SOUL OF THE WILDERNESS Dashing Through the Snow- Amundsen, Scott, and Their Modern-Day Counterparts

• Main Author: M. Glover
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: South Pole; Amundsen-Scott; Antarc*; Antarctica; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.556.833; http://www.wilderness.net/library/documents/glover.pdf

Ml HENEVER I HEAR THE WORD ANTARCTICA, thefirst thing I think of is the famous beautifully dra-. matic story of the race to the South Pole between the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Englishman Robert Scott in 1911 and 1912. To me that story is as powerful as I imagine the story of the Battle of Gettysburg would be to a Civil War historian, or as The Odyssey is to a classicist. It contains the elements of all great stones: love and hate, pride and humility courage and cowardice, and an epic journey into the unknown. Like all good stories, it offers lessons and insights still worth-while today In this article, I’d like to review the story of Amundsen and Scott to see what it might tell us about wilder-ness leadership and about how our specific cultures affect our attitudes toward wilderness and its exploration. In June 1910 Robert Scott left England, to great fanfare, with a crew of 72 men who had the purpose of reaching the