Will Smith's Disney+ series is full of world firsts – here’s how one explorer guided the actor through Earth’s harshest environment using cutting-edge tech

In the first episode of National Geographic's Pole to Pole with Will Smith expedition series, Richard Parks, a polar athlete who holds the record for being the fastest to ski solo, unsupported, and unassisted from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole, says that his job on the show is to "keep Will alive".

With winds exceeding 70mph and temperatures dropping as low as minus 52 degrees Celsius, Antarctica is widely considered to be the harshest desert environment on Earth. That makes a filmed expedition from the South Pole to the North Pole, with a Hollywood A-lister in tow, a logistical nightmare.

And it’s not just the challenge of navigating toward a moving target in one of the most isolated, heavily regulated, and unforgiving environments on the planet. As Parks explains while discussing the series’ first episode, which sees him help Smith ski roughly 700 miles from ...