November 15, 2011

S71°39.281 E010°44.375

Elevation 5890 ft

My head is down as I walk, looking up only periodically to set a path amidst the mounds and mini canyons that make up the broken up surface of the ice. The sky is covered in white clouds and the wind is hissing. Only when I look down do the hood and fur ruff of my jacket spare me the onslaught of cold head winds. It is cold, and the grip on my poles stiffens. The harness cuts at my shoulders and waist from the heavy sledge behind me. Moving uphill, the cargo feels twice its weight. One hundred feet ahead, I can make out, one more time, the clear fault line of a crevasse. The snow bridge depression that covers it fading to the blowing snow. We are in the middle of a crevasse field. I am cold. But stopping means it will be colder still. I look towards Eric. In the drifting snow, his legs and sledge all but disappear, as if erased from the landscape, his silhouette dwarfed by the looming hill we are ascending. Underfoot, I hear the snow crack from my weight. I feel the floor below me shift, and before I realize what happened, it drops, first a few feet at an angle thrusting me forward, and then collapses in fragments swallowing me down. Below, the crack plunges thirty or fifty feet into what looks like a dark abyss. I can barely make out the green iridescence of the frozen walls on each side of me as the trace of my pulk slams me into one of them. The free fall has stopped but my ski twists and comes off my boot, falling into the darkness below. Above, my pulk is jammed; I am suspended in mid air. And I then wake up.

A wind storm lashed at the tent all night long. The snow drift was hissing at the fabric like an angry cat stalking its prey’s desperate shelter. By mid morning, the forty knot gusts had come down by half. The sky was partly cloudy, and the temperature noticeably cooler. Today would have been a nice rest day, but given the two forced on us this week, we can not afford it. And ahead laid that hill.

We are trying to find a way up between mountain paths an crevasse field, an the best we could come up with is a nasty grade of a hill. With today’s head winds and frigid weather, this proved every bit as hellish as we anticipated. “Hell of a hill,” is all I muttered on our various breaks. “Yep,” is what invariably came back, “this sucks”. My ribs make difficult the use of my right arm to lean on the pole. The imbalance makes the left arm work twice as hard but half as efficient. Halfway through our short day, Eric took on the two extra sledges I am towing. With the wind and extra elevation, we feel for the first time the Antarctica bite at around 35C below. The sweat of my hands turns cold, and I have trouble regaining feeling in my fingers. The more we ascend, the more we run into slippery patches of blue ice. After only four and a half hours, we are spent. It is five thirty PM and we have merely covered 3.9 kilometers but gained 400 feet in elevation. Inside the tent it takes me an hour to regain warmth in my hands. Outside the wind is still at it. Too many crevasses to be kiting. Perhaps tomorrow….

November 14, 2011

S71°37.497′ E010°39.330′

Elevation 5488 ft

Today started well enough considering it is shower day! Every five days, I get to use an anti bacterial wipe for a top to bottom scrub down. From inside the nylon area eight feet by four where we spend more than 60% of our time, this is in fact luxurious. The climate is very dry in Antarctica–contrary to the Arctic sea ice–which means that when the sun is high in the sky, the greenhouse effect raises the temperature inside enough to be shirtless. Not so in the evening when it plummets to more or less what is outside; around 25C below these days. The sun sets for less than three hours where we are, at this time of year. This means it dips below the horizon but the sky never goes dark; we are effectively in twenty four hour daylight. But the angle of the sun determines its warmth. Without cloud cover, the cold sets in around 5 PM; the tent begins to heat around 6AM. The night is spent in full face mask and eye cover.

Whatever I come back as if there is another life, please let it not be a mule! These animals do not get the credit they deserve, spending a life hauling things. By the time the game is up for them I can imagine how relieved they must be–probably coming back as a a coconut tree on a beach somewhere. Because hauling is the pits. Today saw much of it as we are still gaining elevation. And I’ll admit, I did ask myself a few times: “Wait, I’m paying for this?!” The views, however, are extraordinary. Nowhere have I seen vertical sheer rock faces in such abundance. Cut against the sky in the afternoon haze, they look like Japanese water colors.

My ribs are clicking–two of them. Which is a bit of a psychological headfuck. Mostly I try to ignore them, while administering myself an anti inflammatory every four hours while on the trail. Nothing inside the tent or I’ll run out. I am reminded of the great climber Voytek Kurtyka’s quote:”Mountain climbing is the art of suffering”. The same can be said about polar traveling. Luckily, I feel an angel over my shoulder, always with me.

We kited for a slow hour gaining four kilometers until the wind died, and spent the rest of the day swearing like a mule. We made 10.84 kilometers.

November 13, 2011

71.3235S, 10.4474E

Yesterday was spent resting and sowing. With each move a painful struggle, my ribs have given me plenty to contemplate. It is difficult to consider 75 more days of traveling–virtually the entire trip. I spent the night examining every scenario ahead, visiting the dark, disappointing place of defeat, only to swing back up the stubborn spine of determination. The night was cold, but cuccooned deep in my sleeping bag, I could not help but wallow in the irony of being out here, after all the months of minute planning, preparation and training, and having the experience jeopardized by the more uninspired type of discomfort: the ribs!

I visualized the squeezing action of the harness, the bumpy roughness of the terrain, and wondered how I would endure. Moments later, my thoughts would jolt back to the unique privilege of being out here, laying eyes on a world that so few would know. And my mind was made up. A day at a time. A foot. A mile. And as I watched the steam explode out of my nose, I prepared for the kind of experience I knew would define the trip. Pain, too, as with all things, shall come to pass…