The peninsula in which the Antarctic expedition camp was located is technically accessible by ship during the brief summer season, and a small number of tourist vessels call there each year. The passengers land by inflatable boat and walk to Point Wild and stand where 22 men waited for rescue that came after four months. The island looks, from the sea, exactly as hostile as it is.
The Falkland Islands, where Shackleton landed after the first failed rescue attempt, are still the closest major inhabited territory to the site of the story. South Georgia, where the whaling station at Stromness received three filthy, unrecognizable men in the early hours of May 20, 1916, is a subantarctic island of extraordinary natural beauty. The whaling station at Stromness is now abandoned and unsafe to enter; the industry that sustained it ended decades ago, and the station has been returning to rust and silence since the last whale was processed there. But the harbor is still accessible, and the path that Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean descended to reach it can be walked by visitors who have enough fitness and permission.
Shackleton is buried at the nearby Grytviken whaling station. His grave is a simple stone slab, maintained by the South Georgia Heritage Trust. The members of expeditions that pass through South Georgia sometimes pour a glass of whisky on the grave, in the Antarctic tradition of honoring those who made the southern seas their own. It is a small, informal, persistent tribute to someone who spent the last decade of his life trying to get further south than anyone had been, and who died at 47 at the island where his greatest survival story had ended.