AUTHENTIC EXPEDITIONS.
SHACKLETON SPIRIT.
LIFELONG RETURNS.
Welcome to Shackleton Challenges, our unique expedition travel division.
We exist to help adventurers like you discover the thrill and achievement of proper exploration.
From Antarctica to Greenland, Oman to the Himalayas, our epic and life-affirming Challenges are designed and delivered by our record-breaking team of professional guides with safety and skills development prioritised.
The calendar is carefully configured to appeal to all levels of fitness and experience, from the novice adventurer to the advanced endurance athlete. Whichever Challenge you choose, we look forward to welcoming you to an unforgettable expedition that combines an invigorating balance of arduous achievement with breath-taking environments and well-earned luxury.
Book a call or contact us to find out more.
Onwards!
- Ian Holdcroft, Co-founder
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“It is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown.”
– Sir Ernest Shackleton
Every Shackleton Challenge has a central mission designed to develop the physical, mental and emotional strength required to access our untapped performance potential and build essential skills in three extreme environments: Polar, Mountain and Desert.
We’ve selected the world’s best exemplars of each, tailored to suit a range of experience and endurance levels. All are stunning, and will stay with you.
At day’s end, nothing trumps the feeling of a Challenge well met, and we celebrate accordingly. Elation enhances everything. Spectacular settings appear more vivid; extraordinary food and service are appreciated on an exalted level.
This carefully curated contrast between personal effort and peak hospitality is a distinctive feature of most Shackleton Challenges – and where conditions are of necessity more rugged, we fill the gap with a bottomless well of restorative cordiality.
AUTHENTIC EXPEDITIONS
Shackleton Challenges embody the enlightened leadership so central to the Boss’s own ethos, with empathy and encouragement at the core. The idea is that while all challenges will stretch us, none will defeat us. As in 1916, we come through as a team.
Developed in association with our partners at Loughborough University and Science In Sport, our industry-leading Foundations programme ensures everyone reaches the start line equipped in body, mind and spirit to achieve their potential. Our in-field preparation is exemplary, our location scouting meticulous, our local relationships rock-solid – thanks in large part to the Shackleton lineage.
And while our guides come with record-breaking exploits behind them, they’re aware that central to Sir Ernest’s genius for keeping spirits up was the nightly “Party in the Ritz”, where the hold of the icebound Endurance was transformed into a genial forum for lively conversation, makeshift feasts and team cohesion.
We’ve kept up the tradition. This contrast between hard-won daytime achievement and team-wide conviviality in the evenings is a distinctive feature of Shackleton Challenges that marks us out as different in kind.
SHACKLETON SPIRIT
The trials overcome will evolve into resources that you’ll draw on for the rest of your life, applicable to all kinds of situations where you’ll need to take the lead.
A sense of quiet self-esteem will emanate to all who meet you in the aftermath. You may not return an inch taller, but you’ll feel it. Challenges alumni report having a firmer handle on their own resilience and resources, with greater confidence that they can step it up when needed. If you can ski across a glacier and sleep at minus twenty, most things seem do-able.
Memories made will abide. Like most of our Challenges alumni, you’ll probably stay in touch with the rest of the team.
LIFELONG REWARDS
POLAR
MOUNTAIN
DESERT
Our Arctic Challenges start at our Norwegian base in Finse where Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen all trained, and extend to tackling Greenland’s stunning ice sheets. Our Antarctic Challenges go all the way to the South Pole, starting either at the coast or picking up the last sixty nautical miles.
Explore Polar
Sir Ernest was no stranger to a mountain, and our modern Shackleton Challenges take in a range of ranges – Alpine, Norwegian, Himalayan, Arabian – tackled by hand, foot and motorcycle.
They span a broad scope of experience, skill levels and time commitments, and are
guaranteed to exhilarate.
Like the frozen south that called to Shackleton, the Arabian desert contains incomparable wonder, boundless variety and a host of practical challenges – together with some of the world’s most spectacular hotels.
Explore Mountain
Explore Desert
Explore our Challenges
Foundations is a world-class expedition preparation programme designed to inspire, prepare and equip Shackleton’s clients for the Challenge. The programme is delivered via a combination of personal consultations, online webinars and unique experiences by Shackleton’s expert performance partners in endurance, expeditions and extremes.
An introduction to Foundations
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We work with the very best guides and expedition partners, ensuring the highest possible safety, tuition and expertise on every expedition.
Our expedition team is led by our Director of Expeditions, record breaking polar explorer Louis Rudd and our Expedition Manager, Amelia Rudd.
Meet our guides
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Shackleton provides a comprehensive bespoke expedition service to clients with wide-ranging ambitions. From highly experienced solo explorers seeking a progressive training path to the South Pole, through to groups of first-timers looking for the experience of a lifetime, our record-breaking expedition leaders will make it happen.
Bespoke Expedition, Training & Expertise delivered by record-breaking explorers
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