My first official trepidation of the trip began when I walked across the runway beneath a low ceiling of dark clouds and saw the twenty-six-passenger Aerovías DAP seaplane rocking with the weather. A rough take-off and instantly it seemed we were flying over the Magellan Strait and Tierra del Fuego Island past Cape Horn. We dipped and rose with each gust, the pilot momentarily derailing our thoughts of crashing by pointing out a stretch of shoreline that was known as a whale graveyard, the bones of the dead leviathans cast up on the rock-strewn beach by the heavy currents.

The winds grew nastier as we flew over the Drake Passage, one of the more volatile waterways in the world. It was here that the depths dropped in excess of sixteen thousand feet—roughly the distance Ben Hintzmann and I would soon be plunging through ice. True and I watched the turbulent surface. We saw whales breaching and schools of dolphin torpedoing through the deep blue sea as, high overhead, our plane pitched against the elements. Before long, small islands of ice began appearing below, progressing into frozen sculptures of towering white and turquoise and blue, carved by the wind and shaped by the water. These were followed by flat city blocks of snow that quickly occupied the horizon.

After a harrowing five-hour flight we descended to King George Island.

Located seventy-five miles north of Antarctica, King George Island was the largest of the South Shetlands, an island chain that extended away from the peninsula into the Southern Ocean. Still in its final weeks of winter, King George’s surrounding seas remained fragmented with tabular acres of ice undulating beneath an early evening overcast sky.

Dressed in thermal underwear, jeans, gloves, wool caps, sunglasses, and our expedition jackets, True and I stepped off the plane into the elements and realized our attire was barely serviceable for the “Antarctic tropics,” let alone what awaited us at Vostok. Trudging over a pebble-covered frozen dirt runway in our boots, we hurried past two abandoned Russian amphibious haulers on our way to the airport terminal, the skin over our exposed faces tightening painfully as it froze.

Gasping for breath, I paused. Up on the hill to our left, overlooking the airfield, was a Russian Orthodox Church that appeared like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. True nudged me and pointed to our right.

We were being watched.

Penguins. Ten to fifteen of them stood on the packed snow like a welcoming party. From their markings I surmised they were chinstrap penguins. As we watched, three more suddenly popped out of an unseen ice hole in the water straight onto their feet, standing with their wings extended as they cooled off from their swim.

Unlike the penguins, True and I were not doing well in the freezing cold. Ducking against the wind, we continued across the unpaved airfield to the airport terminal.