When Annie Aggens was a little girl growing up in Wilmette, her father read her bedtime stories of real-life adventurers.
One was of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton, and Aggens, now 45, still remembers the thrill she felt hearing how Shackleton, with a small group of men, kept his expedition team alive in 1916 by reaching South Georgia Island to the north of Antarctica to summon help, which saved the rest of the crew.
Today, Aggens is preparing to follow in Shackleton’s footsteps as one of the guides for a trek across South Georgia. The trip, planned as a centennial commemoration of the explorer’s 1915-16 odyssey, is the second such trip organized by Wilmette-based PolarExplorers – the first was in 2012. When Aggens talked about preparations for the Nov. 1-21 trip, her enthusiasm was palpable.
“This will be my first time crossing South Georgia Island, and I’m so excited I can hardly stand it. I grew up on these stories,” she said. “We started planning this trip two years ago and the fact that it’s the centennial makes it very special.”
Aggens said her love of outdoor adventure started in high school. She became an expedition guide as a freshman in college, she said, and joined PolarExplorers and its sister company, the Northwest Passage, in 1998.
“I like the simple lifestyle, and I guess I like the tangible risk and reward of what I do,” Aggens said. “My first trip to the North Pole was in 2000, and I really like the expeditionary mindset that you have to be in, to not be thrown by the unpredictable, whether that’s weather or ground conditions, or anything else.”
Aggens says unpredictability could have been the byword for the Shackleton adventure that she, PolarExplorers owner Rick Sweitzer – who also is from Wilmette – and six others will duplicate in part next month.
She said Shackleton was already well-known for two other Antarctic journeys, one with Commander Robert Scott, when he launched the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, with the goal of making a cross-continental Antarctic trek.
Aggens said the mission almost immediately went awry when Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became iced into the frozen Weddell Sea in January, 1915. Shackleton and his crew camped on the floe next to the ship and watched helplessly as it sank in November, 1915.
She said Shackleton kept his men together through marches, across ice floes, and eventually to barren Elephant Island. There, they equipped a lifeboat for a ocean voyage further north to South Georgia Island, where she said Shackleton knew of a manned whaling station.
Aggens said Shackleton and five others launched in April, 1916. They took slightly longer than two weeks to reach South Georgia, only to discover they had hit the wrong side of the island, she said. With two companions, Shackleton struggled across the mountainous, glacier-covered island, reaching the whaling station in May.
“The first people to see them ran away, because they never expected to see people coming from the interior of the island,” Aggens said. “And they were unrecognizable, with long hair and matted beards.”
Shackleton eventually rescued not only the three men left on the far side of the island but – after four unsuccessful attempts – the rest of the crew, in August, 1916, she said.
Aggens has parlayed her fascination with Shackleton into talks she gives to groups including the Geographic Society of Chicago. She said one amazing aspect of the Endurance adventure was the leadership choices Shackleton made. For instance, she said, he knew that keeping his men awake on the ocean journey and the cross-island trek was crucial; if they slept, they could die.
“He’d say they could sleep, and he’d pretend to go to sleep; he’d wait, and then five minutes later, he’d wake them up and tell them they’d slept for 45 minutes. So he kept them alive,” she said.
While Aggens, Sweitzer and their team will follow Shackleton’s general route, Aggens emphasized, “We won’t follow his mistakes, just his progress.”
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The group will take three nights and four days to cross the island, after getting there from the Falkland Islands in South America. Taking that long doesn’t mean the trip will be easy, Aggens said, because the weather will be extremely unpredictable.
“The temperatures can vary widely there,” she said. “Even though you can reach 50 degrees in the sun when the wind isn’t blowing, we’re expecting it to be around freezing. You can actually go through all four seasons in one day.”
But Aggens said the island is surprisingly full of life, with nutrient-rich waters providing food for penguins and seals.
“They sometimes call it the ‘Galapagos of … Antarctica,’ or ‘Antarctica in a nutshell,'” she said. “That’s going to be amazing to see.”
North Barrington resident Davis Nelsen will accompany Aggens and Sweitzer across the island. It will be his third polar trip with PolarExplorers, he said.
Nelsen, an avid downhill and cross-country marathon skier, said he was already comfortable “with snowshoes and skis and winter and cold” when he took part in a 2009 ski expedition to the North Pole to celebrate the centennial of Admiral Robert Peary’s trip there. Nelsen also said he took a 2011 ski trip to the South Pole.
“We’re going to get to see some incredible things, skiing up the South Georgia glacier,” Nelsen said. “This will be demanding, and I think it will be something that will give me a great deal of satisfaction to complete.
“The penguins will be the icing on the cake,” he added.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy