Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
71
boards, but without crampons they had to cut steps when they encountered the steeper
ice—a tedious, tiring job of chopping with the ice axe, bent over, trying to keep balance
in two aligned holes in the ice while chopping the next. David had given Marshall his
crampons and used a set of leather strips on his ski boots that he tested to good success,
but Adams and Brocklehurst struggled over icy stretches of the ascent.
The party carried two tents but had left their tent poles at the depot. They camped at
8,750 feet in their sleeping bags inside the limp shell of their tents (Camp III, see Fig. 3.3).
During the night a blizzard sprang up and pinned them down for another full day, dur-
ing which they had no water because they could not use the cooker in the tents. Imagine
being in Adams's tent, one of three men in one big sleeping bag: every time someone
moved, so must everyone else. At one point, Brocklehurst and Adams had to go outside.
They managed to position the sleeping bag to squirm out of the tent. As Brocklehurst was
taking oV a mitten, the wind grabbed it from his hand. As he tried to rescue it, the wind
took him too, and sent him tumbling down a ravine. Adams jumped to catch Brockle-
hurst and was also blown down the ravine. Marshall was in the awkward position of los-
ing the sleeping bag to the wind if he tried to rescue his mates, so he held tight. Both
Adams and Brocklehurst made it back to the tent by crawling on their hands and knees,
and everyone was fine, but it had been a close call.
On the morning of March 9, the climbing was the steepest thus far, with a slope of
about 35°. The men were able to piece together some rocky stretches, but wherever there
was ice they had to cut steps. They set up a lunch camp in a rocky gully about fifty feet
below the edge of an old crater rim. Brocklehurst admitted that he had not had feeling
in his feet for quite some time. When Marshall removed Brocklehurst's boots, the men
were shocked to find that two of his toes were black, indicating that they had been frozen
for a number of hours, and four other toes showed lesser signs of frostbite. Marshall and
Mackay warmed up his feet, gave him dry socks and an extra cut of sennegrass for his
finnesko (reindeer leather boots with hair on the outside), and tucked him into the three-
man bag to rest while the others spent the remainder of the afternoon exploring.
The inner side of the old crater was a steep-to-overhung wall eighty to one hundred
feet high that dropped into a wind scour about thirty feet deep. Beyond, a fairly smooth
névé climbed to the summit of Erebus. The party found a cleft in the crater wall, where
a drift of snow had bridged the wind scour, and walked the line across to the névé. They
were drawn immediately to the bizarre ice mounds scattered across the névé that they had
spotted from the rim. It was like the men were in some postapocalyptic sculpture garden.
The forms, all rounded and knobby, stood tens of feet at their highest (Fig. 3.4). They
resembled turrets and chimneys, beehives and haystacks; some were grotesque animals
with gnarly sinews ready to pounce. Upon closer examination they found the mounds
to be largely hollow. Professor David concluded that these remarkable structures were
forming at the vents of fumaroles, where steam escaped from the volcano. (Fumaroles
are common on most active volcanoes, but the diVerence here was the subzero tempera-
tures, which caused condensation and freezing of the moist vapors as they issued from the
mountain. What a great place to take a sauna—if you could stand the sulfur fumes!)
The party climbed about a mile up the névé to a small parasitic cone with good expo-
sure. The geologists were delighted with what they found. The groundmass of the rock
 
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