Crevasses can form or close quickly and pose a significant danger to climbers
Sir Ernest Shackleton is one of the most famous names of Antarctic exploration. He is probably best known for the brilliant way he salvaged what could have become the worst disaster on the continent.
There is always risk in exploring the unknown and the unexpected does interfere. Through a series of events relying on his good judgment and the cooperation of the elements and God, a journey that could have killed all of his men was instead transformed into a triumph of the human spirit.
Shackleton was born in 1874 and led three British explorations to Antarctica. The aim of his 1914–1917 trip was to cross from sea to sea via the South Pole. Serious problems began when his ship, the Endurance, was frozen into the ice-pack and was gradually crushed. From then on, the journey was not of exploration, but one of survival.
For months, the crew endured on an ice floe. Then, relying solely on lifeboats, Shackleton and crew managed to reach Elephant Island. While taking them off the water, the island did not offer prospects of long-term survival or, because of its remoteness, great odds of rescue. The majority of the men hunkered down in bleak circumstances as Shackleton, gathering a small group of men, set out in a small boat to cover 720 miles to South Georgia Island to try and save them all. There, he knew whaling crews inhabited the land.
Shackleton promised to return and rescue the men on Elephant Island, but the odds of him ever being seen again were astronomical. Shackleton reached South Georgia, anchored offshore in hurricane winds, and then he and his men were at last able to set foot on land. However, they were on the wrong side of the island to reach the whalers. Shackleton’s crew was forced to trek thirty-two miles across the island, over snow-covered hills, wearing the remnants of their clothing and only normal boots.
They managed it in thirty-six hours. Previously given up for dead, his home country was astonished to hear the men were still alive. True to his word, although it took three attempts, ships guided by Shackleton sailed to Elephant Island to rescue all the others.
Historians and outdoorsmen always wondered what Shackleton and his men confronted when they landed on South Georgia Island and just how remarkable their journey was to reach the whaling station.
One hundred years later, Vern Tejas was part of a group that retraced the steps of those hardy men who were on a life and death mission.
Ernest Shackleton was probably one of the greatest exploratory heroes of the last century. After he lost his ship, he was able to bring back all his men alive after two years in Antarctica. It was a pretty amazing trip. The very last part of it was the trek across semi-charted land. Nobody knew where the mountains and glaciers were in the interior of South Georgia. In the course of their crossing the island, they explored a new place. They didn’t have anything much in the way of supplies as they did so, either.
They just basically fought their way through the snowy mountains to the whaling station as fast as they could. The island was only fifty miles across, and they were in danger of missing it altogether.
The stakes were incredibly high. So many people’s lives depended on him getting it right, from his own and those of the men in the boat, to those of the men left behind camping on Elephant Island.
Their overland trek was chosen because they did not want to risk going back onto the water to circle the island. The winds were powerful, they feared being blown out to sea and never being able to get back. This was the only place where they knew other humans who could possibly help them.
So Shackleton crash-landed the boat on the shore and the men made their way overland. Modern-day adventurers have replicated his desperate boat crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island. Doing what they did, seeing how hard it was, and seeing how quickly it can be done in the modern age has appeal for some people. Naturally, they don’t want to spend a couple of years duplicating what happened to Shackleton, but the overland part has always produced curiosity.
Twice I have been asked to guide the overland route. That traverse is fun, challenging and historical, certainly more fun for citizen adventurers than for those men whose lives were threatened. Polar Explorers contacted me and asked if I would like to join them and lead the trip, and I said sure. The first time was a little over three years ago. It was coming up on the 100th anniversary of Shackleton’s trek. You had to take a ship for a week even to get there and another week going back.
Let’s say it was easier for us. We had skis, tents, and food. In Shackleton’s crew’s urgency, they spent only thirty-six hours reaching the whaling station. We took three-and-a-half days while carrying all of our stuff. We were not starving and did not have others waiting at the other end to save our lives. There were eight of us and our pace was definitely more leisurely.
We started on the west side of the island, up a fjord onto a glacier, climbed up high and got above the animal line. There was so much wildlife there you had to part your way through penguins, seals, and birds to get across the beach.
Crevasses can form or close quickly and pose a significant danger to climbers
Shackleton’s men were starving on the boat, but when they reached the island, they could choose from foods they had forcibly become familiar with. They were out of western food, so they ate all they could kill. Those marine animals have high fat content and fresh meat gives you vitamins, but when it comes to survival, oil is very important. It is one of the most concentrated forms of food energy on earth. Eskimo natives in Alaska survive on it.
The traverse is pretty much a straight line from west to east. You follow the compass and the wind. In the process, though, the route goes over the spine of the island and one of those vertebrae is the Trident Peaks. This is where Shackleton and his buddies scouted around to look for a safe way down and they couldn’t find one. So they coiled a rope they carried from the boat, jumped on it and, while holding on, tobogganed down to the bottom of a very serious slope.
It took us several hours of looking around before we found a safe enough place to go down. The right place was on an avalanche slope about 1,500 feet high with crevasses and snow berms hanging over it. As a mountaineer, it was not a place I would call comfortable. Once again, I had to use the Tejas Snow Wheel as a protective technique. I had the rest of the team make a double-wide tire of snow to roll down.
As the wheel went downhill, it opened a couple of ankle-biter crevasses for us to avoid, which was nice. But it also seemed to indicate the slope was stable enough for us to descend. Instead of skiing down, we walked, pulling our rough-locked equipment sleds behind. Rough-locking is a dog-sled technique wrapping copious amounts of rope around the sled to provide lots of friction. We kept on walking once we reached bottom in case an avalanche followed us. We didn’t stop for another quarter of a mile or so just to be safe. Never hang out below a potential avalanche slope.
It was a great group, an international team of Americans, Europeans, and Kiwis. Good people. There were very strong winds going against us. I remember getting blown down a dozen times. I don’t blow down easy, but everyone was getting knocked over. The Southern Ocean is known for high winds. All of Patagonia is raked with winds, and Antarctica is the windiest continent on Earth. We continued our trip despite the wind, as Shackleton would have.
Shackleton returned to Antarctica for a third time and died on that trip in 1922. He was back in the South Georgia Islands at the time and is buried, by his wife’s request, at Grytviken. The Grytviken whaling station is on Stromness Bay. We visited the grave site and poured a little brandy on it. That kind of wrapped up our adventure. It was a challenging traverse, but it was one of the best historical trips I’ve ever taken. I did it again in 2015 and would go back in a heartbeat.
The wildlife is fantastic. You see whales on the ocean and marine birds. There are all kinds of penguins by the thousands. I saw rookeries of albatross, maybe 30,000 nesting birds. King penguins, fur seals, elephant seals, skuas: it’s like the Serengeti of Antarctica. South Georgia Island is right by the convergence of the South Atlantic Ocean and the Antarctic Ocean. There is an upwelling of huge quantities of nutrients which plankton live on. The krill live on that, and everything else lives on the krill, from the birds to the fish to the marine mammals. The biggest animals in the world, whales, live on the krill.
Overall, it’s a beautiful trip. But there are massive storms. We used a better ship than Shackleton did, but even with a 300-foot boat that holds between 50 and 100 people, there are days you get tossed around so much you don’t want to get out of bed. If you do get up, you spend your time sitting in the galley watching the water submerge the windows. There are times the boat lists so dramatically that you are looking at blue water out the window, looking through blue water. You would be in for some stomach distress, for sure. When you get around the islands, it’s calmer, especially if you are on the lee side.
I loved the trip. How often do I get to do something these days I had never done before? It seemed fresh and exciting and different. Several well-known mountaineers had done it for a TV special; Reinhold Messner, Dave Hahn, and Alex Lowe. They were working their way through all these crevasses. We didn’t do that with our climbers. Those guys went over stuff. We went around stuff. We can’t know exactly what the snow conditions were like for Shackleton and his men; they made their traverse later in the summer when there was probably less snow. We go when there is more snow and take skis.
Shackleton was there out of necessity; we were taking people on an adventure vacation. What was once for survival, 100 years later is for an active vacation.
I really have been on great trips to the Antarctic region, from guiding Norman Vaughan to the top of his mountain, to following in the footsteps of Shackleton, and, of course, my regular trips to climb Mount Vinson. When I first climbed Vinson in 1988, I would have been amazed if anyone told me I was going to do it an additional thirty-five-plus times.