"Great God! this is an awful place..."

This is a stunning picture of a man standing at the south pole a century ago after a grueling trek, man-hauling sleds some 800 miles, and now facing the same going back. Conditions were appalling: temperatures plummeting to minus 45 degrees F., nearly impassable terrain, blinding blizzards, or blinding sunshine. "Great God! this is an awful place..."* he wrote in his journal at the time in 1912, before long distance communications and airplanes. He and his four companions didn’t make it back, and their fate was unknown for almost a year after they had actually perished. A sense of the foreboding inevitableness of a doomed expedition is etched in the man’s anguished face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLeOl0yj0-A&feature=related

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*This remarkable iconic photo taken 17Jan12 (discovered in a tent a year later with their frozen bodies) shows British explorer Robert Scott [left] and his companions having just arrived at the South pole. It dramatically conveys in their unposed postures the dazed dismay and deep disappointment they feel at the crushing discovery that the Norwegians had beaten them to the pole just four weeks earlier. Scott's discouragement is painfully palpable in his journal entry for that day:

“Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend to-morrow. ... Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it”.