A South Georgia Odyssey
Stephen Venables
South Georgia is one of the most remote islands on earth in the vast emptiness of the Southern Ocean, 1500 kilometres from the Falkland islands. It is a mountain paradise with glaciers tumbling almost 3000 meters from the highest summits to the sea. Where the ice has receded, the cliffs and beaches are thronged with penguins, seals and albatrosses. It is one of the world’s greatest wildlife places.
Stephen Venables recounts his adventures on one of the first mountaineering expeditions ever to visit South Georgia. Bludgeoned by blizzards, his team sheltered for 23 days in an ice cave before emerging to make first ascents of some of the highest peaks on the island. But this is much more than a climbing tale: in his finely observed portrait, Venables draws on accounts by Captain Cook, who discovered South Georgia in 1775, Anton Larsen, founder of the first whaling station, the actor and explorer Duncan Carse, Nick Barker, Captain of the Endurance during the 1982 conflict, and, of course, Ernest Shackleton, whose crossing of South Georgia after a gruelling open boat voyage in 1916 was the final chapter in of one of the most gripping survival epics of all time.
This special new edition of "Island at the Edge of the World" includes an updated historical appendix and an extra chapter, illustrated with 16 new pages of stunning colour photos, describing Venables’ more recent expeditions to the island. In 2008, with the renowned yachtsman Skip Novak, he guided a party on the famous Shackleton Traverse; eight years earlier in 2000 he followed the same route with two of the world’s best known mountaineers, Conrad Anker and Reinhold Messner, during the making of the IMAX movie, Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure. A fantastic book written by one of the worlds best alpinists and finest writers about one of the most stunning places on earth!!