December 8, 2011
S77°54.992 E023°54.197
Elevation 11249 feet
One point one kilometers. That is the distance we covered by kite today. Apart from the 31 meters–the distance we managed on foot during the storm–this is officially our personal worse. It could well be a record, which would balance nicely with the one Eric and I set on Greenland last year at 595 kilometers by kites, in twenty four hours. In this case, it is hard to imagine anyone recording a much shorter distance!
The morning saw dead calm conditions again, and we thought this would be a replay of yesterday–confined to the tent with a forced rest day. But by noon, the tent’s fabric began to flutter. Ever the optimists, we chose to read this as encouraging, and packed up camp. By the time we were ready to launch, the wind remained marginal: 3.3 meters per second, and another North-north-westerly.
“It might pick up. Feels like it wants to,” I ventured tentatively.
“Yes, it’s still early,” Eric replied non committal.
In reality, it was not early: it was 13:30. And given our prior experiences, by midday, the wind rarely strengthened; more the other way. Still, after the sastrugi had its usual tiff with the lines, snagging them on every opportunity in an attempt to prevent the kites from taking off, we managed–just–to get them off the ground. But the pull was hardly convincing. A few slow meters, and a pause. When the sledge buttered against a piece of ice, the pause would extend beyond its welcome, and then fastidiously screech along with more theatrics than gusto. We were going nowhere. During a lull, my kite fell out of the sky and collapsed, lifeless, on the ice. The next weak gust moved it around just enough for the seventy five meter lines to get snagged again! I looked behind me to see Eric’s kite take the shape of a mushroom as it, too, fell to the ground. Twenty minutes, and we had covered one kilometer–or an average speed of three kilometers per hour! We decided to set the tent, as temporary shelter to see if conditions would improve. An hour later, they seemed to pull back some and we called it a day. Twenty minutes after that and the wind had shut off completely. There are times, and this is one of them, where the best thing to do–the only thing to do, in fact–is to surrender. No point in whining. Antarctica is serving us its array of conditions. And at the altitude we are traveling at to reach the POI, weak winds are on the menu.
It was colder today. My thermometer only reads down to 30C below, and by late afternoon it was pointing below that; 35C is my estimate. Even with the sun out, there was no shaking the cooler trends, and no afternoon strollon the ice. We’re going to take this as a good sign. The relative warmth of the last few days has not served the wind well, so change may be afoot. Crunching numbers, we need to average 46.5 kilometers per day between now and the South Pole. All bets are still on.
December 9, 2011 S78°56.806 E028°51.625 Elevation 11317 feet There is a sound the wind makes when it beckons you out. That sound I heard when I first woke up at AM. It is more of a grunt than a rumble and, combined with its distant high pitched whistle is an unmistakable sign. I hesitated to wake Eric up, and hit the road. But a quick estimation and I decided to wait until 05:30 instead: the wind has generally been building through the morning, which means that we’d put in a long day, in cold night conditions combined with the lack of sleep, and perhaps hit it just as the fatigue set in. I woke up three times after that to the same signs. Our first section was remarkably smooth with consistent North-north-westerly wind. Looking over to my right, I saw Eric flying over the sparse lunar terrain and, upon looking down at my shadow and the ice speeding below my skis, I could not help but think of two riders of the apocalypse from some lost world in search of a civilization! The ice conditions changed and soon we were riding some wild bucking sastrugi-ridden rodeo. Perhaps fortuitously my iPod stopped working at that point as the ride required utmost concentration, while the legs absorbed the terrain like engine pistons. Three times, my sledge flipped over. Once, my ski caught a piece of ice and threw me off balance. I fell to the side at 25 kilometers per hour but kept my eyes on the kite and after being dragged twenty or thirty feet managed to pop back up without missing a stride! Later, I saw Eric do the same. The thing about kiting on the ice is that a fall doesn’t necessarily mean you stop. That kite is still going and with a little acrobatic you might not even waste anytime! The temperatures have cooled down some, and with the wind-chill factor, we were in for a long depleting day–10 hours, door to door… We ended with 160 kilometers for the day over eight hours of kiting, and have covered 1098 kilometers since Novo. And tonight, I am exhausted! December 10, 2011 S79°24.532 E032°37.736 Elevation 11428 feet Two weeks ago, I busted my big right toe nail, and since then, it has swollen and filled with liquid. I have been dressing it with antibiotic cream and medical tape morning and night, but the discoloration has me concerned. Additionally, during yesterday’s marathon session, the moisture on my face mask froze on my chin, trapped by facial hair. The comic part of this is I had my face mask hanging from my chin for a good twenty minutes after getting into the tent and ended getting the partial equivalent of an ice waxing when I finally pried the ice off it. The less funny part is that hours of that state on the trail resulted in a cold injury on the chin, and having to devise a different facial system. Those two were on my mind getting out of the tent this morning. When an injury develops out here, all types of concerns start brewing in your mind, factoring the worse case scenario, and its consequences, and you quickly feel vulnerable. Which is why when we got hit by the most vicious sastrugi-ridden terrain, five minutes into our first session, I realized I was going to have a bad day. I did not understand how bad it was going to be until one hour before it ended. The wind was there, consistent in direction with prior days, and capitalizing–in the first half of the day, anyway–on yesterday’s system. But our theory of good and bad ice alternating every thirty kilometers or so quickly vanished as we bucked and bounced over the nastiest, unrelenting ice conditions over eighty of the 94.34 kilometers we covered in the day. My brain is still rattling as I write this and I may have loosened all my fillings from the shaking that went on all day. It was not fun. Seeing the shredded ice stretch without mercy in all direction actually made me question what I was doing out here. I saw Eric get bounced around as if riding a bull and thought: “Any time now, that binding repair job is going to go, and we’ll be marooned in this hellish ice!” Meanwhile I was thrown around myself like a pantomime, begging for some smooth terrain. For kilometers on end, the ice was so bad that I could not see a spot where we could have set up a tent had we wanted to. It turns out the smoother terrain never came, though the severity mellowed out somewhat in the last hour. Luckily, we were traveling in a straight downwinder for most of the afternoon, which meant moving in the direction–and not across–the sastrugi, and with less pull on the lines. We miraculously managed a good distance nonetheless, which brings us to 497 kilometers from the POI and has dropped our daily average requirements to 41 kilometers for the next 33 days until the South Pole. However, the afternoon warmed up, and the wind died again around 17:30, which seems to mean that we are back to the old system and probably weaker winds ahead. The tension remains… December 11, 2011 S79°39.887 E034°08.371 Elevation 11466 feet The mornings are pretty solemn. Aside from a shared interest in the wind conditions, which can generally be ascertained by the flapping of the tent’s fabric–or lack thereof–we tend to keep to ourselves, and not much is said. We go through the daily ritual of melting snow, filling up the thermos’ with Herbalife protein powder and H3O electrolytes while charging the iPods and other electronics of the solar panels. We stuff the sleeping bags in their respective compression sacks, and little by little pack up the various items that made the tent a makeshift house for the night. We brush our teeth, swallow vitamins and Omega 3′s–again, courtesy of Herbalife–and finally get to breakfast. This consists of homemade granola or oatmeal, depending on the days. Either one become rather insipid after week on ends. The former is like chewing on pebbles soaked in water; the latter like eating cardboard soaked in maple syrup. The eating is also done silently, as is the process of suiting up, which follows. Even while we travel as a team, most of the day is spent alone, almost as a monastic internal journey. And if the morning silence is partly about readying for another day on the ice, like gladiators preparing for the arena, another part is that we simply don’t have much to say! When the tent door is zipped open, the game is on. The chill immediately sets the tone: the sooner we hit the trail, the better–it warms you up. The tent’s contents are tossed out onto the ice, the tent disassembled, and the sledges packed up. Finally we unwind the kites and set them up for take off. We walk the lines back to the skis and step into them. We clip the sledges’ leashes into the harness, puck up the handle and look to each other for readiness. Once acknowledged, we tug on the lines, one at a time–whoever is upwind generally starts to avoid potential tangle–and work the kite up in the air. In moments, the leash tightens behind us and the sledge grinds forward. We plunge the kite into a figure eight to generate power, and just like that, pull away from our former campsite. Not much has been said, nor needed to be. Next stop in two hours. Today the wind only gave us two sections, and slow though the miles were, we managed–barely–to cover our daily goal with 42 kilometers. Easy math and you got it: an average of ten painful kilometers per hour. In spite of the still nasty terrain, moving got so slow in the end that I almost dozed off kiting! I have upped our daily average to 43 kilometers as I would like to arrive at the Pole on January 11th, the day Robert Falcon Scott made it there, one hundred years ago (almost a month after Amundsen did). Arriving on the anniversary would have some symbolic significance for this trip. Hopefully, my toe will not get in the way of our plans; I am tending to it but have some concerns. Eric’s altitude cough won’t go away. But on the positive side, my rib seems to be healing, which is great news–feels like a bad bruise, but no more clicking! We have traveled 1235 kilometers so far. PS. About the update photo: this should answer one of the more common question about this type of trip! Also: plenty of ventilation, terrific air conditioner, and one of the best views money can buy!Day 35–Riders of the Apocalypse
At 05:30, I poked Eric and said:”It’s on.”
“It sounds that way”, he responded sleepily, without missing a beat.We were on the trail by 07:30. By 09:30 we had covered our daily average. By 10:30, we had broken our first 1000 kilometers for this trip.Day 36–A Day Without Mercy
Day 37–Paying The Dues
