Commander Scott Shackleton of the Navy Reserve isn’t fazed by the South Pole’s foggy, wind-beaten, gray-black landscape. “I went to sea when I was 18,” says Shackleton.

Thirty years into his journeys, the Clayton resident looks seaworthy – of sturdy construction, his mostly gray hair close-cut, glowing outdoor skin, the nails of his strong-looking fingers trimmed. Yes, everything is scrubbed down and shipshape.

He grew up amidst the echoes of the exploits of his fifth cousin, Irishman Sir Ernest Shackleton, who went to sea at age 16. He was in the Robert Falcon Scott South Pole expedition of 1901 and led his own Nimrod Expedition in 1907 to within a record 97 miles of the pole. For this, he was knighted by King George V.

The elder Shackleton led a return expedition in 1912 that ended with their ship, Endurance, stuck in the ice, crushed by the ice and sunk below the ice. He led his crew in open boats across an icy sea to land, then led them over treacherous, trackless terrain to a whaling station 800 miles away.

Back to the Deep Freeze.

In 1922, he once again led an expedition toward the Pole but died of a heart attack and was buried in an icy grave pointing south. His earlier 97-mile effort was the nearest to the pole a Shackleton would get until Scott’s recent duty in the re-supply of Operation Deep Freeze.

This generation’s Shackleton touched every continent save Africa, perhaps most notably Antarctica. During Operation Desert Storm, he was deployed to Kuwait.

As he maneuvered to get assigned to the re-supply of Operation Deep Freeze at the South Pole, he met with stiff resistance because he was a reserve.

“We can’t fight these wars without reservists,” he notes. Scott won out, just as Sir Ernest did when he made a personal visit to the Admiralty to plead his case. From the log of his mind, Scott plays back the entries in a matter-of-fact manner stowing any emotion.

“There’s a three-week window when you can enter McMurdo Sound,” Scott reports.

Even then, an icebreaker must lead the way for a tanker and a container ship to tie up at the ice pier. This year, the Swedish icebreaker Oden led the way and during the re-supply plied the passageway back and forth, day and night, to keep the way clear. Scott was in charge of the unloading and loading.

Teaming up with scientists.

To get to where the world turns, Scott flew from McMurdo Station in a C-130 cargo plane with a huge contingent of scientists, intent on studying the climate, the fauna (there is no flora) and Mt. Erebus, a continuously active volcano that is part of the Pacific Rim of Fire. It’s a beautifully menacing presence, breathing out a seething cloud of steam.

Deep Freeze was once a Navy operation but was turned over to the National Science Foundation. The scientists are from all over and half are women.

There is, in fact, a pole at the South Pole. It’s candy-striped and topped by a mind reader’s shiny orb, eerily mirroring and distorting the surroundings. There, you could stand astride the earth, one insulated boot on the Greenwich Meridian, the other on the International Date Line.

At last, Scott stood at the pole and paused. To push the camera shutter button, he took a glove off, “… for one minute and 20 seconds,” and it got frostbitten.

Making memories.

Scott flew 10 American flags at the South Pole and they froze straight out. He handled them gently, brought them back, laid them across his pool table and folded them in the traditional triangle, a few white stars showing in a field of blue.

To make the most of his experience, he changed tables for each meal at McMurdo Station. “Everybody has a South Pole story,” says Scott.

He relates one told by an old hand about an expedition running out of food, forcing them to kill and eat their dogs. He said he had photos of a man eating and crying.

Other signs of a weary existence can be found at Scott’s Hut. But it isn’t Shackleton’s; it belonged to explorer Robert Falconer Scott. All is preserved in ice – tins of biscuits, cartons of oatmeal, a seal outside the door and pigs’ heads inside.

On a few blessed days, the wind relents, the fog lifts, the ocean is chill blue and the surrounding mountains are pure white in the crystalline air. Then, talk stops.

The profound cliché has it that explorers go to a unique place “because it’s there.” Scott went there because his hero almost got there.