Forty-Six - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 88

I felt removed from the weather as if safely ensconced in my
own private submarine bubble. Today the cold didn't seem to
penetrate my layers as it had done and as I bowed into the
spray, breaking vigorously into the snow encasing my tent, I
felt electrically alive. I was living the kind of adventure that
had enthralled my imagination as a child. As unlikely as it
was for the teenager who had avoided sport at all costs and
the woman who disliked gyms, here I was, a real-life explorer.
I couldn't help but feel thrilled with my own good fortune.
Even though it was cold and miserable and lonely, I couldn't
deny that the adventurer in me was perversely savouring every
minute of it.
The drifting snow had obliterated all the patches of ice that
had delighted me the day before but the light continued to get
brighter as I travelled. I even noticed a few slivers of blue in
the grey caul above me. On the ground I could make out vague
structures like wavelets on a lake made solid. Occasionally a
wavelet would rise out of the frozen surface higher than the
others and curl over at its windward end. The inside of the curl
was always a powder blue that showed up against the dull white
like a pale eye and soon I began to notice these unwinking blue
eyes dotting the ground ahead of me. They became larger and
then appeared clustered together in groups, betraying large
formations of wind-gouged snow that despite being up to a
metre high and several metres long would be largely invisible
until I was almost upon them. These wind-sculpted structures
are known by their Russian name, sastrugi, and I was expecting
them. Despite the fact that sastrugi are constantly shifting like
sand dunes in the desert, ceaselessly changing the surface of
Antarctica so that no place ever looks the same from year to
year, it seems that the largest and most dense sastrugi always