'Round Rothera Point and a Ridge Named Reptile

The following post includes my first few days on the Antarctic Peninsula in December 2008. If you've yet to read about my time in Chile and my flight to Antarctica, see previous posts!

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I had trouble sleeping the first night at the Station from all of the excitement. I was in total shock to be in Antarctica… to feel, as I did in Tierra del Fuego, that I was on a completely different planet… and once again, lucky as hell to be there. The Dash-7 had safely deposited me in the middle of stunning, white, glaciered, iceberged nowhere. I awoke early on the 26^th of December to what would be the first of many spectacularly beautiful days on the Antarctic Peninsula. Blue, blue skies, blindingly brilliant snow. I shared a room with my friend Mel, who I had befriended during my time in Cambridge, UK at the British Antarctic Survey’s Briefing Conference and Field Training in September 2008. From room 31 in Admiral’s Accommodation Block, we had a spectacular view of the gravel runway, Mt. Leotard, the South Cove, Reptile Ridge, the ski-way, the Traverse, and the airplane hangar, and the 4 or 5 feet of Winter snow that still hadn’t melted around the Station.

Admiral's room 31.

The spectacular view from room 31.

After breakfast in a dining room lined with windows that faced the ink-blue and iceberg-strewn North Cove, I went for a walk around Rothera Point with several folks, including Chris (sculptor extraordinaire), Celine (meteorologist), and Adam (plumber) who I had also met at Conference earlier in the year. The jaunt around Rothera Point was beautiful. The icebergs stood out crisply colorless against the deep blue water. Weddell seals sunned themselves lazily along the shoreline, easily mistaken for fuzzy granitic boulders. Penguins zipped through the water, threw themselves onto rocks, and sat, curious and staring, wiggling at all the humans walking past in their funny hats. It was amazing. Blue and white and a tiny bit of rock, as far as the eye could see. After the nice tour around the point, I got to have lunch with Terri (marine biologist), Johnny (mechanic), and Tony (electrician), several more friends from Cambridge.

North Cove.


The runway, apron, hangar, and Reptile Ridge.


Celine and Chris during our walk around Rothera Point.


Looking east toward the Antarctic Peninsula proper.


Lazy seals. (center)


Gorgeous.


Penguins! (center)


Ink-blue Antarctic water flaunting icebergs.


One of the BAS Twin Otter aircraft. (center)


Mmmm... icebergs!


Mt. Leotard from the deck of Old Bransfield.


Some weird ice.

The 27^th of December was a beautiful, busy day of orientations and on-Station training. In the morning, we spent some time at a first aid refresher courtesy of Doc Matt, and had the chance to give intramuscular injections to a sponge, which, I must say, was well doped-up by the time the 10 or so of us had stabbed it with our luer-lok needles. In the afternoon, Johnny gave us some instruction on skidoo driving, and Celine and I were freaking out as he was telling horror stories of people rolling skidoos over on slopes because they were not distributing their weight correctly. My first skidoo ride consisted of me cautiously and nervously driving myself up and down the ski-way, with a spectacular view of the Station below, strangely anthropogenic and anomalous against the snow-covered peaks of the Antarctic Peninsula saw-toothing the blue sky across the Bay.

The Ski-way, the Traverse, and a Ridge named Reptile.


The sun over Mt. Leotard.


Mt. Leotard around 2 AM.

That afternoon, Sledge Golf (our field team, consisting of Dave, myself, and our two BAS mountaineers, Dan and Ferg) gathered to look over maps and discuss field work plans. We gathered together a bunch of “kit” (BAS-speak for gear or equipment) for the next day’s crevasse rescue training and pyramid tent camping. I was given my “female urination device,” called a “She-wee,” which is, for lack of a better way of describing it, a prosthetic penis of sorts, to allow a woman to pee standing up without having to remove her trousers. In my journal, I described it as “a grotesque pink/flesh-colored monstrosity.” Haha.

The 28^th of December was a Sunday and everyone on base had the day off, but Dave and I began our field training. We started with a crevasse rescue refresher in Fuchs House, where I had to recall all that I learned while training with BAS in Derbyshire, UK. I repelled myself down from the loft to sway back and forth in mid air in front of the entrances to the hallway and equipment rooms, where I then switched out my abseiling (repelling) kit for jumaring kit to make my way back up the rope. After lunch that day, we walked across the gravel runway over to the hangar to load up our skidoos for an afternoon of training and our evening out.

As I drove across the traverse, my skidoo caught a rut, and because I wasn’t throwing my weight up-slope as much as I should have, my skidoo started to zip off down the hill outside of the red and black flags that marked the safe area of travel. At the time, I vividly recall thinking that I was going to die, but I slammed on the breaks just outside of the flags and managed not to unwillingly “explore” any crevasses. Dave and Ferg had to help me get the skidoo back on track, because I almost flipped it over. You may read this and think “Man, she’s an idiot,” but you had to be there, and after the fact it was all quite hysterical, especially since Dave did the same thing about 2 minutes later, except he got his skidoo lodged in the snow and had to have Ferg help him dig it out (which afforded me some time to take some nice pictures). Needless to say, after that I understood that Johnny was exactly right when he told me I’d have to do a little extra throwing of weight with my small stature… I would have to put my entire body on the uphill or outer side of a turn whenever I was driving.

Sweet Caroline. My training 'doo.

Looking east, from the Traverse, panning from north to south:






A view north along the Traverse from the seat of my skidoo.

We didn’t have to drive very far before Ferg pulled over next to four red flags and told me to gear up in my crampons and “jingly-janglies.” We were going to repel down into a crevasse!!! Ferg moved a large piece of plywood from the snow and revealed a gaping, glowing hole in the side of the Traverse. Ferg went down first, and then I roped up and went down, digging in my crampons and showering icicles on Ferg below as I bumped them off of the back and top walls clumsily with my helmet. After about 3 meters of descent, the crevasse opened up into a cavern, where Ferg was standing on an icy floor in the eerie, but stunning, bluish glow of down-lit glacial ice. I linked into the guide ropes on the wall and climbed over into the “Waiting Room,” a vestibule with ice pillar walls, so that Dave could descend into the bluish darkness, too. We followed Ferg into the bowels of the glacier as I attempted to master crampon footing for the first time. We traveled down and around and in and out of all sorts of narrow spaces and ledges placed precariously over deeper holes. We dug our crampons into floors, walls, and ceilings. In the icy blue glow, we marveled at the icicles- stalactites, stalagmites, and pillars of the glacial world. Ferg turned on his headlamp and shined it upwards so that the tiny crystals on the ceiling caught the light, dispersing sparkles in all directions like stars twinkling through an atmosphere of synthetic night sky. I have no pictures of our journey into the crevasse. Only images afforded through words. It was beautiful and silent and blue.

After exploring the crevasse and getting a quick lesson from Ferg in ice screw placement, I jumared up the wall of the crevasse’s entrance, followed by Dave and Ferg. We re-packed our skidoos and turned back down the Traverse to sit at the top of the Ski-way and snack on turkey and coleslaw sandwiches while taking in the view. Rothera, below, sat nestled into the bay among epic, glacier-cut mountains that swept their steep sides gracefully, but decisively downward, to plunge into the deep icy blue of calm Antarctic waters dotted with the whites and blues of icebergs.

Having sufficiently refueled ourselves, we geared up and linked up and trudged our way into a snow bowl to practice traversing a near-vertical windscoop in crampons and self-arresting on steep, snowy slopes. We descended into the bowl as another training group was doing their self-arrests. I watched and laughed as Mel, Terri, and Magda threw themselves down a slope that would be dumb to even walk on if you were anywhere else in the world. They were having a blast being rough and tumble in the snow. They left while we were doing our crampon work and we took over their self-arrest spot, where a nice ice slide had been formed through the softer snow. We started by going feet first, face down and digging our axes in… then feet first, face up… and then head first, face down… and finally head first, face up! I very nearly concussed myself on some waylaying chunks of ice, but still had a blast.

After self-arresting, we hiked out of the windscoop and back up to the skidoos, and then tore off towards the Caboose. We ate some biscuits and had a couple of cups of tea, and then began to set up the pyramid tent that we would sleep in that night, next to the igloo that Graham and Chris built a few nights earlier. It was a nice, albeit child-sized, igloo built from ice-bricks that they quarried from a nearby snow-pit. We dug out a large square area of softer snow and then set up the faded orange tent, laying the ground sheet and packing in all of the wooden boards, wooden kits boxes, and personal bags, the same way we would during our weeks in the field. After a bit of HF training, Ferg cooked rice pilaf for dinner. After peeing (quasi-successfully and quite hysterically) with the aid of my She-wee at the pee flag, I spent my first evening in a pyramid tent quite warm and quite comfortable, and awoke in the morning to my first Antarctic snowfall. Beautiful chunky snowflakes racing down from graphite gray clouds.

Looking up at the ceiling of the Caboose.


A view from inside the pyramid tent of snow falling on the Caboose with Reptile Ridge in the background.

The 29^th was a busy day of more crevasse rescue training, which included making snow anchors and me throwing myself blindly over a ledge while roped to Dave to simulate falling down a crevasse. It was fun, despite the fact that an allergic reaction to a nasty mix of sunscreen and melting snow in my eyes resulted in symptoms similar to those of snow-blindness. My eyes and nose were watering so profusely when I was rigging up the Z-pulley system to pull Dave up from over the ledge that I could barely see and I had to wipe my boogers in the snow. I think it amused Ferg to no end. Despite the discomforts of cold and the plethora of boogie, I managed to remember all of the technical stuff… I was able to put in snow anchors, abseil down over the ledge to “check” on Dave, jumar back up over the ledge, prep the ledge, and then pull Dave up over the ledge using the Z-pulley system I rigged myself. Not bad for a gal from Alabama with little snow experience and no mountaineering experience what-so-ever... and boogers running down her face.

After a day of rest and preparation on the 30^th, Sledge Golf received the go-head on the morning of December 31^st, 2008 to fly via BAS Twin Otter to our field sites further south. I was going to celebrate New Years along George VI Sound at about 70 degrees South!

(Next Post: Antarctic Fieldwork)