LOO-JW - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 50

shivered through every nerve. I forced down my evening meal
because I knew how much my body needed the energy, but
every mouthful was a struggle. Once again I had eaten hardly
anything during the day and as I looked at the bags of food
left over from my first forty-eight hours I was conscious of all
the missing nutrients it represented and the impact it would
have. In the past I had relentlessly nagged my teams to eat
every single scrap of each day's allocated food, so it was with
a degree of guilt that I hid the excess food from my sight. I
knew I had to start eating but I reasoned that perhaps it was
ambitious to expect my body to adjust overnight to digesting
the 4,500 calories in my daily rations.
At the end of my third day I camped in front of a tall orange
mountain with a thick cap of snow on its summit. Its exposed
faces were heavily crenulated like the wrinkled skin of an
ancient and the rich colour of the rock seemed to glow in the
sunlight. Although not the tallest peak, it stood out from the
rest of the range, sitting on a corner like a newel post. It made
an immediate impression on me and once I had pitched the tent
I stood for a while letting my gaze rise upwards over its rutted
surface. Pulling the map from my sledge I marked the position
of my camp and tried to match the topography on paper to
the view in front of me. The magnificent craggy mountain had
to be the knot of concentric contours named on the map as
Mount Beazley. If so, I realised with mounting excitement, the
slope to its left was the narrow stretch of the Leverett Glacier
that I had seen from the air, the corridor to the plateau. It
was hard to glean much from where I was camped about the
route through the gap. The ground looked smooth except for
a large area of obvious crevasses near the top showing up
against the white like a patch of cracked and peeling paint. It