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Diary from Antarctica Part 3
Day Eleven: Thursday 24 September
It was slow getting away in the morning, with a few dawdling over breakfast. I got very frustrated, probably more than I should, but I hated wasting daylight hours when we faced uncertain conditions. It was the coldest morning of the trip: –26°C at 0715 with winds at 20–30 knots.
We were away with high confidence at 0940, but bogged by 0950! By then we were the extraction A team, and so thirty minutes later we moving again. We had only two other boggings that day, and both times the Haggs were able to self extract. We’ve all got much better at this.
Our lunch stop was at Tilley Nunatak; it had only taken three hours to arrive in comparison to the eleven hours, in the reverse direction, on Monday. We arrived Colbeck at 1630 and immediately started digging out the fuel cache and moving it to rocks higher and further west. Some older drums were found under two metres of snow, making them virtually inaccessible and a leak risk. There were a number in poor condition, so we decanted those into better drums, planning to return the dodgy ones to Mawson.
Day Twelve: Friday 25 September
I ordered a compulsory sleep in until 0800 – no protests to that! Brilliant sun all day and no wind. We had a great climb up good scree and snow to the top of Chapman’s Ridge. The view was one of the best I’ve seen, anywhere. Mt Henderson was one hundred kilometres to the east. I spied a frozen lake from the top of the ridge, and scrambled down to explore – spending two hours walking over its enormous surface, mesmerised by the patterns created by air bubbles trapped when it snap froze. I also found an old whale bone trapped in the ice. When I returned to the hut, I finished transferring the fuel cache. We celebrated our last night with a bottle of half frozen port.
Day Thirteen: Saturday 26 September
It was an easy trip back to Mawson on generally clean ice. One major tide crack was the only difficulty; it took an hour to find a safe crossing. A Weddle pup was seen at the southern end of the tide crack, afterbirth bright red on the snow – so it perhaps only a few hours old. It was our first pup for the season.
We returned to Mawson at 1630 for a quick unpack, a long shower and even longer debrief at the newly renovated bar. It was nice to be ‘home’. A shower and my first real soap in two weeks (we use alcohol scrub in the field). I weighed myself – and found I lost two and a half kilograms. I better go again!
This trip was one of the highlights of my year. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to Kloa, but happy with what we did achieve. I was also able to give news of a possible Adélie penguin colony, first found in 1954 and since forgotten. If confirmed, it will be the most western colony in Antarctica. We were visiting our nearby Adélie colonies every day; none seen yet but their return was imminent. Our replacements are now half-way through their training in Tassie and in about five to six weeks, we would be watching for the light planes on the sea ice in front of Mawson. For me, it would be the first of the four flights that I needed to catch to reach home, hopefully in early December. Time to start working on my final reports, performance reviews and finish off the stocktakes – and get out to Auster one more time. And it would also be time to dust off the CV and see what jobs are out there for chubby fifty-two year olds with frostbite and a nasty habit of wearing thermals for five days straight.
Diary from Antarctica Part 2 by Peter Hackworth
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Kill Your Darlings, No. 8
January 2012 The Stella Prize
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