As a people, we’re an adventurous sort, always balancing our pleasures with the risks involved in achieving them. Since we’re unable to look to the future for events to recreate (or just create, in that sense), people are always looking to the past for inspiration, motivated by some truly amazing feats from human history, accomplished against all odds. Personally, I look to Wilt Chamberlain’s Lothario lifestyle, at least until my wife is around. A team of British and Australian risk-takers looks further back.

Australian explorer Tim Jarvis has spent the last six years planning to lead this team on a trip replicating the unimaginable, awe-inducing journey of oft-unmentioned British explorer Ernest Shackleton. From 1914-1917, Shackleton went from goals of exploring the Antarctic land mass to heading rescue missions to save most of his crew. His ship, the Endeavor, got stuck in the frozen waters, and he and his crew lived on it and a series of ice floes for months until he finally reached solid land, the inhospitable Elephant Island. He then took a rowboat with a smaller crew across 800 miles of stormy waters to South Georgia Island. Trading sea legs for land legs, Shackleton then traversed 32 miles on foot over the mountainous terrain to finally get word to someone that a rescue mission was in order. Though Shackleton eventually died of a heart attack, I like to think it actually came out of his body and literally attacked him.