Climbing team attempts to summit 6 mountains in Antarctica

Antarctica might not be the first place to look for a mountaineering adventure. Only a handful have tried to climb the isolated and frozen granite walls at the bottom of the world. Only on "CBS This Morning," we're introducing you to the North Face climbing team that took on the chilling challenge to summit six mountains in Antarctica.

When one massive cargo plane lifted off from Cape Town, South Africa, it was carrying 1,700 pounds of extreme cold weather gear and six of the best rock climbers and mountaineers in the world. 

Their destination, almost a six-hour flight due south: a rugged and remote region of Antarctica called Queen Maud Land.

"There's kind of an elliptical ring of mountains and there's six peaks that are with walls between two- and three-thousand feet tall," said team leader Conrad Anker.

For a climbing legend like Anker, those walls -- which very few people have ever seen, much less scaled -- are irresistible.

"The fact that it's always below freezing makes it a challenge for wall-climbers… the remoteness, the cliff face and the temperature," Anker said. "Any one of them can get us, but all three together, you always have to manage that risk on a day-to-day basis."

Yosemite search-and-rescue vet Cedar Wright came up with the idea for the all-star Antarctic adventure.

"If you go out deep into the center of that wild, unexplored continent, you find one of the most impressive ranges of granite in the world," Wright said. "I look at it like as a frozen Yosemite… each of these formations is at least if not bigger than El Cap… It just kind of takes all the skills that we've learned in places like Yosemite and brings them to this really wild and severe environment."

Yosemite and its sheer granite monster El Capitan is the most famous training ground for expeditions like Queen Maud Land, and no one has conquered El Capitan like Alex Honnold. This past June, he achieved the holy grail of rock climbing – a rope-less solo free climb up its 3,000-foot face. His biggest challenge in Antarctica? Temperatures hovering right around freezing and below.

"When you first touch cold rock, your fingers will get numb, but then after the initial numbing, blood rushes back to your fingers… it really, really hurts when the blood rushes back to your fingertips, so it makes you want to scream and... you feel sick," Honnold said.

Jimmy Chin's long career has acclimated him to the cold, but that happens when you accomplish feats like he did in 2006: skiing off the summit of Mount Everest.

It might seem all downhill from Everest to Antarctica, but for Chin, none of it would be possible without El Capitan.

"You have to be really comfortable on El Cap… in order to go down and think about climbing in Queen Maud Land because… you drop the temperature from 70 degrees to negative-20, and then you put it in some place that's totally inaccessible and remote, the stakes become quite a bit higher," Chin said.

The stakes for Anna Pfaff and her climbing partner, Savannah Cummings, are even higher. They're the only women on this expedition. They hope the trip helps them move the sport forward.

"I would like to get more women in the sport of doing this kind of stuff," Cummings said.

"There's still the stigma that, you know, the mountains are made for men," Pfaff said. "I've had people say these things to me before. And what it's done to me is it's just made me want to try harder."

"Anna and Savannah are… every bit as capable as the dudes on our team," Wright said. "Everyone should go to Antarctica and climb a big wall – or six!"