which Vaughan put to good use on Byrd’s expedition.

After his return from the pole, he tried to settle down to a steady life, taking a sales job with an advertising agency, but the call of the wild was too strong. Attractive as his brave and roving nature was, his urge to test himself against the elements cost him dear in his personal life, and he was to be divorced three times.

In 1932, he was asked by Byrd to return with him to Antarctica as second-in-command of an expedition, but Vaughan sensed that Byrd was interested primarily in his own reputation and that there would be little new for him to do. He accordingly rejected the offer, and threw himself instead into dog sledding, at which he represented the United States in that year’s Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York State — the only time the sport has been featured in the Games. Four years later he wrote the first guide by an American to skiing technique, Ski Fever (1936).

When the United States entered the Second World War, Vaughan joined the US Army Air Corps. Much of his work involved the rescue of pilots who had crashed while ferrying bombers over the northern Atlantic, and in July 1942 he organised the successful retrieval by a fellow sledder of the crews of eight aircraft which had been compelled to put down on a glacier in Greenland, near a German weather station. After their evacuation, it was discovered that the secret Norden bombsight on one of the aircraft had not been destroyed, and it was Vaughan who was charged with making the hazardous journey to the site to do so.

Later in the war, he took his dog teams to the Ardennes to try to speed up the transport of wounded from the Battle of the Bulge, though in the event a thaw came before they could be of use.

From 1945 to 1949, he was head of the Search and Rescue Division of the International Civil Air Organisation, the air wing of the United Nations. During the Korean War, he was employed on psychological warfare duties; one of his duties was to draw propaganda cartoons which could be floated over the Communist lines on balloons. He retired from the service in 1955 in the rank of colonel.During the next decade he ran firms selling chainsaws and then snowmobiles, publicising the latter with a record journey of 6,000 miles on one of his vehicles from the Arctic Circle to Boston in 1967. The failure of this business, however, and of his third marriage in 1973, prompted him at the age of 68 to pack a few possessions into a duffel bag and to strike out for Alaska. There he supported himself with menial work such as cleaning lavatories until finding a job managing a university theatre.

Living in Alaska enabled him to further his love of husky racing. In the 1950s he had been the first non-Alaskan to drive in the North American sled dog championship, and in the 1970s and 1980s he competed in more than a dozen Iditarod runs, the 1,049-mile race from Anchorage to Nome. In the 1990s, he organised a new challenge, the Serum Run, which commemorated an 868-mile dash to bring diphtheria medicine by sledge to Nome.

Indeed, so much did he come to identify with Alaska and its sledding heritage that, in 1976, he was appalled that it was to be the only state not represented at President Carter’s inaugural parade. He took a team down to Washington and badgered officials into letting them into the running order (as number 57½). Four years later he returned for President Reagan’s inauguration, even overcoming the handicap of having three of the huskies briefly dognapped by local youths.

In 1981, Vaughan was on hand to greet Pope John Paul II when he visited Alaska, and after giving him a ride persuaded him to bless his team, notwithstanding that two were named Satan and Devil.

Two years earlier he had returned to Antarctica for the 50th anniversary of Byrd’s expedition, and in the austral summer of 1993 planned to go back once more to drive dogs on the ice for the last time before they were banned for environmental reasons. This project, however, had to be abandoned when the aircraft carrying the dogs and some of the team members crashed short of the airstrip at Patriot Hills, in the American zone, albeit without fatalities.

Undeterred, Vaughan returned the next year, and (with an artificial right knee) finally made a week-long ascent of Mount Vaughan, the 10,302ft (3,140m) peak named by Byrd in his honour. He reached the summit, suffering from hypothermia, three days before his 89th birthday. With Cecil Murphey, he published an autobiography, My Life of Adventure, in 1995.

He married first, in 1931 (dissolved 1938), Iris Rodey, and secondly, in 1938 (dissolved 1965), Rosamond Lockwood. A brief third marriage was dissolved in 1973. He is survived by his fourth wife, Carolyn Muegee, whom he married in 1987, and by a son of his first marriage and by a daughter of the second.

Having promised his mother that he would not touch liquor until he was 100, he had enjoyed his first sip of champagne on his centennial birthday.

Norman Vaughan, polar explorer, was born on December 19, 1905. He died on December 23, 2005, aged 100.