On December 14, 1911, on the windswept white emptiness at the bottom of the world, five bearded men on skis came to a stop. Their dog teams, 16 huskies in all, panted in the snow beside them. Their leader, a Norwegian explorer named Roald Amundsen, pulled out a small Norwegian flag, looked at his three crewmates Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, and together they planted it. They had become the first humans ever to stand on the South Pole.
The race had been brutal. Amundsen was secretly competing against a British team led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Both groups had set sail in 1910 with sleds, sled dogs, and ponies, but their plans were very different. Amundsen, who had grown up on skis and learned snow survival from the Inuit people of the Arctic, trusted his dogs and skied light and fast. He set up food depots along the route and traveled 15 to 20 miles a day, even through temperatures of 40 degrees below zero. The team crossed treacherous crevasses on the Axel Heiberg Glacier and climbed to over 10,000 feet above sea level.
When Captain Scott finally arrived at the Pole on January 17, 1912, he was crushed to find Amundsen's tent and Norwegian flag already there. Scott's team sadly died on the return trip. But Amundsen's team made it home triumphantly, having proven that careful planning and respect for the cold could conquer the harshest place on Earth. The Pole has been visited by hundreds of explorers since, but the Norwegian flag was first.
