Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now. (Cont'd.)

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now. (Cont'd.)

ANI IS LARGELY the legacy of one man: the late Giles Kershaw, a slim, bearded Briton widely regarded as the greatest aviator in modern Antarctic history. Born in India in 1948, he emigrated to England with his family in the early 1960s and took up flying as a teenager. Before he hit 30 he was flying jets for Britannia Airlines. Not long after, he answered an ad for the ultimate busman's holiday—to fly for the British Antarctic Survey during the airline's slow season.

"A lot of professional pilots keep small planes and throw them around on weekends, because airline flying is so boring," says Charles Swithinbank, 75, a former BAS glaciologist who often flew with Kershaw and is now senior associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England. "Giles was no different. He liked a bit of sport. What drew him south was adventure."

In 1983, two American businessmen—Dick Bass, owner of Snowbird Ski Resort, and Frank Wells, a now-deceased Disney executive—approached Kershaw, looking for help getting to Vinson. Two months earlier, the moguls had met and hatched the idea to climb the Seven Summits. Vinson was the toughest logistically; government parties had done it, but no private expedition had gotten within a hundred miles of the peak. Using an elaborate series of fuel caches, Kershaw got the climbers to Vinson and back. Tremendous media interest in the trip helped persuade Kershaw and two Canadian partners, Pat Morrow and Martyn Williams, that the time was right to found ANI.

The real breakthrough came four years later, in 1987. By then the only thing holding the business back was the size of its aircraft, but Kershaw had a radical idea. After dropping an expedition team at Vinson in a beefed-up DC-3, he and Swithinbank took a side trip. Their destination was Patriot Hills, a place the two had first overflown 12 years before. Thanks to the shape of the hills and the scouring action of the wind, the location featured a huge patch of blue ice that Kershaw suspected might be smooth enough to land a conventional wheeled aircraft. It was the crucial chink in the continent's armor, and that November, using Patriot Hills as a transfer point from wheeled to ski-equipped aircraft, Kershaw flew the first tourists to the South Pole.

"The NSF was not amused," Swithinbank recalls. "They got the U.S. State Department to go to the head of the Chilean air force and say, 'You must stop this!' The only thing that saved it was I had met the head of the air force the year before, and he was pretty interested in what we were doing down there."

About the same time, Kershaw married Anne Campbell, a Britannia Airways flight attendant with an engineering degree from Glasgow University. After the two were hitched in 1988, she made her first trip to Antarctica. "By the time we got to Punta," she remembers, "I knew the company was a mess. I mean, not by any stretch of the imagination were they businessmen."

In February 1990, Giles left on a six-week cruise down the peninsula, intending to use an experimental gyrocopter for aerial photography. "Giles was flying it when it got hit by a gust and fell 200 feet," Anne Kershaw says. He lived only 20 minutes.

Giles was laid to rest on a granite shelf nearby, in a range that's since been named for him. "That couldn't happen now," his widow says. "There'd be too big a debate: Is his body history, or garbage?"

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