It has been hailed as the greatest story of endurance and survival of the human spirit of modern times.

Cut off from civilisation and facing certain death on the freezing, hostile, plains of the Antarctic, Sir Ernest Shackleton's doomed 1914 to 1916 British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition has passed into legend as a tale of true heroism and courage.

Bradford was given a taste of the appalling hardships that Shackleton and his men endured yesterday when one of the world's top mountaineers came to the city to talk about his role in re-creating the explorer's journey for a spectacular new film.

Conrad Anker was one of three experts hand-picked to follow in Shackleton's footsteps on the final leg of his two-year-long trek to survival.

And the American admitted he was in awe of the explorer and what he had achieved.

After posing with a pack of Canadian husky dogs brought to the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television for the occasion, Anker said it was hard to imagine the scale of what the British explorer had achieved.

He said: "Shackelton's is an epic story. Perhaps the greatest example of the survival of the human spirit when everything is lost we have.

"It's a story that we still find particularly interesting 80 years later because our lives have changed so dramatically. There's communications and transport everywhere now but back then there were no satellites flying overhead and there were still blank bits on the map.

"The fact that he survived, and that all 27 of his men survived with him, is a testament to what an amazing leader he was."

For the IMAX film, called Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure, Anker had to traverse South Georgia Island - a trip that took him three days with the latest mountaineering equipment. Shackleton made the journey in 30 hours after nearly two years of almost starvation and freezing temperatures.

"I have massive amounts of respect for what he did with the equipment he had. I think it would have been impossible for him to do it today because of the way the glaciers have shifted."

Anker is also the man who found the missing body of famed British explorer George Mallory on Mount Everest 75 years after he disappeared in 1924.

But the softly-spoken Californian said it was an eerie feeling finding Mallory's body on the mountain's barren north slopes. It was the fourth deceased mountaineer he had found in a day and only recognised Mallory's body by his pre-war hobnail boots.

He said: "It was a very solemn and humbling moment. I sat with the body for 20 minutes before my team mates came to me and I just treated the moment with the total respect he deserved. He'd died there on Everest trying to achieve something."

However Anker does not believe that Mallory did manage to scale Everest's summit - something that scholars have argued about since his disappearance.

He believes that, like Shackleton, Mallory had failed to achieve his goal but unlike Sir Ernest had failed to return home to tell about it.

Pictured: the huskies enjoy a trip to Bradford.