LOO-JW - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 44

scenery to my right. Each sweep of my gaze across the buckled
skyline picked out delicate details that by themselves were
exquisite and together as a whole were almost overwhelming.
Occasionally I would look in the opposite direction towards
the empty vastness of the Ross Ice Shelf on my left, a clean,
featureless horizon precisely dividing dense blue sky from
harshly white snow. The contrast with the mountainscape
was so absolute that I could have been flitting between two
entirely different planets with a simple turn of my head. The
Ross Ice Shelf looked desolate and lonely in its flat emptiness,
especially in comparison to the chain of peaks which, although
silent and devoid of life, did at least fill my world with colour
and texture. It was an ominous thought that within a matter
of weeks the mountains would be nothing but a memory and
I would be surrounded by empty landscape identical to the
featureless world of the Ross Ice Shelf.
After skiing several kilometres, I caught sight of a dark
scratch in the pale shades up ahead. As I drew closer, glide
by glide, the scratch deepened, its edges too straight to be
made by nature. Eventually it revealed itself as a tall wooden
post hammered into the ground and surrounded by tattered
green pennants writhing in the wind on bamboo poles. At the
top of the post were engraved the letters, 'LOO-JW'. I took
off my skis and walked around the post until I found several
signatures in black marker pen, slightly faded on the surface
of the heavily grained wood but still clearly visible. Among
them I spotted the name Valdi and remembered the man I'd
met in Reykjavik who had signed this post almost exactly a
year previously.
Placed originally by the SPOT traverse as a navigational
marker, LOO-JW had gained significance in recent years as a