Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
51
the others hiked down in the tracks, and then they all repeated the operation several more
times. After about six hundred feet of descent, the surface leveled out somewhat, giving
an opportunity to regroup. The slope they had just descended may have reached 45° at its
steepest, but from there down it appeared less steep, so the men hiked back up to camp to
fetch the others and the loaded sledges.
They lashed the six sledges together in pairs. In addition to standard rope brakes,
fashioned by tying a heavy rope across the underside of sledge runners, they also fitted
bridles under the runners as brakes. Four men then carefully lowered the tandem sledges.
Armitage, Skelton, Allan, and Macfarlane took the lead. Their run was touch and go
when the sledges sped up and threw Armitage and Allan from their tow ropes, but the
others managed to ride the sledges to a safe stop on the first terrace. Armitage made the
cavalier comment, “It was a most exhilarating run, far more exciting even than the water-
chute at Earl's Court.” The other teams followed safely and from there maneuvered down
two more inclines of lesser steepness, camping about a third of the way down the slope
on a relatively level spot.
The next day saw the party to the valley bottom, where they congratulated them-
selves on their success, and then were forced to lay up because of a thick fog that rose up
the valley. When the air cleared the following day, the party quickly started to haul up
the south side of the glacier, but the four inches of sticky snow that had been crucial to
their successful descent now made pulling the sledges so grueling that only two could be
pulled by the twelve men at a time. Furthermore, the snow made spotting crevasses dif-
ficult, so Armitage was typically out in front probing the glacier with his ice axe.
By December 23 the party had pulled past the four faceted ramparts of Cathedral
Rocks and reached a point where they could see that the glacier had two major branches,
one coming from the south and the other from the west (see Fig. 2.9). Judging that the
westerly route oVered the better promise of reaching the plateau, Armitage pointed the
party in that direction. By Christmas Eve they had risen over a shoulder in the glacier and
then descended into a sort of null region, smooth and crevasse free. They crossed to the
west of this névé and camped in the snowy lee of a pair of huge granite boulders set on a
moraine that grew out of the foot of the blocky massif, the same mountain that Armitage
had viewed in the spring from the mouth of the valley. Because of two prominent knobs
at the summit, they named this landmark Knobhead.
From there on, the snow from the previous blizzard either had been blown away
or had melted, so the pulling was easier. A few miles beyond their camp at Knobhead,
the men noticed that a fourth arm of the glacier appeared to extend oV and down to the
north, but its full extent could not be seen. The mountains kept their secret, but only for
another year. Over the next week between days lost to bad weather, the party ascended
a series of rolling icefalls, separated by stretches of relatively smooth glacier ice. The up-
permost reaches of the glacier gave the appearance of flowing down over large steps in
the bedrock before channeling. From Knobhead upward the bedrock had changed from
the steep walls of granite and gneiss (metamorphic rock) in the lower glacier to cliVs of
flat-lying sedimentary rocks interspersed with thick sheets of dolerite. Although Armit-
age noted that “their colouring was most beautiful, consisting of all shades of red, brown,
and yellow,” his overriding focus was the route to the plateau, and what might be beyond.
