November 10, 2011

Same position as yesterday

After attempting to repair the ski, I do not feel confident that the fix job can sustain another 4000 kilometers of hard ice and sastrugi at speed. With barely 30 kilometers separating us from the station, the only option is to go get it there. One of us will leave with a light pack and come back tomorrow. After some hesitation, due to their schedule, Andrei at the base, is kind enough to drive the ski about eight kilometers from where we are. I cannot say enough to thank him and his team for their support. Eric offers to ski that distance which is now negligible. The air is dead still, the sun shinning and the temperature very moderate at around minus 15C. As I sit alone in the tent, at the coastal edge of Antarctica, I contemplate the nature of doubt, failure, and introspective questioning. Failure is the blood relative of all successes. It looms along side the dreams and accomplishment. In this type of mission, it is with you with each challenge met–sometimes with each step–in spite of the forceful reneging of its very existence. Stubbornness is the spirit of expeditions. Failure is not an option, we say; until it is the only option. With so much planning, anticipating and double checking, we have had two major technical failures in our first five days–one of our satellite phones and the ski–each of which would have cost us the expedition had they happened, say, a week from now. I had opted to keep the skis I had used on Greenland since they barely had one season on them–about thirty days of kiting–and the wear was not substantial. I chose the tested ski over risking a surprise with a new one. Admittedly, a plant into sastrugi with 400 pounds in tow nets tremendous stress on the gear. Given the ice surface out here, this is something we will need to be extra careful about.

Breakdowns are commonplace on this type of trip. Part of the appeal is to find solutions with the materials on hand. But both of these could have been crippling. I am troubled by choices that I made, in spite of lessons that I already knew, but was not diligent enough to impose. Praying that this puts an end to our misfortunes, those simple lessons are these:
1. Both team members must be on the same equipment. One spare serves both.
2. Don’t compromise when your gut tells you otherwise
3. Just about everything should be new, save the boots that need be broken in.

Eighty to ninety days in an environment as harsh as this does not afford to cut corners.
Eric returns with the one ski. The air is dead still. It is 5PM and no traveling will be done today. I mount the binding on the new ski as the temperature drops inside the tent. Failure will not be with us tomorrow.

November 9, 2011
S71°03.916′ E011°13.219′

Elevation 3763ft

From inside the tent, the flapping of the fabric in strong wind has the sound of banging corrugated iron sheets. That is what most of last night was like. By morning, while the wind had reversed direction from yesterday–it now blew from the east–it still had good enough an angle to pull out the kites. We flew the nine meter frenzy’s for about an hour, but the wind was weakening which made it painfully slow and a lot of work. We were sweating bullets trying to move the sledges over the rough terrain. Eventually, I came to a stand still. The kite was flying but not enough power to haul. We switched to thirteen meters, and even that for a while was slow moving. But then it picked up a bit and soon the hard work lessened to a reasonable pull. The surface is still very rough and twice, my ski stuck into a sastrugi and had me do a face plant–the equivalent of a yard sale! However, we were moving, and the landscape was noticeably changing. As we rose in elevation, a mountain range revealed itself to the south east, superb, rising out of the ice, with sharp, rugged peaks. This is the northern range of Queen Maud Land. In spite of the slow speed, within two hours we had already doubled our daily average. Ahead stood a significant crevasse area. The depressions showed cracks large enough to swallow a house.

We were struggling to work our way up a hill, and that is when it happened: after taking a fall from looping the kite in an attempt to generate power to move the sledges, I noticed that one of my skis did not look right: the ski was delaminating under foot! With this our first day of kiting, this could have catastrophic consequences to the expedition. Needless to say we had to stop and set up camp to assess our options. In the tent, I drilled holes through the ski, and will screw in the de-lamed surface tomorrow morning after applying epoxy and hope for the best. Right now, it is too cold in the tent to do anything further. I have serious concerns. I had brought a spare ski with me, but in a compromise with Eric, we opted to leave it at the station to cut on weight. That decision could be crippling. We traveled 14 kilometers today for a total of 31.43 km…

November 8, 2011

S70°57.857′ E011°27.003′

Elevation 3338ft

We woke up to absolute stillness, and the sun was again baking the inside of the tent. Upon stepping outside, the day’s temperature and conditions stood in stark contrast to yesterday’s: no a cloud in the sky and this again promised to be T-shirt weather (yesterday was about 35 below with the wind!).

Ahead of us stood the nasty hill that had stopped our day and was now looming. The fresh look of the morning reconnects you with the positive outlook that got you here in the first place. And then reality sets in again! The grade was nasty–around 25%–and the effort intense. Luckily, the sastrugi was more moderate on the hillside. We weaved away from the more obvious crevasses and selected carefully the bridges that we crossed. All these crevasses are hidden by ice cover–bridges–and would barely be noticeable but for the slight depression in the terrain. We managed 200 feet of rise in the first hour; 100 in the second. By then we reached a first plateau. There was a slight breeze coming in from the west. Enough to fly the big kite? Given the brutal workout of the morning, it did not take much arguing! We quickly switched to ski boots, pulled the kites out and proceeded to unwind the 75 meters of lines. Mine had slight tangles and took me about 20 minutes to manage. Luckily, it wasn’t too cold and I could worked mostly without gloves. When done, however, I looked over at Eric who was handling what amounted to a fishing net’s worth of knotted mess! When the kite lifted in a jerk, he had accidentally released a whole section of line from the quick winding tools I had custom made. We spent the next two hours finding a way through that mess. Untangling such a pile of lines is like an endless series of little projects that don’t seem to add up to much except, little by little, we got to the end of it. By then, we both attempted to fly the kites. I managed about 20 feet after running like a convict to get it up in the air and flying. The wind had died. Eric did not even get his skis on. Today was a lot of work, with little to show for. But we did manage that hill… We covered a meager 1.46 miles. We haven’t even gotten started!