If I'd only known, back in the third grade, that walking miles to school in drenching rain was preparing me for South Georgia Island and the Crean Glacier, I'd have gone more willingly. But we didn't go to the end of the earth merely to validate my childhood. We were commemorating Ernest Shackleton's most celebrated bit of wandering.

s It is difficult though, after the best part of a century has elapsed, to imagine how much harder such wandering was in 1916. I found it hard enough thinking back to my own forced storm marches to school (which was up a bunch of hills) and remembering that I'd somehow squeaked by without so much as a hint of waterproof yet breathable attire: no seam sealing; no GPS to point the way; no sunburned lip; no big, darn pack and sled oozing along through the wet snow; no pretty red skis pounding out a track; no gigantic plastic boots; no climbing harness; no rope; not even 20 drenched souls plodding along in my ski track. In reality, I guess it was just the unrelenting rain and the certainty that we had to be out in it that reminded me of trudging to the likewise unavoidable third grade.

But enough about my soggy youth, I would have to concede that there is far more interest these days in the Shackleton story. Sir Ernest set out with his fine ship Endurance in 1914 with the goal of crossing Antarctica on foot. Instead, before "Shacks" and the gang reached the continent, they were caught in the sea ice, their ship was crushed, they drifted on the ice and got skinny for months before having to take to the lifeboats when the ice busted up. They made a remarkable voyage to a remarkably bleak place, Elephant Island, where they would never, ever have been found (although they would have learned to swallow a lot of seal blubber with a smile). Shackleton and five men then got in an open boat, the James Caird, and did 800 miles the hard way. Through some of the world's stormiest seas, short on food, water, and happy thoughts in general, they ended up right were they set out to go — South Georgia Island.

They knew there were whaling stations (which, sadly, symbolized "civilization" in those days) on South Georgia and the chance to get a rescue going for the gang doing the Elephant Island program. But Shackleton and his guys were pretty well hammered after that boat trip, and to make matters more complicated, they hadn't been able to get the James Caird to the side of South Georgia that had the factories and people. They would have to cross the island, which hadn't been done before.

South Georgia is a hundred mile-long sickle of big, sharp mountains, cold and heavy glaciers, and bizarre and beautiful wildlife (when it isn't being rendered down for oil, of course). The Island is not very wide. It is just spitting distance across in some places, with a good wind. And since the wind blows about 100mph every other hour just for the hell of it, well, I guess you could say that everything on South Georgia is usually within spitting distance.

Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean, and Frank Worsley set out to cross South Georgia back in 1916 to get a series of rescue efforts going. They were successful. They crossed glaciers and passes and miles of uncharted scary stuff. They reached Stromness and consequently ships and rescue reached all of the Endurance team left hither and thither chewing down bad rations and blubbery creatures. Not a man died, all were successfully delivered back to their draft boards for World War I, already well under way back home.

Many of us are fascinated by Shackleton's Endurance journey. We marvel at the bad circumstances, the good luck, the bravery, the drive and determination that saw them all through. We wanted to get a little closer to the whole darn thing than just the flood of books, films and lectures on the saga back in the states. But we need to be selective about what we re-create and replicate. Shackleton devotees would like to do everything from crushing a modern ship in the ice to re-enacting the First World War to really get the feel of the times. Luckily, I guide for a company that is happy to find some middle ground. Adventure Network International put together this Shackleton Commemorative crossing of South Georgia and asked me to head it up. I liked the idea. I've always been a sucker for mountains and glaciers and bad weather and a good goal. So ANI put me and the team on a ship and sent us away to the South Atlantic.

The first couple of days of the crossing didn't remind me at all of grade school. Things were so good that I was simply reminded that I've got the best job ever invented. Our team was strong and friendly, the weather was variable yet workable and the scenery was breathtaking. One could feel the vivid history of Shackleton, but also of the planet itself. Things went so well in those first days that the biggest trouble was folks complaining of seasickness in the tents. "Landsickness" really, when you wake up rocking and rolling to the ocean only to realize that the glaciers have no such motion going on. Blame it on our previous week aboard the good ship Grigoriy Mikheev on the way over from the tip of South America, but the Drake Passage was behind us and we were getting our land legs again and loving it.

The place is incredible. South Georgia is like the land that time forgot; there ought to be pterodactyls flying over it for effect or "Antarctic Park...the Movie," but back to our crossing. There came a day when the rain started falling. Death by hypothermia is nowhere near as sexy as getting bitten in half by a large Hollywood dinosaur, but there we were, dealing with the real world. After a day of waiting out the rain, I decided that we needed to go ahead with our little journey anyway and hope that things improved.

That is the tricky thing about an island crossing in the South Atlantic, once begun, it must be finished. And it can't just be finished anywhere you may choose. They haven't got helicopters in this part of the world for people wishing to dial up a rescue on the cell phone. And, for that matter, cell phones and sat phones are kind of scarce and worthless. There was our fine ship, but most of the glaciers we were on just went rudely down to the ocean without any sort of friendly taper to their terminus. When they simply end in a cliff dumping icebergs to sea, a Zodiac wouldn't be able to get in even if we found ourselves able get to the water's edge. We had definitely reached that point where we needed to keep going, not merely for the preservation of history but for the preservation of our very carcasses.

We clomped along in the rain and dense cloud and I started to do my guiding thing. That is to say, I began endlessly chewing over what could go wrong with our day. There is always that sneaky little fear of busting into a crevasse when one is on a glacier, but I was more concerned with things like losing my way in front of an audience or hearing a bloodcurdling scream from one of the 20 folks behind me. You know, the one that goes "AAAIIIEEE!!!! I'M TIRED AND COLD AND WET AND THIS IS UNFAIR AND WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND I'M NOT GOING ANOTHER STEP AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!!!"

So far, so good, I wasn't yet hearing that distinctive wail, when I saw the helicopter. Helicopter? Yeah, I know, I said there aren't any about. But the one we walked up on near the divide between the Crean and Fortuna Glaciers does exist. The thing is, it is upside down and busted in half. Crashed there back in 1982 when the British were going to retake South Georgia Island from Argentine troops, a small, sad sideshow to the Falklands Conflict.

"A good enough excuse for a restbreak," is what I thought, so I stopped my rope and the others joined us at the break. With rain dripping from my nose, I thanked Anne Kershaw, my boss back at Adventure Network, once again for stacking the deck in my favor. I realized as each of the four other ropes came in out of the rain and fog to sit around the wreck that such screams as I feared were not likely to originate from ropes guided by the team we had. Al Read, a legend of American guiding, head of Exum Mountain Guides and one of the people who literally pioneered commercial adventure travel, calmly pulled in. Jim Sano, another icon of the trade, head of Geographic Expeditions and lots of other good stuff came in sure and steady alongside Al. Jim Williams, the well-known workhorse and star of modern guiding and climbing marched in and finally there was Mark Tucker, one of my many rivals at Rainier Mountaineering Inc. for the last 15 years. I'd asked Tuck along, not simply because of his distinguished and ridiculously busy resumé of guiding and surfing, but so that I could keep an eye on the rascal... you know, to make certain I could stay six or eight jumps ahead of him in this odd business. But, of course, on that rainy day on the Shackleton Crossing, I was ever so grateful to have Tuck haul in with everything well under control.

We only rested for the few minutes it took to cram down some chocolate and a swig of water. Then I yelled "Saddle Up!" and we left the helicopter fading in its own little whiteout. A few hours farther along and we had reached the Fortuna Glacier and worse weather still. The wind was now screaming along steadily, luckily from behind us, but it was blowing something not quite rain and not quite snow. Every time I turned my head to check on the teams behind, the weather tried to sandblast the eyebrows off my face. So I stopped checking. I reasoned that an all-star cast of guides no longer needed me checking on them; they needed me to stay the course and pick the correct pace. Too fast and I worried about hearing that dreaded scream. Too slow and, as the guides had already cautioned me, we'd be unable to generate the necessary heat.

As we worked down and across the Fortuna, I began to play with some contingency plans. The weather was just getting worse in every way rather than better. It was back to rain, which I didn't like. I was no longer nostalgic for walking to school, I was nervous about anything going wrong. If somebody tweaked a knee and stopped the team, we would begin the hypothermia domino effect until we were all blue-lipped and useless. True, we could rebuild camp, and true, each person had one last set of fleece pants and sweater that were quasi-dry in a plastic bag in the pack, but also true that those would be the final cards we could play in the dry game. Building camp in such conditions means camp will be wet to start. Pulling out the dry stuff means it will only be dry for a few more minutes. So, if we were going to go that way, I wanted the timing to be right. These South Georgia storms aren't known for being user-friendly. They don't stop on schedule and they don't warn before intensifying. I knew our ship would come into Fortuna Bay to check on us that evening. I started thinking we might use them for a bit more than a check. I also decided to get down to Fortuna Bay by the surest route I could, rather than the steep and spooky gully that the Boss had led Worsley and Crean down in 1916. With five teams hauling sleds I couldn't afford to be wrong about which pass or which gully we committed to.

We came out from under the ragged clouds and I began to see my way down to the bay. The wind seemed to be full-on chasing us now, with gusts strong enough to knock down the light folks. I looked back to Peter Potterfield, anchor man for my rope, locked in mortal combat with his misbehaving sled, but somehow making it all work anyway. Each rope was now dealing with the inevitable glitches that come from descending on skis and snowshoes with loaded sleds and gushy snow. And they were dealing by pushing on. When I next saw Tuck, he had grown a second sled. Jim Williams had added someone's load to his pack. We didn't need to talk about it; the solution to our problem was to get down NOW. Toward that end, I got weaving through the crevasse terrain that finally revealed itself and I began calling "Grigoriy Mikheev, this is the Crossing Team, come in please."

Where the glacier finally played out just short of the beach, we set down loads and began working hard to get up tents. In the process, I kept trying to raise the ship, but since I couldn't see them in our bay yet, I knew we'd need to fend for ourselves for some hours. The team worked well still, with three people holding onto any given tent so that we didn't make a giant beach ball of them that could bound away in the wind. With the last rope safely in and the last tents going up, I brushed the rain off my sunglasses and peered around our gray little world. Yep, that was a herd of reindeer 200 feet away watching us cope (the Norwegians introduced them to the Island, they decided to stay after the whalers moved on). And yeah, those were a few hundred King Penguins standing by politely to one side, dressed to the nines. Those lumps on the beach were elephant seals and fur seals. None of these creatures seemed to think it was a particularly bad day. None of them was calling for Zodiacs. But I was. We wanted out.

All were safely in the tents and pulling out that final dry item or two when the guides and doctor Duncan had the stoves fired and hot water to pass out. I kept working the radio, calling every few minutes for the bridge of the Grigoriy Mikheev. A little time went by then, and I found myself thinking of how what we were doing absolutely did not compare to what Shackleton did. For one, he didn't face the prospect that Anne Kershaw would give him a Scottish yelling at if he screwed up. I did. He didn't have a ship to call in. I did. He didn't have a storm when he crossed. I did. He could always eat a penguin if he really needed to. I couldn't. He had men to rescue and a war to get back to. I didn't. He and his men were some of the toughest tourists of all time. We weren't. We wanted to see the scene of Ernest Shackleton's greatest triumph, we didn't want to die in that effort. I wanted a pick up.

Huddled under the cooking tent with Jim Williams, Tuck and the good Doctor, a stove sputtering away, standing in a few inches of water and leaning against the world's wettest snow, I tried one more time. Darkness would come in about 30 minutes. "Grigoriy Mikheev, Grigoriy Mikheev, this is the South Georgia Crossing Team, come in, please." And then there was a nice loud reply with a strong Russian accent, "Who's calling Grigoriy Mikheev?"

We looked at each other, four wet faces, huddled together, and we broke up laughing now. Really, who else would be calling the Grigoriy Mikheev? Contact made, and the ship pointed our way, I decided to walk that last hundred yards to the beach to see where the Zodiacs could come in. I found myself wetter than I'd dreamed was possible and shivering good and hard after even a few hours of lessened activity. Talking then with Bill Davis, our ship's expedition leader, he said the Zodiacs were on their way and dinner aboard would be at 9pm. Not bad.

We dried out and touristed about while the weather cycled through some more, and then we landed to ski and walk the last few hours into Stromness, completing our goal and wondering how Shackleton had felt as he took the same steps years ago. To know that he and his men were going to survive, that for a little while they'd all be safe and sound once again — against all odds. Our own challenges will never be so great, but surviving always does feel good, even a third grader knows that.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Correspondent