Discover Your Inner Godwit

On March 29, 1912, Robert Scott and two fellow explorers huddled in a tent during a fierce Antarctic blizzard. They had landed on the edge of Antarctica five months earlier, hoping to be the first people in history to reach the South Pole. They succeeded in reaching the Pole, but it was a bitter success. They discovered that another team, led by Roald Amundsen, had gotten there first. So Scott and his team turned back and began the 800-mile journey back to the sea. They hauled sledges themselves, without the help of dogs. The plunging temperatures increased the friction of the snow, so that they had to put in as much effort as they would to haul the sledges through sand. On February 4, Edgar Evans dropped dead. On March 16, Laurence Oates, barely able to walk, simply left the camp and never came back. A blizzard on March 20 ...