By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland.
David Roberts, veteran mountain climber and chronicler of adventures ( Washington Post ), draws on firsthand accounts and archival materials to tell the story of this daring expedition and of the epic Survival ordeal that ensued..
On April 21, four months after Courtauld began his solitary vigil, Gino Watkins set out inland with two companions to find and rescue him.
He was buried under an immovable load of frozen snow and was disastrously short on supplies.
By the end of March, Courtauld\'s situation was desperate.
When a team went up in March to relieve Courtauld, after weeks of brutal effort to make the 130-mile journey, they could find no trace of him or the station.
To enable the mission to go forward, he would monitor the station solo through the winter.
Then team member August Courtauld made an astonishing offer.
When they arrived at the ice cap, there were not enough provisions and fuel for another two-man shift, so the station would have to be abandoned.
The first crisis came in the fall when a snowstorm stranded a resupply mission halfway to the top for many weeks.
But he had several daring trips to the Arctic under his belt and no one doubted his judgement.
Watkins was younger than anyone under his command.
No one had ever tried to winter over in that hostile landscape, let alone manage a weather station through twelve continuous months.
Watkins\'s scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to monitor the station for two months at a time.
Temperatures plunging lower than -50o Fahrenheit in the winter.
Fierce storms.
The weather on the ice cap was appalling.
The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America.
In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed Gino), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and Into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level.
The east coast, however, was another story.
The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries.
By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland
