Roald Amundsen had a thing for extreme (and extremely cold) places. The Norwegian explorer was part of the first expedition to winter in Antarctica in 1898, and led the first expedition through Canada’s perilous Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean from 1903-1906. And on this date 103 years ago, Roald Amundsen led a crew of five to the geographic South Pole, where they became the first explorers to stand at the bottom of the world on December 14, 1911.

Amundsen had originally aimed for the other end of the globe, as he planned to sail to the North Pole, a trek he did significant fundraising for. But in 1909, Amundsen learned that American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had each claimed to reach the North Pole. He changed his plans, and instead aimed for an Antarctic expedition…although he was the only person who knew it. When his crew left Norway in the summer of 1910, they all thought they were going to the North Pole.

Amundsen was also racing against the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, although Scott didn’t know it yet. Scott was leading his own Antarctic expedition to plant the British flag at the South Pole, with plans to establish a base at McMurdo Sound. Amundsen instead made for the Bay of Whales along what’s now called the Ross Ice Shelf, placing him 60 nautical miles closer to the pole than Scott’s planned base.

Amundsen’s crew sailed south for months before sighting the icebergs of Antarctica on New Year’s Day of 1911. Outfitted in sealskin and reindeer skin, his men camped for months, enduring temperatures more than 70 degrees below zero and four months of darkness between April and August. When the sun finally rose, Amundsen’s men and dogs made a false start toward the pole, but were turned back by extreme conditions. Some dogs froze to death. Amundsen realized it was too early in the season to set out for the pole.

The fateful expedition finally set out on October 19, springtime in the Southern Hemisphere. Five men, four sledges, and 52 dogs set out. (The dogs were intended as a source of both labor and protein in the punishing conditions.) They faced crevasses spanned by snow bridges and the Transantarctic Mountains, and scaled more than 10,000 feet up the Axel Heiberg Glacier (named for one of Amundsen’s financial backers). Finally, they reached the South Pole on this date. Looking around for signs of Scott’s rival team, they found none and planted the Norwegian flag at the bottom of the world. Amundsen, in a later recollection: "Never has a man achieved a goal so diametrically opposed to his wishes. The area around the North Pole—devil take it—had fascinated me since childhood, and now here I was at the South Pole. Could anything be more crazy?"

Scott’s team made it five weeks later, and found the evidence that they had been beaten by Amundsen. Scott’s men all died on the way back from the pole, leaving Amundsen and his crew alone to relate the stories of what they found at the South Pole. And as for the North Pole, Amundsen made it there too, flying over in a dirigible in 1926. At the time, Amundsen thought he was the fourth man to make it to the top of the world, since American Richard Byrd had claimed to have flown over the North Pole three days earlier. In the years since, all three Americans who claimed to have preceded Amundsen to the North Pole have had their stories questioned…making it very possible that Roald Amundsen was the first man to reach the top and bottom of the world.

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