Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The camp at Lake Hoare was the most sophisticated in the Taylor Valley, with a smart new hut
fitted with a kitchen, and, predictably enough, it was devoid of character. It did have solar pan-
els, however, which powered the laptops, and it meant that a generator rarely blighted the silence.
The eight residents of the Hoare House (as they themselves inevitably called it) were graduate stu-
dents working with the Long Term Ecological Research programme, a National Science Founda-
tion global project.
I put up my tent near the others and walked out on to the lake. It was named after Ray Hoare, a
member of a team from Victoria University of Wellington who had worked in the Dry Valleys in
the 1960s. There were some photographs of them in the hut, and even bundled up in all their gear
they looked like Hermann's Hermits. Some of the pictures showed them pulling each other stark
naked over the lake in sledges. It was frontier territory then, the days of mapless land and nameless
places.
The hut was divided down the middle, one half containing the kitchen and a long table, and
the other a set of bunks and a couple of desks. The kitchen window looked straight at the cliff of
the glacier, fissured with slits like the walls of a medieval castle. Although chunks of ice (which
they called glacier berries) regularly fell off the ice cliff and were used to make water, everyone
was never the less acutely aware that water was a precious commodity. When I began washing the
dishes after dinner someone piped up, 'Hey, how come you get to wash your hands?'
In the evening, people drifted off to their tents or lay in the bunks in the hut. The camp was more
a collection of individuals than a team; you could feel it straight away. I went to bed early, and
when I opened my bag I found a cloth ration pouch inscribed with my name and the words 'from
all your friends at Lake Fryxell'. Inside they had put a sweatshirt from their institution, a sew-on
patch, bars of chocolate and other treats.
Everyone seemed to be feeling better in the morning; they talked to each other in polysyllables,
anyway. A helicopter arrived with the post, and it took away the charred rocket toilet. One of the
students received an advent calendar in the post. It was already 9 December and most of the win-
dows had popped open in transit, causing the chocolate animals lurking underneath to slip to the
bottom, disintegrate and turn magnolia white on their passage through multitudinous temperature
changes.
Two scientists appeared with the helicopter, and one, a snow and ice physicist and mountaineer
called Ed, was planning to hike up the valley to his camp at Lake Bonney later that afternoon.
When he asked me if I wanted to go with him, I leapt at the chance as I was longing to travel over-
land. It turned out to be one of the best walks of my life - and of his.
I left my tent and sleeping gear behind, and someone agreed to put it on the next helicopter to
McMurdo. We strode off up Lake Hoare, the sky smeared with cloud like a lazily cleaned pane
of glass and Ed delivering diatribes on ice formation. At the far end Hoare blended imperceptibly
into Lake Chad. One of the early explorers got diarrhoea there, and the story goes that the lake was
named after the brand of toilet paper favoured by the expedition. Chad in turn petered out into mo-
raine. The bank of black debris, pushed along by the Suess Glacier, blocked our way up the valley.
Ed, who had climbed Denali and in the Himalaya and had spent half his life in the wilderness, told
stories about falling into crevasses. His words bounced back at us from the wall of the Suess, like
