Snow

Well, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the snow, but perhaps not in much detail. When reading about the early expeditions in Antarctic Exploration, there are a few things that intellectually I get, but just aren't the same as actual experience. They say the Inuit have 100 words for snow, and my glimpse of Antarctica has started to show me why. In some places, I walk fairly easily across the top crust of snow. In other places, it has been packed down, and still makes for easy walking. More often, you sink down into the snow some ways. Freshly fallen snow has a completely different texture. Some snow is great for snowballs, while some ice far too icy. Some has weathered away to form a strange footing of tiny peaks and valleys of ice, mud and guano.

Back to the early expeditions, there are many accounts of their travels through the snow and ice of Antarctica. And it was one thing to sit at home and read about - Roald Amundsen's meticulous grids of markers around food depots for finding more easily later on, and Robert Falcon Scott's team man-hauling their supplies across the continent toward the Pole. And intellectually, you get that this was hard, laborious work, in an extremely harsh environment. But it's so far removed from any experience I've had. How do you truly appreciate it then? What I've experienced here is truly just the tip of the iceberg. And yet, slogging through the many forms of snow, in some of the northernmost Antarctic terrain, in safe weather conditions, with all my 21st century high tech gear - a radio to communicate, gps, etc. - and carrying a light load of items to last me only a few hours at a time, and a few emergency supplies ... it can be tough. It can be tiring. And each time, I return to a warm, comfortable home base with cocoa and excellent food waiting. Rolling across the Drake Passage on a new ship, an excellent polar vessel, the trip down isn't spectacularly comfortable.

To then think, of how much easier all this is, compared to the expeditions, in comparably tiny vessels sailing far greater distances, loaded to the brim with men and animals, food and supplies - only to reach the continent and slog through hundreds of miles of ever-changing Antarctic terrain - I feel all the less able to fathom how they did it, and what it could have possibly been like. It is easy to look back and wonder how some of the errors in those expeditions could have been made - but despite any poor planning or judgement, the men who explored this wilderness can only be held in the highest regard. Few people are cut out for arduous and tedious work.

As for my trip, it is coming to a close - soon I will be whisked back across the Drake and headed on my way home. I already feel nostalgic, but I will wait and make one final post for the trip in the next couple of days. Yesterday, we accomplished a great deal. Admittedly it wore me out, but after a nap, I managed to stay up for the sunset - though the sun does set here, dusk never seems to arrive; it seems to stay at light as a cloudy midafternoon. Today, we began work very early, so I supplemented my cocoa mug with some coffee. I had the thrill to see for the first time, graceful petrels and chicken-like sheathbills nesting in the crannies of a rocky cliff. It's remarkable that in such a different place, the cormorants flying past are so similar to those back home. The snowy peaks seem to fuse with the blinding clouds, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.