According to popular lore, during one of Captain Robert F. Scott's famed expeditions to the Antarctic in 1912, his weather man - a genius known to give amazingly precise predictions - walked out of camp one night and got caught in a sudden storm.
He trudged endlessly on until morning when, desperate and tired, he managed to catch site of the base.
As the storm passed, his footprints revealed that he had been going around in circles only 30m from the rest of Scott's men.
There are many other examples of explorers who never made it back, their bodies later found to have been within a stone's throw of their travel companions.
These were the types of tales Catlin's Ice Base staff shared with us on our first days in the high Canadian arctic.
"The thing about polar regions is that you can't take anything for granted," says Paul Ramsden, the Ice Base Manager.
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