Every Step - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 9

be on my own with nobody to tie myself to, nobody to rescue
me and nobody to raise the alarm should I fall into one of the
many crevasses.
The largest of the glaciers through the Transantarctic
Mountains is the infamous Beardmore. This long, ponderous
runway of ice that buckles and fractures for nearly 160
kilometres on the eastern side of the Ross Ice Shelf was used
by both Shackleton and Scott during the first exploratory
expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900s. Scott's Norwegian
rival, Roald Amundsen, favoured the shorter, steeper (but
equally lethal) Axel Heiberg glacier tucked into the top
corner of the Ross Ice Shelf, where the distance to the South
Pole is shortest. Since then, only a handful of expeditions
have followed these pioneering routes and even fewer have
attempted new ones. In the 1950s Sir Edmund Hillary led a
convoy of modified farm tractors up the Skelton Glacier, close
to the Beardmore, as part of Sir Vivian Fuchs's mechanised
crossing of Antarctica and, more recently, Ann Bancroft and
Liv Arnesen made a descent of the Shackleton Glacier in 2000.
Blazing my own trail along an unknown glacier - alone in
one of the remotest parts of Antarctica - was not an option.
I didn't have the skill, confidence or appetite for that level of
danger. Instead, I considered each of the known routes in turn.
The Beardmore and Skelton glaciers were both on the western
side of the Ross Ice Shelf and would add considerable distance
to my journey, so I focused on the glaciers on the eastern side
of the ice shelf, the Shackleton and the Axel Heiberg.
Norwegian explorer, Borge Ousland, had chosen to descend
the Axel Heiberg during his solo transantarctic expedition in
1997. His book gave a lot of detail about the route down the
glacier and had plenty of terrifying pictures of fractured ice