Endurance - An Epic Story of Survival - Episode 7 - The Mountain.

In this episode, the James Caird reaches the south coast of South Georgia — the culmination of one of the greatest feats of navigation in maritime history. But the ordeal is far from over. With the weather preventing them from sailing around to the whaling station on the north coast, Shackleton, Crean, and Worsley are left with only one option: to cross the island's interior on foot. No human being had ever done it. The spine of South Georgia is a jagged, glaciated chain of peaks and ridges, and the three men had no meaningful mountaineering equipment, no sleeping bags, and no margin for error. They walked for 36 hours without rest, crossing glaciers in total darkness, navigating by instinct and desperation, at one point sitting on a coiled rope and sliding down a steep ice slope into the unknown below. Tom Crean walked every step of it — and Shackleton later wrote that the Irishman's reserves appeared to be bottomless. At three in the morning, exhausted beyond all measure, they heard a steam whistle rising from the darkness far below. Stromness whaling station. They had made it. When they finally descended into the station, the whalers who met them on the path could barely recognise them as human beings.