The Scott Expedition - Antarctica

Hold onto your hats, the Scott Expedition is back underway. Perhaps you remember when I posted a year or so ago that I had discovered the blog of Ben Sanders after viewing a TED talk.

He's the guy that was the third in history to ski solo to the North Pole and holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey by a Briton.

He's also the guy who intends to lead a "team" (himself and a friend) to make the first return journey to the South Pole on foot. He calls it "The Scott Expedition" and it will be 1,800 miles long and take four months – assuming everything goes according to plan.

I put it that way because, just like the ill-fated original expedition, that far south plans are not easy to follow. Sanders needed to scrub his first attempt but kept everything in place for use once all the logistics were worked out.

In October 2013 he and a replacement companion, Tarka L’Herpiniere – an accomplished ultra-endurance athlete, now intend to undertake the longest unsupported polar journey in history and the first completion of Captain Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition.

Ben's blog has been silent for many months awaiting, well, whatever they were waiting on. But now it has sprung to life again as they are traveling to the icy wilderness of Greenland for a "practice run" or "shakeout cruise," whatever you want to call it.

Once the expedition begins, I understand that he intends to carry a GPS monitoring device and make it available on the web so people can follow along real-time (I assume on Google Earth) over the four month period. For now, however, he's got photographs and an ongoing diary of their daily adventures in Greenland.

I'm looking forward to seeing this get underway and being able to follow along.

Learn A Little More

Several of the images they have posted on their blog are actually video and it looks as though they have a fairly sophisticated back-up team photographing in High Definition. Take a look!