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Scroll through a Facebook feed any day of the week, and you’re bound to find exhortations to live each day to the fullest, but few of us have gone to the lengths Peter Freuchen did to fulfill that goal.

Here’s just a brief taste from Jason Kottke:

Standing six feet seven inches, Freuchen was an arctic explorer, journalist, author, and anthropologist. He participated in several arctic journeys (including a 1000-mile dogsled trip across Greenland), starred in an Oscar-winning film, wrote more than a dozen books (novels and nonfiction, including his Famous Book of the Eskimos), had a peg leg (he lost his leg to frostbite in 1926; he amputated his gangrenous toes himself), was involved in the Danish resistance against Germany… [and] once escaped from a blizzard shelter by cutting his way out of it with a knife fashioned from his own feces…

And his wife was no slouch, either.

Forget motivational mountain-top scenes; we’ll settle for a full-sized poster of this guy.

Full story at Kottke.

Fascinating people.

Photo credit: Irving Penn