Paying Attention - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 29

the way across the distant view. It was my first sight of the
Transantarctic Mountains.
The pilots finished refuelling and climbed into the plane. One
of them shouted back to me,
'You explorers are true rock stars to voluntarily spend time
out here. I can't imagine being out in conditions like this.'
I laughed with him but the truth was I could barely imagine
it either and had been as grateful as anyone else to scuttle
back into the relative warmth and shelter of the aircraft.
Standing out in the wind, my body had recoiled in shock
from the cold and yet in just a few weeks I would be back on
the plateau and these conditions would be the reality of my
daily existence.
It wasn't long before we were suspended high above the
mountains I had seen from the ground. The tops of the ridges
on the lower hills were almost bare of snow, the rock showing
through like wrack lines of tide-washed debris on a white sand
beach. Between them were wide channels of ice, the moraine
and rock debris trapped within each glacier visible as fine dark
trails along their length. Carried steadily but imperceptibly
slowly downwards through the mountains, these moraine
trails mark out the movement of the glaciers in long, delicate
stripes as orderly and sinuous as hand-carved arabesques. This
graceful dance of ice and rock stretched on in all directions
so that my eyes darted around the landscape struggling to
take it in. I pressed my forehead against the plastic glass of
the aircraft window, straining to get the widest possible field
of view. Then I noticed soft scars radiating outwards from the
top of the nearest glaciers; perfectly concentric impressions of
hundreds of snow-covered crevasses in an otherwise creamy
surface. They looked like the ripples on the surface of a pool,