I suppose I signed up for this: shuddering across an Antarctic ice sheet in an open-topped buggy, holding on for dear life and doing everything I could to regain the feeling in my fingers. It was barely 8am and I had at least another three hours of this to go. Assuming we didn't get stuck.

Visiting the explorer Douglas Mawson's huts at Cape Denison, around 70km across the fast ice from where our ship the Akademik Shokalskiy is moored in Commonwealth Bay, East Antarctica, had always been the target of this expedition. Several scout teams had investigated the ice sheet between the ship and the hut in the three days we had been at the frozen continent, however, and their news didn't look good: a recent warm spell had melted lots of the snow cover on the fast ice, and the route across it was riddled with pools of water covered with thin, easily broken ice.

One team, including expedition leader Chris Turney, had made it to the huts on Thursday but it had taken them a hard slog of five and a half hours, with regular stops to push their vehicles out of the sludgy snow. They decided that it was too risky to take all of the passengers to the huts and, instead, there would be just one more trip from the Shokalskiy, leaving at 7am on Friday morning. One of the expedition co-leaders came into my cabin at 10pm on Thursday night and told me that there was a space for me but I'd need to be ready by 5am the next morning if I wanted to be on it.

There were seven of us in total, including two marine biologists and an ornithologist who needed to get to Cape Denison to carry out specific updates of some of Mawson's work on the original Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) between 1911 and 1913. We loaded our equipment, extra clothes, food and survival gear onto the backs of two Argo vehicles – a cross between an open-topped 4X4 buggy and a boat – and began our journey just before 8am.

Alok and the Argo all-terrain vehicles that took him and a small team of scientists to Mawson's Huts on Friday. In the background is the edge of a massive iceberg called B09B. Photograph: /Guardian Photograph: Guardian

These vehicles are not fast – a top speed of around 25kph over the sea ice whenever it was flat – and have a punishing lack of suspension. But they are rugged and shrugged off bumps and unexpected pools of water on the ice.

We made good progress for the first hour, watching the landscape change from coastline to pure, flat white. We passed iceberg after iceberg – some the size of small towns – and, to our right, rose the immense dome of Antarctica's ice cap. Not for the first time, I had to remind myself that this epic moonscape was, in fact, on the Earth. (It didn't help that our tiny six-wheeled vehicles reminded me of the lunar buggies the astronauts took with them in the later stages of the Apollo programme.)

After 30km on solid ice, we slowed as the surface got increasingly sludgy. We spent the next hour splashing through pools of freshly melted snow on the surface of the sea ice. Freezing water went everywhere. On most occasions, this meant all over us passengers.

A bone-shaking hour later, windswept and freezing, we saw our first bit of exposed Antarctic land up ahead – Cape Hunter, named after John George Hunter, the original AAE's biologist – and we knew we were on the home strait. Every external Antarctic surface we had seen so far on the expedition had been ice, slush or water. Cape Hunter was not only the first rock but it also meant we had reached the Antarctic landmass itself. We were now only 13km west of Mawson's Huts at Cape Denison.

Supplies being unloaded at Cape Denison on the original Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-13. Photograph: Frank Hurley/State Library of NSW Photograph: Frank Hurley/State Library of NSW

As we rounded the bay and the last few kilometres to Cape Denison, we got a taste of the winds that can whip up here. This part of Commonwealth Bay is the windiest place on Earth at sea level, famous for its “katabatic winds”, which tumble off the mountains surrounding the bay at an average of 70kph. When Mawson was here a century ago, he recorded gusts of more than 300kph and there is film footage of his men standing at impossible angles trying to work outside as the winds raged.

We were fortunate that the winds were only blowing at around 55kph when we arrived at Cape Denison at around midday, which is a light breeze in these parts. Nevertheless, it was bone-chilling.

Within the hour, though, the wind had disappeared and Cape Denison turned into an Alpine paradise: warm sun, bright blue sky, running streams and pools of clear blue water among the glistening snow, all set off by a background of rocky hills. Mawson's Huts are nestled at the bottom of the main valley, almost hidden, opposite what used to be a natural harbour before it froze into an ice sheet, thanks to the recent arrival of iceberg B09B. Adelie penguins wander around everywhere.

A small colony of Adélie penguins resides next to Mawon's Huts in Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay. Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian

Built in January 1912, when their ship the Aurora arrived at Antarctica, there are four huts, each with a particular purpose. The main hut has got two components: the living quarters and the workshop. Adjacent to that is the Transit Hut, which was used to make astronomical observations. Further down the hill are Magnetograph House and the Absolute Magnetic Hut, where Mawson's team studied the variations in the Earth's magnetic field as part of their scientific work. The latter three are standing ruins, only kept in minimal repair so that they don't collapse. The main hut, however, has been the centre of a conservation effort since 1996.

“It was basically a box, square frame and pyramid roof and designed to be very strong,” says Ian Godfrey, formerly head of the department of materials conservation of the Western Australia Museum, who is leading the conservation of Mawson's Huts. “At the sides, you only had five-foot-high walls and then verandas on three sides. The idea of the verandas was to give them storage and also so that you'd have a little bit of extra insulation agains the cold. In addition, the winds would slope up and over the roof so that you wouldn't get the real stresses and strains on the building itself.”

The roof of the main hut was replaced by the Mawson's Hut Foundation in the late 1990s so the structure didn't collapse. The small strips of wood on the outer walls were originally nailed on to keep sailcloth in place to windproof the building. Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian

The AAE team built the huts from scratch, in extreme windy weather, using timbers that had been pre-cut to size. “It was Ikea-style without the allen keys,” says Godfrey. “They would have got there and nailed and bolted it all together."

The main hut at Cape Denison had 18 men living in a space 7.3 metres square (24 foot by 24 foot). There were two levels of bunks around the side and Mawson had his own cubicle on another one side. The remainder of the space was taken up with a dining table, stores and a darkroom for expedition photographer, Frank Hurley.

Life inside the main hut. Photograph: State Library of NSW Photograph: State Library of NSW

They had a stove that would be kept burning, often with seal blubber, all day and night. One of the most critical things was making sure there wasn't a fire in the hut and a different person would be given the role of night watchman each night, with the reward that they would get a bath that night. “So, once every 18 days you do that job, you'd heat up the water on the stove and you'd give yourself a bit of a wipe-over,” said Godfrey.

The stove is still there in the hut today. Rusted but recognisable. A few cans and bottles are on the shelves and the library of cheap storybooks is piled on one shelf. The walls get covered with ice, which has to be chipped away carefully to maintain the integrity of the stuff underneath. The names of the people sleeping in the bunks, with the year that they were in the AAE, are inscribed under every bunk.

Bunks inside the main hut are inscribed with the names of the men who slept there. Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian

In the far left of the gloomy main room, a wooden beam is inscribed “Hyde Park Corner” – named after the area around a major road junction in London. This is where Xavier Mertz, Cecil Madigan, Francis Bickerton and Belgrave Ninnis had their bunks. “That was sort of like this social corner,” says Godfrey. “So, often you'd finish the main meal and they'd go and sit over in the corner. I've seen a photograph of about nine of them just sitting around these four bunks, chuffing away on their pipes and just chatting.”

(The British connection carries through to the area around the huts – Cape Denison has two extremities, a few kilometres apart, one is called Land's End and the other is John O'Groats.)

The explorers cherished their designated corners in the hut, often naming them after something that reminded them of home. Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian

Getting into the main hut every year is a challenge – Godfrey and his team usually have to dig out the main entrance from under several feet of winter snow – but the main living space has been carefully cleared of ice over the years. Nevertheless, snow and ice crystals line all the woodwork of the roof and ice is several feet thick on the ground.

When the snow recedes around this time of year, it reveals all sorts of expedition detritus among the rocks next to the hut. Here, the explorers seem to have thrown everything from seal bones and dog chains to old shoes and used food cans. All of it is kept in place by the conservation team, who say that, every year, they see something different among the rocks, depending on where the snow melts the most.

Witout constant attention, snow and ice would slowly consume the structure. The explorers used their socks to stop spindrift snow invading through the cracks in the wood. Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian Photograph: Alok Jha/Guardian

Godfrey says the main aim of the restoration work is to stop the huts decaying further. They have sealed the building to try and prevent more ice getting in – though it is still an annual battle to remove ice crystals that grow on the wooden roof beams every year – but they don't intend to restore the hut to its original, newly built state, but rather keep it in much the same state as when Mawson left it.

“Some people think the huts should just be left there to show the passage of time and eventually end up with a ruin,” says Godfrey. “I like to think we can do what we can to preserve the fabric of the building itself. Because [this] was the first Australian overseas scientific expedition, it was really critical but it also laid the ground for Australia's entire claim to its 42% of the Antarctic. It's a symbolic thing as much as anything else.”