Norman Vaughan, who died Friday having just turned 100, was a lifelong dog musher who drove sleds on Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1928-30 expedition, at the 1932 Olympics, on rescue missions during World War II, and in 13 Iditarods, Alaska’s grueling 1,150-mile sled race – the first of them at age 70.

He also distributed propaganda leaflets via balloon during the Korean War and taught Pope John Paul II to mush huskies when the pontiff visited Alaska.

“Dream big and dare to fail,” Vaughan liked to tell interviewers, and he had certainly done his share of both, having dropped out of more Iditarods than he finished, divorced three wives, and spent much of his life getting by on menial jobs while seeking sponsors for his adventures. At one point in the late 1960s, he drove a snowmobile from Alaska to Boston, a distance of 5,700 miles. “I say of armchairs, throw them away,” Vaughan told the Christian Science Monitor in 1992. Two years later, at age 89, he summited Mount Vaughan, the 10,320-foot peak Byrd named for him in the Queen Maud mountains of Antarctica.

It was his role in Byrd’s 1928 expedition that remained the touchstone of Vaughan’s career, and he never tired of telling the story of how, as a mushing-obsessed Harvard student, he knocked on Byrd’s door and eventually convinced the explorer to take him along.

Vaughan, two other drivers, and 94 dogs, reached Antarctica in January 1929. After setting up a base camp called “Little America,” the expedition launched operations exploring the geology and mapping unknown areas of the continent. During one 900-mile journey, Vaughan quarreled badly enough with a fellow driver that he took to sleeping in secret locations. The expedition was also noted for making the first flight to the South Pole, with Byrd as one of the navigators. Vaughan, however, remembered it for something else: “We were the last to use dogs,” he wrote in his 1990 memoir, “With Byrd at the Bottom of the World.” “From then on, explorers would use planes and over-the-snow vehicles.”

Returning home to Hamilton, Mass., where his father ran a prosperous business as the inventor of Vaughan’s Ivory Sole Leather, the white leather used for the soles of nursing shoes, Vaughan tried to make a living in the advertising busi ness, but felt stifled. He briefly joined and then dropped out of Byrd’s subsequent expedition. He was America’s entrant in the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, where dog-sledding was a demonstration sport. A 1932 news report credited him with discovering the bodies of two young climbers killed in a blizzard on Mount Washington.

After enlisting in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Vaughan helped build air bases in the Canadian eastern arctic and Greenland. In 1942, two B-17 bombers and six P-38 fighters caught in a blizzard made emergency landings on the Greenland Ice Cap, and Vaughan led a successful effort to bring the fliers out alive. He was then sent back to retrieve a Norden bombsight, a top-secret device the Germans coveted. In the late 1980s, Vaughan was part of a team that recovered one of the P-38s, then buried under 250 feet of ice. Ice-penetrating radar and hot-water drills were used in the operation, which took several years. The plane was restored to flying condition in 2002.

Following the war, Vaughan headed the search-and-rescue division of the International Civil Air Organization for four years, then served in the Korean War, retiring with the rank of colonel. He had several unsuccessful businesses in Massachusetts, including owning a snowmobile dealership. In 1973, he finally yielded to what seems to have been a lifelong call of the north, and moved to Alaska, where he could race against the best dog-sledders in the country. Newly divorced, he arrived in Anchorage penniless. He earned a living shoveling snow, working in restaurants, building scenery at the University of Alaska theater, and eventually as a janitor at the university.

Co-workers at the university sponsored him in his first Iditarod, in 1976, when he was 70. Vaughan made headlines when he missed a turn and got lost for three days, until an airplane pilot spotted his tracks. “Snow is hard to eat when you’re cold and hungry,” he told a reporter for the Associated Press. He was back in the race the next year, and competed in 13 of the races in all. He boasted that he was the “oldest and slowest” competitor. His last race was in 1990,at 85.He was subsequently elected to the Mushers Hall of Fame.

In 1993, his attempt to climb Mount Vaughan failed when one of his expedition’s two planes crashed. The next year he returned and managed to scale the peak bearing his name. Heedless of the obvious dangers for an 88-year-old, he told compatriots, “If I die, ‘ve told everybody to just leave me in the nearest crevasse.” Hobbled by a bad knee, he took several days to climb more than 7,000 steps in snow and ice cut by his guide. He passed out briefly on the summit. It was the first recorded ascent of Mount Vaughan, and it was filmed by a team from National Geographic.

Vaughan was a figure of great renown in Alaska, where he was affectionately known as “the Colonel.” In 1996, he carried the Olympic flame through Juneau on its way to Atlanta. He married a much younger expedition guide and lived in the shadow of Mount McKinley.

He had planned to mark his 100th birthday atop Mount Vaughan, but financing fell through, despite an appearance on the Tonight Show earlier this year. Hospitalized with heart problems, he ended up celebrating his birthday while bedridden. He took his first taste of alcohol that day, a sip of champagne, and ate a few oysters.

Norman Dane Vaughan
Born December 19, 1905, in Salem, Mass.; died December 23 at the Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage; survived by his wife, Carol Muegge, and by a son and a daughter from earlier marriages.