Alex Honnold on Watkins during his Yosemite Triple; Video still courtesy Sender Films

There’s a moment in Sender Films’s new documentary Honnold 3.0 that is utterly terrifying to watch. At age 27, Alex Honnold has emerged as the world’s premier free-solo rock climber. In the film, he’s in the first leg of his “Yosemite Triple”—an attempt to climb the three biggest faces in the Valley, Mount Watkins, El Capitan, and Half Dome, in record time. Back-to-back through the night. Solo. And almost the whole way without the aid of a rope or fixed pitons or bolts to clip.

Alex Honnold on Half Dome during his Yosemite Triple; Video still courtesy Sender Films

Honnold calls it “daisy-soloing.” On all but the very hardest moves, he’s pure free soloing. If he falls, he dies. But on the really dicey spots—pendulums, roofs seeping with rainwater, 5.12 moves on slopers—he’ll clip in briefly to a fixed piece of protection with his nylon daisy-chain, and even grab that piece to swing upward a few feet, before unclipping and re-entering the free-solo void.

Perhaps a thousand feet up the south face on Mount Watkins, Honnold has the fingers of his right hand clamped to a small hold above his head. With his left hand, he’s reaching gingerly to clip the chain to a bolt to his left. The camera seems to be only six feet away. Only the upper half of Honnold’s body is in the frame. The concentration on his face is elemental.

Honnold stretches his arm as far as he can reach. He’s two inches short of clipping the bolt.

And then his foot slips. Honnold’s body lurches downward six or eight inches, then comes to a sudden stop. The look in his eyes never changes. He reaches again, clips his ‘biner to the bolt, and swings his weight onto it.

Alex Honnold bouldering in a scene in Honnold 3.0; Video still courtesy Sender Films

When Honnold 3.0 screened at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival this November, at the moment of that foot-slip the audience of 950 adventure junkies in the Eric Harvie Theatre uttered a collective gasp, pierced with a few groans and shrieks. I’d gotten to know Alex pretty well when I hung out with him for a week at Smith Rock in Oregon in 2010, as I profiled him for Outside magazine. I must have asked him five or six times, “What if you slip and fall?”

Alex had his pat answer: “It’ll be the worst five seconds of my life.”

In the Eric Harvie Theatre, after the showing of Honnold 3.0, producer-director Peter Mortimer came on stage to answer questions. From the audience, I asked, “What did Alex say later about that foot slip on Watkins?”

“He didn’t even remember it,” Mortimer answered. Another gasp from the crowd. “We put a clip of it up on You Tube. After Alex saw it, he called me. ‘Hey, dude, I do 7,500 feet of rock climbing in one day, and you choose the one moment where my foot slips!’”

Mortimer adds, “I pressed him about it. ‘It was no big deal,’ Alex answered. ‘I had a solid hold for my right hand.’” Among his Yosemite pals, I knew, the climbing prodigy had acquired a nickname: Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold.

Just four years ago, Honnold was a nobody. He’d pulled off his first two colossal free solos—of Moonlight Buttress (5.12d) in Zion and the northwest face of Half Dome (5.12) in Yosemite—with an audience of zero, having told only a friend or two about his upcoming projects the day before he pulled them off.

Peter Mortimer, the founder of Sender Films, took notice and got in touch with Honnold. Despite insisting on his love of privacy, Alex agreed to recreate the two great solos for a film. Alone on the Wall, which appeared in 2009, quickly won major prizes at festivals, including Mountainfilm in Telluride, the Trento Film Festival in Italy, and the Kendal Mountain Film Festival in England.

Thanks in large part to Sender Films, Honnold quickly became a celebrity, appearing on the cover of National Geographic and in a feature on 60 Minutes, during which a smitten Lara Logan caresses Alex’s fingertips as she tries to divine from them the secret of Honnold’s genius.

At the Banff festival this November, Honnold 3.0 won the prize for Best Climbing Film. Appearing on stage, Mortimer magnanimously claimed, “This award goes to Alex. He’s the one making the magic happen. We were just fortunate to follow him around.”

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Alex Honnold with Pete Mortimer in the background; Photograph courtesy Sender Films

Despite his “aw-shucks” modesty, Pete Mortimer is in the process of redefining the adventure-film genre. At Banff this November, the documentaries his teams produced won an unprecedented three different prizes. Besides Honnold 3.0 for the Best Climbing Film, Wide Boyz—a whimsical journey with two British lads determined to break the sound barrier of off-width crack climbing—won the Best Short Mountain film award, and La Dura Dura, which covers the grunting, shrieking duel of Chris Sharma and Adam Ondra on what may be the hardest single-pitch rock climb in the world, took home the coveted People’s Choice prize for Radical Reels. Appearing onstage to receive his third glass trophy of the night, Mortimer was scolded by the presenter, “Pete, this is getting a little ridiculous.”

Although Mortimer founded Sender Films only in 2005, his small team of indie filmmakers has indeed already won a ridiculously long list of prizes worldwide, at festivals not only in Banff, Telluride, Kendal, and Trento, but also Taos, Boulder, Sheffield and Edinburgh (U. K.), Squamish and Vancouver and Montreal (Canada), Ushuaia (Argentina), Graz (Austria), Torelló (Spain), and New Zealand and Australia.

The REEL ROCK tour, which Mortimer launched with fellow adventure filmmaker Josh Lowell shortly after founding Sender, is currently the hottest thing of its kind. At a showing of its latest installment, REEL ROCK 7, in a funky old armory building in Somerville, Massachusetts, I was amazed to see gaggles of twelve-year-old girls—the very kids you’d expect to line up for The Hunger Games or The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—hanging on every screen sequence that captured the antics of Honnold, Sharma, or Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker on the Shark’s Fin in the Garhwal Himalaya.

What’s the recipe for Sender, REEL ROCK, and Mortimer’s success? It’s some amalgamation of humor, fast pacing and clever editing, unrehearsed sound bites from athletes caught close-up during bursts of manic performance, all leavened by the authenticity of real risk and genuine adventure. Mortimer is not the Warren Miller of today’s adventure films. His features are compulsively watchable without being slick. No one would ever call “La Dura Dura” climbing porn. Whatever the key to the “magic” is, it belongs to Mortimer as much as to such protagonists as Honnold.

And it seems to be grounded in Mortimer’s character. At Banff and shortly afterward, I caught up with the filmmaker, hoping to probe his technique and his vision—if so artsy a term can be applied to such a down-home guy. What I found was a 38-year-old man, married, with one kid and another on the way, who emanates the enthusiasm of a youngster who’s just discovered what he loves doing most in life, and can’t quite believe that people will pay the price of admission to watch him do it.

The Sender Films Crew at the Boulder, Colorado, premiere of Reel Rock World Tour, from left: Nick Rosen, Pete Mortimer, Victoria Bisharat, Alex Honnold, and Josh Lowell; Photograph courtesy Sender Films

From the outset, however, Mortimer insisted on sharing the credit for his achievement. “All our films are deep collaborations,” he told me, “and while I have a big role, what makes the REEL ROCK program so strong is that Josh Lowell and Nick Rosen are going deep with me.  On La Dura Dura, for instance, a team of cameramen spent months filming. Then, after we structured the piece, Josh plunged far into the edit while I gave notes and feedback. I think what has taken our films so far beyond my early stuff is the group dynamic and what we all bring to the table.”

*   *   *

Pete Mortimer started climbing at age 14 in his native Boulder, Colorado, at Fairview High, where climbing legend Roger Briggs was the physics teacher. The school offered a “class” that snagged phys-ed credit for a whole day’s play at Eldorado once a week. At Colorado College (CC), though he majored in geology, Mortimer gravitated to a video class. At CC he also became close buddies with his fellow students and future collaborators, Rosen and Lowell.

After a few years working at the New York Film Academy, where he learned his trade from the ground up (“I spent a lot of time cleaning cameras”), Mortimer headed to USC for grad school in filmmaking. It was here that his two roads diverged in the proverbial yellow wood. “I could have gone the conventional route,” Mortimer reflects, “catching on with a Hollywood studio as an assistant and slowly working my way up. Or I could do my own thing.”

His own thing was making indie films. And his passion was still climbing. Scraping together $10,000, Mortimer made his first real film, called Scary Faces, about a small coterie of pals trying to lead a dangerous run-out route called Jules Verne at Eldorado. He wangled a screening at the Boulder Theater, sponsored by Rock and Ice magazine.  “I was so nervous,” Mortimer remembers. “The theater holds nine hundred seats. I was sure nobody would show up. My parents bought sixty tickets, just to guarantee that somebody would be in the audience. And the night of the screening, it was snowing.

“When I showed up, the line stretched four blocks long. They had to turn people away. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a whole new concept—an entire community turning out to see a rock climbing film.”

In 2003, Mortimer produced Front Range Freaks, a single DVD showcasing seven short films. Compared to Sender’s films today, Freaks seems raw and a little haphazard, but the Mortimer stamp is there—lots of fast-motion footage, pulsating music, ad-libbed asides as the subject mugs for the camera, and above all, zany humor. The touchstone piece on the DVD is “Urban Ape,” which consists of little more than Timmy O’Neill buildering all over Boulder and Denver as he fires off wisecracks, blowing the minds of pedestrians and policemen in the process. You can’t turn it off.

Characteristically, Mortimer salutes O’Neill’s gift for comedy as making the film soar, rather than his own talent as a cinematographer and screenwriter.

In his first years of filming climbers around Boulder, Mortimer often got stood up by the local rock stars, some of whom he had looked up to as heroes. But after the suprising success of “Front Range Freaks,” which won prizes at Banff, Vancouver, Telluride, Taos, and Kendal, Mortimer and his colleagues had no trouble garnering the collaboration of far more famous climbers, including Dean Potter, Ueli Steck, Chris Sharma, and Steph Davis. “All these folks want to share their feats with a larger public,” Mortimer insists.

In 2006 Mortimer lured his college pal Nick Rosen back from grad school at Columbia University to help him write and produce. Rosen agreed to a salary of fifteen grand for a six months’ trial, during which he lived in a room in Mortimer’s house. With the pair’s founding of Sender Films, Mortimer and Co. hit the fast track. Meanwhile, “We started to see the potential of screening tours.” REEL ROCK arrived in 2006, as Mortimer and Rosen teamed up with Josh Lowell, who had started his own film company, Big Up Productions. From forty shows around the country in its initial year, the tour has burgeoned to 400 venues in 2012-13. And, as I saw at the Somerville armory, most of those screenings sell out, and a substantial portion of the audience is young. Very young: from six to sixteen. “Those kids get it,” says Mortimer. “They get the connection between Conrad Anker and Adam Ondra.”

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With its zany, wisecracking, sheer funhoggery, the Sender Films “message” could easily have become a shtick. Yet Mortimer, like every other devotee who laces up his rock shoes and ties in to a rope, had to confront the reality that climbing is dangerous, that far too many of its practitioners die on the crags and in the mountains. Amidst the levity of Front Range Freaks, Dirty Bird, a moving tribute to Derek Hersey, the pioneering free soloist who fell to his death in Yosemite in 1993, stands out for its somber avoidance of the clichés of sorrow and bereavement.

In 2010, Sender Films put out a boxed set of six DVDs under the title “First Ascent: The Series.” The compilation is Mortimer’s magnum opus to date. By far the hardest of the films to produce was Point of No Return. In 2009, Jonny Copp and Micah Dash, two of Boulder’s most ambitious climbers, set off to climb Mount Dojitsenga in Tibet. When their permit fell through, they shifted their objective to the little-known, unclimbed east face of Mount Edgar in western China.

Copp and Dash were close friends and climbing buddies of Mortimer and his colleagues. The plan was for the two to shoot videos of their voyage in to base camp and up on the wall, to be edited by Sender once they returned. To enhance the footage, Mortimer and Rosen asked Wade Johnson—a young cameraman with little climbing experience—to tag along. Johnson had no intentions of going up on the face itself.

Mount Edgar turned out to be hideously dangerous, with barrages of falling rock coming down during all the hours of day and night. After weeks of waiting out storms, Copp and Dash reluctantly agreed to abandon the climb. On the verge of heading home, all three men hiked up toward the base of the wall to retrieve gear they had cached. And sometime during that short foray, a gigantic avalanche swept the face, killing all three men. The bodies of Copp and Johnson were later found, but Dash’s was not.

The search teams, including Nick Rosen, found extensive video footage in the trio’s base camp. Back in Boulder, Mortimer and Rosen agonized over whether to call off the whole project, or turn it into a film. And they suffered enormous guilt over having sent Wade Johnson to China—even though Johnson was eager to go.

“We finally decided to go ahead with it,” says Mortimer, “when Wade’s mother told us, ‘If you can make the film, do it.’ She’d always wanted to go to the Himalaya herself.”

Point of No Return is excruciating to watch, because we know how the story ends. In Boulder, Copp and Dash goof around for the camera even as they work out training for Mount Edgar. Every pronouncement from their lips seems fraught with impending doom. Copp says that thanks to all his experience in the mountains, “I feel that I can get myself out of anything I get myself into.” Both men talk about how hard it is to leave their girlfriends, and there’s an extended scene at the airport as Copp and his sweetheart hold a passionate embrace.

At base camp, the men wait through weeks of storm, growing more and more discouraged. The rocks falling around them are pregnant with warning. Yet even in the rain, the men dance and sing as Copp plays a wooden flute. Then the weather changes. “Holy shit!” one of them yells. “It’s clearing! Let’s go!”

Yet caution prevails. Copp: “I’ve been in two avalanches in my life. I don’t want to get caught in another avalanche . . . . We don’t want a fifty-fifty chance of dying. That’s not a manageable number.”

In the end, they make the right decision—to give up. There’s only that one last hike to perform, to retrieve their cache . . . .

Watching the film for the first time, I screamed internally, Leave the fucking gear! Just go home!

Had Sender Films produced a dramatic recreation of the Mount Edgar tragedy, all those lines the men deliver would have been pilloried as heavy-handed foreshadowing. But we’re constantly aware that none of the men’s talk was rehearsed. It’s what they really said to each other as they waited out the storms. It’s what the film canisters contained when the rescue team retrieved them. It captures the ambivalence at the heart of every daring adventure.

Point of No Return achieves an ending that earns its affirmation, as back in Boulder, the friends of the three victims gather to celebrate their short lives. They cheer and yell, even as they weep.

I’ve never seen a film quite like it.

*   *   *

By early 2010, I was vaguely aware of Sender Films and Alex Honnold, but when I served on the film jury at Telluride that May, both the climber and the film company leapt onto my radar. Alone on the Wall so easily outdistanced the other entries for the Charlie Fowler Adventure Award that my fellow jurors and I didn’t hesitate in unanimously giving it the prize.

Alone on the Wall is also Sender’s most successful film to date. In getting the private purist that Alex was back in 2009 to agree to recreate for the camera his astonishing free solos of Moonlight Buttress and the northwest face of Half Dome, Mortimer scored a coup. But it was a triumph that took brilliant climbing choreography to pull off, as the cameramen had to rappel into position to document Alex’s daring moves from only a few feet away. The film succeeds not simply because it captures Alex’s “magic,” but because, like Point of No Return, it raises fundamental questions about life and death.

I’ve showed my copy of Alone on the Wall to several dozen non-climbing friends. At least half of them have said something like, “This is sick. Doesn’t he realize he’s going to kill himself?” Several have declared, 15 minutes in, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t watch this.” On my tenth viewing, even I find my palms sweating.

At Banff, five months after Telluride, I met Mortimer for the first time, as I researched my Honnold profile for Outside. With Alex sitting nearby, I asked Mortimer about the responsibility involved in pressuring the soloist to perform for the camera.

“I worry for sure about what we’re asking him to do,” Mortimer answered. “If we pose him on a wall, and he slips and falls and dies, I’d feel one-hundred percent responsible.”

To which Alex quipped, “Yeah, but if I fell 70 feet and broke my ankle, you’d say, ‘Great! Can you do it again?’”

We all three laughed. But when the Outside fact-checkers ran the exchange by Mortimer, he balked. Did he come across as insincere, even pious? To his credit, he never denied that the conversation had taken place, and Outside ran with it.

Honnold 3.0, the new REEL ROCK film that climaxes with Alex’s Yosemite Triple, represents an even more remarkable cinematic coup. Alone on the Wall was a recreation of two climbs. To capture Alex on his race up the faces of Mount Watkins, El Capitan, and Half Dome, the filmmakers had to be there when it happened. There would be no recreations, no second takes.

Mortimer explained to me how he pulled it off. “This was a feat that could not be covered by only two or three cameramen, no matter how skillful they were,” he said. “We needed to pinpoint the key spots on the three climbs, and get in position to be ready when Alex came by. So we hired ten different cameramen, and we chose Alex’s climbing buddies, even if they weren’t that experienced at shooting, just so Alex would feel more comfortable with their presence. We had to be on El Cap in the dark.

“For example, Cheyne Lempe rope-soloed up to the Boot Flake on the Nose, then just waited. He could see Alex’s headlamp as he approached, and he got those hundred feet of critical footage. As Alex climbed by, he said, ‘Hey, Cheyne, how’s it going?’

“Sean Leary, who’s climbed a lot with Alex, rapped down six hundred feet from the top to the Great Roof. He’s such a good climber that he jugged those six hundred feet, shooting Alex all the way to the top.

“Even so, there was some great stuff we missed. When he started up the Nose in the dark, Alex forgot his chalk bag. Rather than waste time rapping down to get it, he climbed on. Ran into some guys bivouacking on the Sickle Ledge. They took one look and said, ‘God, it’s Alex Honnold.’ He said sheepishly, ‘Hey guys, I forgot my chalk bag. Do you think I could borrow—‘

“’Yeah, yeah, take it, of course,’ they answered. ‘It’s an honor.’ The minute Alex was gone, they called their wives on their cell phones to tell them what happened.

“I would have given anything to have caught that moment on film, but we just weren’t there.”

*   *   *

Right now, Sender Films, the REEL ROCK Tour, and Peter Mortimer’s team are at the top of their game. So what comes next?

The big project on the drawing table—seven years in the making, with a scheduled release date of spring 2014—will be called Valley Uprising. It’s a comprehensive history of climbing in Yosemite, melding together vintage stills and clips with the best new footage Sender can craft.

Recently Mortimer and Rosen gave me a sneak peek at a two-minute clip from Valley Uprising. It’s pretty damn exciting. To make a slightly far-fetched analogy, if the clip is representative of the whole, it’ll be as if Ken Burns had played second base for the Red Sox before retiring to produce Baseball.

And a year and a half from now, I’m pretty sure, those twelve-year-old girls in the audience, who have never before heard of Yvon Chouinard or Royal Robbins, will be biting their knuckles as they watch how the Gods of Camp Four danced up vertical rock, decades before they were born.

See the Sender Films team on CBS This Morning:

H.M.S. Intrepid, under the command of Irish explorer Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, is trapped in pack ice in Baffin Bay, circa 1853. McClintock is on his first mission to find the 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin, which disappeared during a search for the Northwest Passage. From a sketch by Commander May R.N. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

More than six decades before Scott reached the South Pole, Sir John Franklin led an expedition into the Canadian Arctic that would turn into the greatest catastrophe in polar history. Attempting the long-sought Northwest Passage, the hypothesized shortcut from Europe to Asia, Franklin set off from England in 1845 with two powerful steam-driven ships, the Erebus and the Terror, in charge of 128 officers and men. It was the strongest expedition ever launched in the Arctic, and the Admiralty was confident of success.

When the summers of 1846 and 1847 passed with no word from Franklin’s party, the Royal Navy launched a massive search. Over the following years, dozens of relief missions, both British and American, sailed and marched overland into the Canadian Arctic looking for clues. It was not until 1850 that one of these parties found the remains of Franklin’s first winter camp, along with the graves of three seamen, on the coast of Beechey Island. But that team found no written record of the expedition’s progress through the spring of 1846.

It was not until 1854 that a surveyor, doctor John Rae, met Inuit (Eskimo) near King William Island who carried artifacts from the doomed expedition and related grim stories about the demise of Franklin’s men. And it was not until 1859 that another explorer, Francis Leopold McClintock, found a single piece of paper enclosed in a tin container in a cairn on King William Island, on which was scrawled the sole surviving record of what happened to Franklin and his men.

That record is so maddeningly brief and vague that ever since, it has served as a Delphic riddle from which generations of historians have launched their wildly speculative narratives. On the piece of paper, James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, penned a few lines giving the latitude and longitude of the first overwintering, ending, “All well. Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the Ships on Monday 24 May 1847.” A second entry, added almost a year later, curls around the margins of the paper. It reveals that the ships were abandoned on April 22, 1848, having first been frozen into the sea ice in September 1846, then closes, “Sir John Franklin died on 11 June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.” A last postscript reads, “And start tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River.”

Five years earlier, the Inuit had told John Rae that their brethren had watched the sailors slowly starve and die of scurvy on King William Island. (The Britishers refused to eat the fat and internal organs of seal and walrus that kept the Inuit healthy.) The natives further testified that in extremis, Franklin’s men had cannibalized each other.

England blamed the messenger: Rae was vilified in the newspapers. In high dudgeon, Charles Dickens accused the “lying savages,” whose testimony was “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people,” of murdering the sailors and concocting the cannibalism story to cover their crime. No one wanted to believe that stalwart British citizens might resort to eating each other.

Over the century and a half since McClintock’s discovery of the note, many more Franklin relics and several graves and scattered bones have been found along the track of the men’s desperate retreat south from King William Island. Forensic study of the bones has proved beyond a doubt that the Inuit claim of extensive cannibalism was true. But not a single further note or diary page has come to light. And despite intensive underwater searches in recent years, no trace of the Erebus or Terror has yet been found.

Among the 129 men aboard the ships, probably all the officers and many of the men kept diaries. Some of them may also have written down a full account of their plight after the ships were locked in ice. Lady Jane Franklin, who knew the very shape and feel of her husband’s diary, offered a reward of £700 for its recovery.

What happened to all the records? Rae suggested that the Inuit, who had a superstitious fear of paper with writing on it, may have thrown them away or destroyed them. The last words of Franklin and his men, written on the wind, have vanished forever. Only the mystery remains.

Members of the Robert F. Scott expedition standing in front of Roald Amundsen's tent at the South Pole, 1912. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress

“Great God! This is an awful place,” wrote Robert Falcon Scott in his diary on January 17, 1912. Just hours before, Scott and his four companions had reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen’s team had beaten them there by a month.

Nine weeks later, doomed by a combination of starvation, scurvy, and hypothermia, Scott and his last two surviving teammates lay marooned in a tent. A nine-day storm prevented their sledging the last eleven miles to a food depot that might have saved their lives. Scott knew he was going to die, and he kept writing in his diary until the very end. He prepared a “message to the public” that closed, “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale . . . .”

The last to die, Scott was determined to leave the best record possible of his team’s gallant and tragic adventure. Today, March 29, marks the centenary of his final entry. He closed the passage thus: “I do not think we can hope for any better things. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.” Then, with the pencil almost falling out of his hand, he wrote, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” Yet he added a final cry of despair:  “For God’s sake look after our people.”

More than three weeks earlier, the ship that had come down to Antarctica to pick up the expedition personnel had to steam out of McMurdo Sound, bound for England, for fear of getting frozen into the late-summer ice. By then, the rest of Scott’s Terra Nova team in the hut at Cape Evans were all but certain that the polar party had perished. Yet thirteen of those men volunteered to stay on, spend another nightmarish winter in Antarctica, and search for the bodies the next spring.

Heroism of this sort—and the eloquence of Scott’s diary—are in short supply today. Indeed, the race for the South Pole seems now to have a quaint, period flavor. At Scott’s “awful place,” a two-story building complex stands—the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, complete with cafeteria, fitness center, sauna, and full-length basketball court.

In Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair, published in 1951, the protagonist, Maurice Bendrix (very much Greene’s alter ego), takes down a copy of Scott’s diary from the shelf of his dead lover’s cherished childhood books. “That had been one of my own favourite books,” Bendrix muses. “It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own. Two wars stood between us and them.”

Indeed, the hundred years since Scott’s demise have changed the exploration game forever. Technological advances in connectedness have replaced Scott’s “message to the public” with Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Canned, broadcast live to the world, an instant sound bite—yet in 1969, had anything gone wrong with Apollo 11, Armstrong and his two crewmates on the moon would have been as far beyond hope of rescue as Scott was on the polar plateau.

In 1996, as Rob Hall lay dying just below the summit of Mount Everest, out of reach of any rescuers, other climbers on the mountain managed to patch Hall through via radio to his wife, Jan Arnold, in New Zealand, seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child. Their last exchange had a terrible poignancy of its own, and there was nothing canned about what Hall said in his last moments alive. But dozens of others in various camps on Everest listened in live, and within days a transcript of the radio conversation was available to the public.

There was an odd note about the exchange, as Arnold, who had climbed Everest herself and knew better, said, “I’m looking forward to making you completely better when you come home,” to which Hall replied, “Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Denial? Or Arnold’s desperate last effort to get Hall to pull himself together and try to descend on his own?

During his own last days in Antarctica, Scott wrote a letter to his beloved wife, Kathleen. There was no attempt in it to sidestep the grim truth. “You know I have loved you,” Scott wrote, “you know my thoughts must have constantly dwelt on you and oh dear me you must know that quite the worst aspect of this situation is the thought that I shall not see you again. The inevitable must be faced.”

Scott had no certainty that his last camp would ever be found. Many another polar explorer has vanished forever, leaving no last words to explicate his fate. The diary was a message in a bottle, thrown into the vast ocean of the frozen continent.

It was not until November 12, 1912, more than seven months after Scott’s last entry, that a search party came upon the tent, in which the bodies of Scott and his two teammates still lay in their sleeping bags. The searchers collapsed the tent without removing the bodies, built a cairn of snow over it, and erected a memorial cross. It was, as one of the party, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, later wrote, “a grave which kings must envy.”

And the searchers retrieved Scott’s diary. In 1973, I paid my first visit to the British Library in London. Browsing in the main exhibit hall, I lingered for several minutes over the only extant copy of William Shakespeare’s signature, until a glass case in the center of the hall caught my eye. Inside the case, propped open to the last page, I found Scott’s diary. As I read the words I knew by heart, a frisson, the likes of which I had never before felt in a museum or library, crept up my spine and settled in my shoulders.

“Period” Scott’s heroism may seem today, but for me the frisson is still there. On that smudged final page, Scott managed to put down what are surely the most moving last words any explorer ever wrote. One hundred years later, they still pierce the heart.

By David Roberts; Photograph by London News/Getty Images

It was the strangest of all races. Two teams of five men each—one British, the other Norwegian—set out at the beginning of the 1911 Antarctic summer, both bent on becoming the first explorers to reach the South Pole. The British team was led by 43-year-old Robert Falcon Scott, the Norwegian by 39-year-old Roald Amundsen. Each man had already made bold expeditions to the Antarctic region.

Yet because the two expeditions had chosen to build their coastal base camps 600 miles apart, at either edge of the vast Ross Ice Shelf, their paths would never overlap, and the two teams would never catch sight of each other. There was no way to know who was leading the race.

After wintering over in Framheim, Amundsen’s team set out on October 18. Scott’s party did not depart from Cape Evans until November 1. The two parties had about the same distance—roughly 800 miles in a straight line—to cover to get to 90 degrees south. Yet their traveling styles were utterly different, and those differences would spell victory and defeat. Amundsen used dogs to haul his sledges, while the men skied; to supplement the rations they carried, they would kill and eat the dogs when they succumbed to exhaustion. Scott experimented in vain with ponies and motorized tractors, but ended up heading for the Pole with his men in harnesses, pulling their heavy sledges themselves. At the last minute, unwilling to exclude the plucky “Birdie” Bowers from the party as it neared its goal, Scott ended up launching his final push with four pairs of skis for five men. Bowers had to plod along in his boots, plunging deep into the snow at every step.

After nearly two months of smooth progress, Amundsen’s team pitched their tent at 89˚45’ S., a mere 15 miles from the Pole. The men were almost too excited to sleep. They also wrestled with the same disturbing question:

What if they discovered that Scott’s team had made it there first. At 3 p.m., on December 14, the dog-drivers simultaneously barked out the command “Halt!” As closely as their navigational instruments could determine, they stood exactly at 90 degrees south. There was no sign that anyone had ever been there before.

It was almost anti-climatic. Wrote Amundsen later, with his characteristic self-effacement, “The goal was reached, the journey ended. I cannot say—though I know it would sound much more effective—that the object of my life was attained. That would be romancing rather too barefacedly.”

The men spent three days at the Pole, sending out skiers in each direction to crisscross the plateau and plant markers, to prove to any future doubters that the Norwegians had indeed accomplished the feat that explorers had dreamed of for centuries.

They slaughtered Helge, “an uncommonly useful and good-natured dog” who had played out: “[W]ithin a couple of hours there was nothing left of him but his teeth and the tuft of his tail,” Amundsen wrote. On the last evening in the tent, the taciturn Olav Bjaaland surprised everyone by standing up and delivering “a really fine oration.” At the end of his speech, he pulled out a case of cigars he had secretly carried with him through the long sledge journey and offered one to each of his comrades. “A cigar at the Pole!” Amundsen recorded. “What do you say to that?”

The festive mood stretched through the three days. As the team departed on December 18, they left behind a tall brown tent with their country’s flag mounted atop the center pole. Inside they deposited a letter to King Haakon VII, with a note asking Scott to deliver it—not a thumbing of Norwegian noses at the British, but a documentation of their triumph in case Amundsen’s party disappeared on their return journey. “Scott will arrive during the next day or two,” the leader told one of his teammates. “If I know the British, they won’t give up once they’ve started.”

Less than a year later Amundsen gave his first American lecture on his historic expedition to the National Geographic Society. Today, he is acclaimed as the greatest polar explorer of all time.

Six years before reaching the South Pole, he had completed the first traverse of the Northwest Passage, a quest that had previously claimed hundreds of lives and stymied a half-century of British expeditions there. And in 1926, in a dirigible designed by the Italian engineer Umberto Nobile, Amundsen flew over the North Pole, as he and his South Pole teammate Oscar Wisting became the first men to reach both poles, whether on foot or by air. Tragically, Amundsen died two years later when his plane crashed on a rescue mission over the Barents Sea north of Norway. His body was never found.

More than a month after Amundsen reached it, Scott and his teammates, on January 17, 1912, stumbled to the Pole. The discovery of the Norwegian tent, the flag, and the letter to the king came as the cruelest possible blow at the end of an unimaginably cruel journey. “Great God! this is an awful place,” wrote Scott in his diary.

On their return journey to Cape Evans, all five men died of frostbite, starvation, and exhaustion. Trapped in a tent with his two surviving teammates, as a nine-day storm prevented them from reaching a life-saving depot of food and cooking gas only eleven miles away, Scott was the last to die. He kept making entries in his diary till the end, and on March 29, he penned his last words: “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” R. SCOTT.

At some point he added: “Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people.”