18 years ago Laredo resident Robert Hess took off on what he thought would be the journey of a lifetime to Antarctica. Little did he know that it would change his life so much and one day make him a published author. Today our Ryan Bailey spoke to him about his journey.

It was October 1993 when they left Laredo’s airport with the final destination being Antarctica, so a life long explorer could climb the mountain named after him.

"You could feel the weight of the airplane. It just didn't want to get off the ground."

They were headed for Mount Vaughan, named after an explorer that had been on expeditions to the South Pole in the 20's. Vaughan was 87 years old and wanted to be the first to climb the 10,000-foot mountain. While refueling in Chile, they heard warnings that weather was awful but they decided to press on.

"We were running out of daylight so to speak. We had to press on."

While in flight they were forced to turn off the cabin heat and when they tried to restart it, they found they had no heat to the windshield. Added to the situation was the poor weather and it was a recipe for disaster.

"There was no definition, no horizon and with the windshield heat not being there it was just extremely bad."

They were descending at 500 miles a minute and had no idea where the ground was, and before they could act, they crashed into the ice.

"Propellers flew off the airplane, one of the engines came off and I personally was waiting for the fireball to catch up to us.”

They quickly scrambled to put out the small fires that had formed and knew they needed to set up some sort of camp.

"We set up tents and we just prepared to stay for the long haul. We didn't know how long we would be there."

Luckily for them they were only eight miles from their destination and one of the men at that camp had spotted a black dot across the horizon.

"He said he saw the dot stop and he knew we were down. He said he saw smoke and jumped in his snowmobile and headed towards the aircraft."

The weather cleared after about 12 hours and miraculously the crew was off the ice one day later with only one serious injury. Their expedition was over but Vaughan pressed on and one year later was able to conquer his mountain.

"He did go back the following year and at 88 years old began his climb to the top of his mountain and he made it."

Hess says every fall he would reminisce about the events of that trip and pieces fell into his life that allowed him to write blind descent chronicling that journey. He will be speaking about this amazing story at the Laredo Public Library tomorrow evening from 6 to 7:30.