Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
whom was Frozen-Sausage Bill, and eleven pupils besides me - three navy personnel and eight
scientists. Everyone was in high spirits.
We headed out a few miles, on to the ice shelf. By the time we embarked on the first session, at
the foot of a snowhill, a band of cloud had descended and visibility had shrunk to thirty feet. The
morning culminated in techniques for self-arrest while sliding down a snowhill supine and upside
down. To do this, you plunge your ice axe into the snow at your side with the adze pointing to-
wards the sky, twist your legs over, roll and pivot yourself round the axe until you are lying face
down, head at the top, with the weight of your body over the axe, knees in and bum up.
Afterwards, we trooped off for lunch. They had put a small hut on the ice to facilitate happy
campers, and in it Bill discoursed on the niceties of stoves as the rest of us concentrated on trail-
mix, expedition cheese, crackers and chocolate and sucked on cartons of cranberry juice. Between
bouts of eating we mastered pumping and priming and nodded gravely about the dangers of carbon
monoxide poisoning. When we had finished, we walked across the ice shelf towards Mount Ere-
bus to learn how to build igloos.
Erebus is an active volcano, and to those who love the south it is more perfect than Fuji, even
Hockney's Fuji. The most recent measurement of its height, generally agreed to be the most accur-
ate, is 3793 metres. It is the Eiffel Tower of the continent. Named after the ship in which James
Clark Ross fought through the pack ice to almost 79 degrees south in the sea now named after
him, on one side Erebus overlooks the Ross Ice Shelf. Called the Barrier by the early explorers and
formed by ice flowing off the continent, this shelf consists of a roughly triangular slab of floating
ice the size of France which is glued to the continent on two sides. The third side meets the ocean.
During the summer months, when the thinner sea ice breaks up, the edge of the ice shelf crumbles
off as bergs. This is what Edwin Mickleburgh wrote about the ice shelf in
Beyond the Frozen Sea.
'The ice shelf is a region of unearthly desolation, a place of strange forebodings stirred by the loss
of horizons into an endless encirclement of the ice invading the explorer's mind.' The helicopter
pilots called it 'The Big White'.
During the course of the afternoon we engaged ourselves enthusiastically in building a snow
mound, sawing ice bricks, constructing a wall and digging a trench. Frozen Sausage showed us
how to spiral bricks into an igloo; this was very difficult. After we had accomplished these tasks
we put up the tents and the instructors handed us a radio and went off to stay in the hut half a mile
away. I shared a Scott tent with a scientist sporting a beard like Trotsky's (it seemed dangerous,
with so many ice axes about), and we ate our dehydrated dinners sitting on our snow-brick wall.
It was Thanksgiving Day, and, gathered chummily around the two stoves, we toasted it with more
cranberry juice, though not being American I felt like an imposter at a Masonic ceremony. One
of the navy men, a chief petty officer, was about to embark upon a mission to recover a radioiso-
tope thermoelectric generator powering an automatic weather station at a remote spot on the polar
plateau. A number of small RTGs had been working nicely in Antarctica before anyone began to
worry about the environmental impact of radioactivity. All the others had been removed, but the
last one was so inaccessible that no one had got round to going to find it. The RTG hadn't been
seen for ten years, and whether this man and his team would ever find it was clearly a matter of
conjecture. He didn't seem to be worried, anyway.
