“Why don’t we go find a big mountain that we can climb and then ski off of?”

This was the question that Peter Dea and his friend Steve Monfredo posed at the beginning of the 1980s. It’s a question some people entertain but rarely follow through. Peter Dea is not some people.

Sitting outside his Martha’s Vineyard home looking out over Aquinnah, this former geology professor doesn’t immediately give off an air of gravity defying adventure. Yet just last year he finished climbing the last of all of the 54 peaks listed over 14,000 feet in Colorado, a process he began as a college student.

Today Mr. Dea is the CEO of Cirque Resources LLC, a natural gas and oil concern, but adventure travel continues to define his daily life, and work ethic. A trip he took as a young man to Mount Logan, the highest peak in Canada, personifies this. Considered one of the largest massifs in the world, Mount Logan rises out of the Hubbard ice fields, stark and staggering with 13,000 feet of vertical relief. Mount Everest, by contrast, only has an approximate 11,000 feet of vertical relief.

“We actually climbed that distance three times over,” explained Mr. Dea. “We each had the equivalent of about 180 pounds of gear, but you can only really carry 60 pounds at max when you’re climbing at altitude and during steep ice climbing.” The solution was not to carry less, but to “climb high and carry low.”

“We would carry a 60-pound load up 1,000 feet high, come back down to camp, climb down another 1,000, get another 60 pounds, carry that back up and then come back down and camp and sleep. The next morning we move the camp up to the cash, and then we took two loads up another 1,000 feet and so on. You’re always going up 1,000 feet twice, but then camping low and that is a proven way to stay acclimatized.”

Upon reaching 15,500 feet, the group experienced first-hand the mountain’s reputation for some of the world’s most harrowing weather.

“These were wicked 100-mile-an-hour winds,” Mr. Dea said. “Our dome tent just got shredded in the 100 mile winds while we were in it. So we had to dig a snow cave and we stayed in it for four days. When the storm finally passed and we moved our way up to 18,600 feet, another storm blew in. This time we didn’t even set the tent up. We just dug in and spent another couple of days in yet another snow cave.”

The group made it off of Mount Logan after 30 days, frostbitten and tired. Just a few weeks later, Mr. Dea took off for another 420-day expedition, because, well, why not?

These days, Mr. Dea and his wife of 13 years embark on at least one adventurous expedition each year. Recently the couple made their way up to the far northern tip of an island off Greenland known as Baffin Island. They made their camp near the ice flow edge for a full nine days.

“It’s one of the most unique trips I’ve ever done,” Mr. Dea said. “Up in the Arctic the ocean freezes and the ‘fast ice’ as they call it, because it’s fasted or attached to land, that’s the ice flow. Now the pack ice is comprised of pieces of the ice flow that have already broken off during the melting season. The result is just bizarre because you have all these artistic sculptures of ice that just get rafted and thrust up on top of one another, so it’s just the beautiful but random collage of ice stacked up. That’s also where the polar bears hang out.”

On that trip alone, the couple saw 39 polar bears and countless narwhals swimming between edges of broken ice forms.

“We also saw a mother and baby bowhead whale swim right by as we were walking along on the ice flow edge. Then half an hour later this 50-foot bowhead whale breaches the surface, and then it does it again — 59 times! We counted. It was like fireworks. The grand finale that never ends.”