Expeditionary Forces

Expedition member Al Read moving across South Georgia's Trident Ridge (Photo © Peter Potterfield)

Breaking camp below Trident Ridge (Photo © Peter Potterfield)

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When Potterfield first read Alfred Lansing's Endurance (number six in Outside's 2003 Adventure Canon) at age ten, he couldn't have predicted he would retrace Ernest Shackleton's South Georgia Island crossing four decades later. Caroline Alexander's 1998 retelling of Shackleton's 1915-1916 survival epic to a new generation of readers (in Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition) whetted Potterfield's longing for his next expeditionary fix. It was time, he decided, to literally follow in the great man's footsteps.

"Like the others with me on this twisted adventure, I've been deeply impressed for much of my life by the story of Shackleton's epic," Potterfield explains. "The men of the Endurance party, their ship crushed by sea ice and sunk in 1915, seemed walking, working dead men, adrift on a frozen sea for 18 months."

"Just getting to South Georgia took six days and 500 miles in a Russian trawler crossing the stormy Southern Ocean from Ushuaia, Argentina," says Potterfield in remembering the days before even stepping out onto the Antarctic ice. "We were dropped off at King Haakon Bay, the very spot where Shackleton landed in 1916. The surroundings were austere: nine glaciers tumbled out the mountains into the bay—no evidence of humans whatsoever, just a gaggle of king penguins and few fur seals. You're utterly alone, more remote even than the Antarctic continent, which has camps."

Packing their gear on sleds and on their backs, the team skied the Fortuna Glacier, an icy monolith that rises to 2,796 feet. They then spent five days traversing a feature of rocky spires called the Trident Range, eventually getting pinned down by foul weather on the Crean Glacier for two days. As if to compound the intensity, blue-green glacial icefalls continually crashed into the ocean around them.

"When we finally crossed to the ruins of the abandoned whaling station at Stromness, it was very emotional," Potterfield recalls. "There was little back-slapping, just a quiet celebration of sorts. [Shackleton's] journey was made not for sport, but for his survival and that of his six companions and the 22 men still stranded on Elephant Island. Shack did it because he had to; ours was for the adrenaline. And oh, did we know the difference."