Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
54
glow in the sky above the darkened valley. The air temperature was a frigid minus 49° F,
but in the morning the sun was bright and spirits were high. The fjord was a sight to be-
hold (see Fig. 2.8). Unlike the floating glacier tongues of northern Victoria Land that pro-
jected out from the mountain front, this floating glacier had calved well up into its valley.
The walls on both sides, which rose steeply to more than three thousand feet, were devoid
of snow and plastered over with morainal debris, except for narrow icefalls that poured
into some of the gullies from the snowfields above.
The glacier was a raggedy mess, just like Armitage had reported, but that frozen
stream along the edge of the glacier looked like a possibility to Scott. While the others
climbed up the side of the valley to see whether any routes could be spotted from above,
Scott and Skelton went to explore up the draw. The bottom was very slick in places, rough
with gravel in others, but from what they could see, not too steep or too narrow for man-
aging a sledge. About a mile along, the stream channel headed up onto the glacier. As the
two men climbed, the relief on the ice pinnacles and blocks became more subdued, giving
promise of what lay ahead.
When the groups joined up again, the men who had been up the side of the valley
confirmed that it seemed to smooth out farther up glacier, and maybe that there was even
a better route closer to camp. The rest of the day was spent dragging and portaging the
two sledges up the twisted gully, with the party camping in a relatively smooth spot for
the night. The following day they relayed the sledges for another half-mile, then pulled
on up together on a smooth and easy incline to the eastern toe of Cathedral Rocks (see
Fig. 2.11).
It had taken Scott's party six fewer days to reach this point from Discovery than it had
Armitage's party the previous year, even with a day lost to a blizzard on the sound. Al-
though they had to carry the sledges across some rough stretches of ice, the dangerous
traverse down Descent Glacier could be avoided. On the moraine at the foot of Knob-
head, next to a conspicuous, white, quartzite boulder, Scott made a cache: three weeks'
rations for six men, four gallons of oil, and sundry climbing gear. This would be an easy
place to find when the western party pushed through several weeks hence.
Upon their return, the party avoided almost all of the rough terrain by taking a more
northerly route down the glacier. Scott surmised that the diVerence in the surface
roughness resulted from midday sun from the north casting a shadow on the north side
of the valley while warming and melting the glacier on the south, in contrast to the wee
hours when the sun was in the south and at a lower angle, when its rays did not readily
melt the north side of the glacier. From their camp at Butter Point, Scott pushed the party
to test their limits by sprinting the forty-five miles back to the ship in two days.
The second major undertaking of the summer of 1903-1904 was a traverse to the
southwest, led by Barne, into the reentrant south of the bluV, to explore the deep cleft
into the mountains, with the possibility of finding another route to the interior. A party
went out in mid-September to lay a depot for this traverse on the south side of White
Island. Their thermometer broke at minus 67.7° F, nearly 20 degrees colder than Scott's
party had suVered during the same cold snap. On October 6 the twelve members of the
southwest and southwest support parties pulled out of Winter Quarters Bay.
