Mount Hope is a dome-shaped

hill A hill is a landform that extends above the surrounding terrain. It often has a distinct summit, and is usually applied to peaks which are above elevation compared to the relative landmass, though not as prominent as Mountain, mountains. Hills ...

, rising to approximately , situated at the foot of the

Beardmore Glacier The Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica is one of the largest valley glaciers in the world, being long and having a width of . It descends about from the Antarctic Plateau to the Ross Ice Shelf and is bordered by the Commonwealth Range of the Queen ...

Ross Ice Shelf The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica (, an area of roughly and about across: about the size of France). It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than long, and between high ...

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. ...

at .

Discovery

It was discovered on 3 December 1908, by

Ernest Shackleton Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarcti ...

and his south polar party, on their journey towards the

South Pole The South Pole, also known as the Geographic South Pole or Terrestrial South Pole, is the point in the Southern Hemisphere where the Earth's rotation, Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface. It is called the True South Pole to distinguish ...

during the

Nimrod Expedition The ''Nimrod'' Expedition of 1907–1909, otherwise known as the British Antarctic Expedition, was the first of three expeditions to the Antarctic led by Ernest Shackleton and his second time to the Continent. Its main target, among a range of ...

. Through their ascent of this hill the party gained their first sight of the glacier which provided the route to the

polar plateau The Antarctic Plateau, Polar Plateau or King Haakon VII Plateau is a large area of East Antarctica that extends over a diameter of about , and includes the region of the geographic South Pole and the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. This ...

and the pole itself. Shackleton recorded: "We reached the base of the mountain which we hoped to climb in order to gain a view of the surrounding country ..With great difficulty we clambered up this rock face, and then ascended a gentle snow slope ..From the top of this ridge there burst upon our view an open road to the south, for there stretched before us a great glacier ..stretching away south inland until at last it seemed to merge in high inland ice". Shackleton named the hill that provided this vantage point "Mount Hope", for the promise that it provided. Shackleton's party ascended the glacier to the plateau, but turned back before reaching the Pole. Three years later,

Captain Scott Captain Robert Falcon Scott (6 June 1868 – ) was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the ''Discovery'' expedition of 1901–04 and the ''Terra Nova'' expedition of 1910–13. ...

's party followed the same route and reached the Pole, but the entire party perished on the return. Mount Hope was the site of the final depot laid by the

Ross Sea party The Ross Sea party was a component of Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Its task was to lay a series of supply depots across the Great Ice Barrier from the Ross Sea to the Beardmore Glacier, along the polar ...

in 1916, in support of Shackleton's abortive transcontinental march that was to have marked the

Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Ernest Shackleton, Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the ...

Notes

References

* . * {{citation, last= Tyler-Lewis , first= Kelly , author-link= Kelly Tyler-Lewis , title= The Lost Men , publisher= Bloomsbury , place= London , year= 2006 , isbn= 978-0-7475-7972-4.

Hope Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one's own life, or the world at large. As a verb, Merriam-Webster defines ''hope'' as "to expect with confid ...

Discovery

See also

Notes

References