Exhausted, exhilarated and with a plate of roast potatoes on her mind, skier Mollie Hughes cranked up the volume on her old iPod and let Aussie rockers AC/DC power her closer to the South Pole.

The 29-year-old Edinburgh adventurer’s final five miles of a remarkable journey from the edge of western Antarctica to the bottom of the world was a debilitating 58 days and 700 miles in the making.

The final push, at 8am last Friday morning, concluded 650 hours of solo skiing during which she endured horrific whiteouts, -45˚ temperatures, cutting gales and lonely days when, robbed of stimulation, her mind took her by surprise by dredging up long-lost childhood memories and fantasies of tucking into chips, mash and roast tatties.

The gruelling expedition saw her become the youngest woman to ski solo from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole – capping a hat-trick of extraordinary achievements which include twice climbing Everest.

Speaking from Chile, where she is recuperating and still sporting wounds on her cheeks caused by the bitter wind, Ms Hughes, who learned how to cross-country ski only a year ago, shared images from her expedition and told how just moments after being dropped off in beautiful sunshine, dark clouds gathered.

The eight-day whiteout that followed cost her precious days of progress, including one which saw her ski for seven hours only to find she had covered just three miles, and left her fearing for her safety.

“Within an hour’s skiing I saw these really dark clouds coming over the horizon,” she recalled. “It was whiteout conditions for eight days solid.

“I couldn’t see more than one metre in front of me, it was white when I looked down, up and all around, and hard to navigate.

“It makes you feel quite sick. I couldn’t leave my tent for two days, it was so windy and I was scared it would be blown away.”

With no one for hundreds of miles around, Devon-born Ms Hughes was in complete isolation in a white wilderness, battling winds that raged up to 55 knots, pulling a sled weighing 105kg for up to 12 hours at a time and surviving on 4,000 calories of dehydrated rations a day.

The storm’s passing was almost biblical. “I could see a bit of horizon, it cleared more and I could see mountains on my right-hand side. Then the sun came out and it was very emotional,” she said.

“I was crying. I don’t think I realised how stressful or hard it was until the sun came out, I’d been so focused on getting through.”

Her arrival at the South Pole last week meant she could claim the world record from previous holder Vilborg Gissuradottir, from Iceland, who completed the challenge in 2013 when she was 32.

The feat means Ms Hughes has now broken two world records – in 2017, aged 26, she became the youngest person to climb both the south and north faces of Everest, the world’s highest peak.

However, she says taking on the Antarctic wilderness was far harder than conquering Everest.

“Physically I was fine, but mentally it was hard. On Everest you can stop and be inspired and motivated to keep going by the scenery. But in Antarctica there’s nothing.

“At points you feel pretty insignificant, the landscape is so huge.”

She found her mind wandering to long forgotten childhood memories, and at times was overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, the isolation and “deafening silence”.

To break the monotony she turned to listening to an old iPod loaded with Noughties pop tunes, Harry Potter audio books and, for the final thrust towards the Pole, the high-energy thrash of Angus Young’s guitar.

She can’t remember the exact tune that provided the motivation for the final push, other than it definitely made her ski faster.

Ms Hughes plans to return home to Edinburgh next week to rest and write a book about her three trail-blazing expedition