Forty-Six - Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo Across the Southern Ice - page 74

on the ground the whole time and yet, to me, it had appeared
to dart about like a UFO. My judgement of scale and distance
was confused by the fact that the terrain hadn't flattened out
after passing through the narrows of the Leverett Glacier but
continued irregularly upward over a series of hills. The UFO
flag that had appeared to float above me was probably simply
at the top of a hill and it had moved around as I had gained
or lost height.
The wind never stopped, continuously circulating in currents
and flows, its gusts and eddies always searching and probing
for some weakness, be it the slightest of gaps between my face
mask and goggles or some item of equipment stowed on my
sledge that was in danger of being pulled free. The winds left
a thick layer of soft snow on the ground so that my skis sank
a full three or four inches into the surface with every stride,
slowing further my already sluggish movement up inclines
that felt endless because I was unable to see the top in the bad
visibility. The only reason I knew I was climbing at all was
because my sledges would suddenly feel much heavier and my
pace slowed as I began to breathe harder. The lack of progress
despite such backbreaking effort was demoralising. On one
particularly bad day I made less than three nautical miles in
over ten hours of dogged skiing.
The time lost on the Leverett Glacier and now the relentless,
slow slogs uphill in soft snow and bad weather weighed
heavily on my mind. Each evening I marked my location on
the map and made increasingly desperate calculations in my
tiny notepad, searching for some consolation in the numbers
- but there was none to be had. Whichever way I looked at it,
there was no possibility that in these conditions I was going to
be able to make up the time and mileage I had lost. I tried not