Free Antarctic Tears chapter 9

Antarctic Tears

Chapter 9

Days 4-8

Sunday, November 4, 2012, Day 4
It was cold, clear and windy. The barometer was at 27.8 in Hg. My face felt windburned because I only wore glasses and not the protective mask which fogged up the goggles. As I was not keen on traveling blind, I didn’t have any other choice. My goggles were en- tirely fogged, so I had to choose from blindness, windburn, sunburn or frostbite. Crud! I thought I’d bombed the distance today based on how I felt, but I was not even close. Leaving camp at 10 a.m., I skied for eight hours and stopped at 6 p.m., yet I had traveled only three miles. I kept bonking out and had terrible trouble moving, as though I had run a marathon before even leaving the tent.

Over the years of trekking, I’ve learned that when the first thought of food passes through my mind, I become hungry in 20–30 minutes. If I didn’t eat when I thought about food, I bonked by the time I was hungry, and then it turned into a vicious cycle. My energy levels reduce to a crippling level. I was able to override this emotion and force myself to march on in spite of my body crying out. If I were to stop every time hunger hit, I would only stand all day and eat. I was constantly on the cusp of bonking.

The foot beds in my boots were wet and I was sweat soaked when skiing uphill from the coast. Once I crested the hill, past Wilson Nunataks, and was over the slope, I cooled down considerably but had little energy all day. Even though I should have been mostly over my cold, it felt as though the cough I was fighting was deteriorating instead of improving. During this hill climb, I learned it took over an hour to feel the energy from the sticks of butter I ate. Thus far, thoughts of food coursed through my mind every hour, making for distracted towing. The snow surface was extremely hard today, mak- ing skiing dangerous. I constantly slipped and wished I had boot ca- bles or ski crampons. Even though others said I should stay on skis to help avoid the danger of falling through a crevasse, falling down and breaking an arm from slipping on skis was not an enviable alternative.

I started to develop a timetable for making camp at the end of the day:

Stop at 6 p.m.
6:18 have the tent set up
6:28 have the tent fly buried with snow
6:38 unload the sleds into the tent
6:45 melting snow for dinner
It took so much longer to pitch a tent when it was cold. Though

the time it took was discouraging, in oversized boots and gloves, it was difficult to move any quicker.

The GPS showed I had already climbed to 2,200 feet, meaning I was progressing on to the plateau, which was over 3,000 feet in eleva- tion. Pulling this amount of weight up such a steep hill proved to be stunningly difficult, tougher than pulling tires up 1,800 vertical feet on Old Teton Pass Road.

Camp AC04
80deg 04.296’S 80deg 18.709’W, Distance 3.48 nm, Time 8 hours, Distance to South Pole: 596 nm

Monday, November 5, 2012, Day 5

My whole body ached when I awoke, so it was a slow morning. I didn’t start skiing until 10:30 a.m. Todd, an ALE guide, had told me that this expedition was difficult for the first 10 days before everything smoothed out. As this was only day 5, I had a long way to go.

Damn, I felt I had traveled twice the distance I did today! Skiing uphill gave the false impression that I’d gone farther than I had. The surface was completely wretched today. So was the weather. It was total white out conditions with 20-30 knot winds out of the SSW to the SW. Right now I was heading south, so the wind was off to my right all day. The staff at Union Glacier told me the wind did not gust. Instead, it felt like the wind outside a moving vehicle, consistent and rarely varying.

During the white out conditions of the day, I fell off some sastrugi and slammed my side. Even though there was no damage, the inci- dent made me feel the need to walk rather than ski through these ice sculptures. If I were to have taken some of those falls on skis, I could be nursing a sprained wrist or worse. Falling off a short block of ice while blind and attached to 320 pounds of sleds would not end well for my body. With the whiteout, it was like I had strapped on semi-transparent white plastic over my eyes, attached a rickshaw to my body, then started walking through a construction zone on a street with broken asphalt and sizable potholes, all at -15 ̊F with 20 knot winds.

For some reason, American patriotic music played in my head all day. “God Bless America” was the constant refrain in between my struggling with the pulks flipping over. It kept me going and, if nothing else, entertained. I hadn’t sung this song in a decade. Yet it surfaced here out of nowhere.

I’d become more adept at using the crumbled styrofoam snow as toilet paper. As long as I used the proper scrubbing speed, it was tol- erable. I tossed each piece of ice after one pass. With only two squares of toilet paper per event planned, I was careful with my supplies. It was having my backside hanging in the burning wind that put the hurt on. The sensation of developing frostbite on my hips and bum cheeks scared me. Also there was the problem of having a carabiner dangling from the harness while taking care of business. More than once, the frozen aluminum rested against my skin, feeling as though it was pulled out of a lit grill. The metal was so cold it felt like it was heated by a torch.

After 1 p.m., I thought more than once about being in the shelter of my tent. My mind’s justification system of why I was here ignited, attempting to convince me that what I was doing made no sense and that what I was doing was foolish. It wasn’t hunger or thirst that drove these thoughts. I presumed it was the frustration of the conditions and making poor progress that picked on the weakest center of my brain. Any time justifying an activity comes into my mind, I have to tell myself, “It’s okay, you’ll walk farther tomorrow. The weather will be better. You’re tired, everyone will understand why you’re having such a tough time.”

When this miserable mental monologue rears its ugly head, I know something was awry.

During a break at 3 p.m., I parked the pulks next to some sastrugi, maneuvered them so they were stem to stern and managed to lie on their leeward side to hide from the wind. The ski pogies [fleece hoods placed over the ski poles for hand protection] served as insulation from the snow, allowing me to lie down on my hip and shoulder to relax for a minute. It wasn’t exactly comfortable but it sure beat sitting on the sled in the punishing wind. I felt weak because I wanted to hide from the wind, even though it was a primary part of the expe- rience here. One of the thoughts that crossed my mind was that if an aircraft flew over and saw me lying down beside the sleds, the crew might think something happened to me. I guessed I looked pretty sorry from the air.

Through all this, the end of my day drew upon me. I was utterly punished. The whiteout was so absolute that I became disoriented. Tossing and swirling the fluorescent tow rope across the snow surface, I ascertained the rough surface shape and where the pits were. It was as though the line was magically hovering in space. Even then, I kept stumbling over sastrugi and other snow features I couldn’t see, for want of a few shadows to reveal the pitch and roll of the land.

I waxed the skis on both sleds, as I felt the red sled skis were drag- ging. This was the third day since I had last waxed them. The coarseness of the ice crystals tore through much of the wax base on the skis in a matter of days. Checking the supply of glide wax I brought made me wish for another tin, even though I had brought two. Although waxing the skis in unpleasant weather was annoying, the effort will pay off in tomorrow’s towing sessions.

I spoke with Mom and Dad by satellite phone for a half-hour yesterday. It was wonderful to talk with them! They were ecstatic to hear from me, as if they thought they wouldn’t hear from me the whole time. I planned to call every Monday to make them and myself feel better. Dad said skiing up to the polar plateau was going to be the worst and he was right. This steep grade was brutal. It was like drag- ging a refrigerator up a mountain road. The towing force was near my maximum capacity. There were flat parts where I moved quickly, only to be forestalled after a few quick steps. I felt free of the glue I skied through only for mere moments.

I answered a few questions from people via my phone-in blog. Kelly let me know what the questions were and I answered them in my broadcasts. It was a relief not to waste time typing. All I needed to do was talk for five minutes and my daily audio message was finished.

Camp AC05
80deg 07.268’S 80deg 27.155’W, Distance: 3.5 nm, Time: 7 hours, Distance to South Pole: 593 nm

Tuesday, November 6, 2012, Day 6

Thus far my body was not dialing into the heavy expedition load. It felt as though I had absolutely no energy. I skied thirty steps and then was forced to stop, as though I was badly out of shape. A cold, dry environment was nothing new to me, yet my body acted as though I had not worked out in a year. The incessant cough worsened as the day wore on. The flour-fine dusty snow made breathing difficult. I felt as though there was an alien choking me from the inside. It both frustrated and discouraged me, as I was able to drag an equivalent amount of weight with not nearly this much trouble while training in the Rockies. That was far higher than I was now, so it wasn’t an altitude issue. Although I thought I recovered from my cold in Punta Arenas, the cough had progressively deteriorated and now sapped my energy.

When the wind died down and I caught glimpses of the Ellsworth Mountain Range with the still far-off Patriot and Redpath Hills, my spirits surged, even if my body didn’t. I was here, in Antarctica, excited to be making my way through the toughest continent on the planet. With my supporters cheering for me back home, I grinned even though I gritted my teeth while dragging the load up a steep hill. Once the weather calmed down in the afternoon, I pushed harder and picked up a few more miles. From what ALE said, this whole area was extremely difficult to pass through, as the wind and deep snow had hampered explorers before.

Now that I’ve been here for a week, much of my bravado had di- minished, and now it came down to making forward progress in the face of poor mileage. I knew conditions would improve once I escaped out of the coastal mountain region, but it was difficult to envision that happening when my skis, boots and sleds bogged down in the perpetually deep snow. Even though this was part of the ex- perience, it was a real ego buster not to have shot out of the gate as fast as I would have preferred. In a way, it was a humbling experience. For all the training I had done, it did not prepare me for illness nor dealing with heavy snow and strong winds.

My body was adjusting to the absolute lack of humidity in the air. All day I fought a parched throat, so I downed water in an attempt to adjust my hydration. With the cold air, the only consequence was that I stopped frequently to water the landscape. Having been through this before, I knew that it would take time to sort myself out. It was far safer to have too much water in me, even if it slowed me down. Once serious dehydration sets in, muscle and stomach cramps follow soon thereafter, making me downright miserable.

Having watched training videos of other teams in the Arctic Circle, one of the vital emphases was on drinking before thirsty and eating before hungry. With those warnings in my head, I made sure to stop frequently and take care of both. However, it did not make for efficient travel. I was still running on fear in this huge, empty place. I knew that if I kept to what I knew, the expedition would work out. Extending my previous travel distance from hundreds to over a thousand miles was another matter in my mind. It was difficult to not contemplate the big picture but rather to focus on the immediate. Since there was nothing for me to do but push through, worrying about events out of my control only sapped my energy. I thought about my successes up to this point, thinking about what I had gone through to reach Antarctica. This reduced the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Far away in the United States, thousands of miles away, it was election day. And I didn’t miss the barrage of campaign ads at all. As much as I was glad I live in a country where I can participate in the process, I was so wrapped up in my own personal battle that a presi- dential election was rather irrelevant. Suddenly this place felt like the moon: raw, inaccessible and fully detached from the world. I was out here all on my own, slowly making my way toward the South Pole.

Camp AC06
80deg 09.704’S 80deg 34.451’W, Distance: 3 nm, Time: 5 hours, Distance to South Pole: 591 nm

Wednesday, November 7, 2012, Day 7

I wore my goggles most of the day and suffered through the infer- nal fogging. Depending on how I oriented my head, the fog would reappear and disappear in a minute. When I faced dead into the wind, the goggles turned opaque, making it impossible to see. One time when I stopped to adjust the harness, I faced away from the wind and the goggles quickly cleared, as though I had turned on a defroster mechanism. Thrilled to see again, I turned into the northerly wind and pushed forward. Within two minutes, the goggles fogged over again. For reasons unclear to me, my orientation relative to the wind completely dictated how much or little fog there was. I expected them to stay clear in the wind, as it should have carried the heat away. Yet that was not the case.

Having read about other explorers suffering from the same prob- lem, I made sure to bring spare lenses and glasses. When I stopped to change from goggles to glasses at 1 p.m., I had to take off my outer gloves to unzip the glasses pouch. Quickly my right pinky finger felt as though it was on fire. I thought I had frozen it. It hurt worse than smashing it with a hammer. I stopped and rested on the pulks, retract- ing my fingers into the palm of my glove to rewarm the pinky. After several moments, feeling started coming back, allaying my fears of frostbite. Angry at myself for coming close to suffering a cold injury, I berated myself. I have been in so many cold places that I should have known better and felt embarrassed. Others, with far more polar experience than I, had suffered worse. Being frostbitten because I desired to switch glasses quickly was not the story I wanted to tell when I returned home.

The pulks kept falling into holes, necessitating constant retrieval. It was advantageous each one only weighed 150 pounds, as I didn’t want to wreck my back yanking them upright. Those who bring down a single sled weighing in excess of 400 pounds must do some impres- sive lifting. I wondered how I fared in comparison with others who were attempting the South Pole round trip this season? Had they surpassed me in distance already? Thinking about what others had done and how I stacked up weighed on my mind. I knew my mileage was terrible, but there was little I could do to improve it. Between the sleds constantly falling into holes, my incessant fatigue and having the wind blow the sleds backwards, I was at a loss for a method for moving more quickly. I was satisfied that the sleds were gliding, as when I righted them after falling in a hole, they immediately slid sideways, forward or backwards, depending on the slope. However, I was blown away that the wind was so strong that, upon stopping and loosening the harness traces, I felt the sleds tugging at me because the wind shoved them backward.

Surely this had to seriously hamper my forward progress.

While pitching the tent, one of the stakes bent in half. Damn. The lightweight stake was an efficient design for snow, but the drilled holes for weight savings made the stakes weak, always bending at those drill points. Of all the issues to run into: ruined tent stakes!

As the tent was not self-standing, having no stakes means having no tent. This was a surprising first for me, considering how superbly the stakes worked in Yellowstone over the winter. Then again, I had not tried to smash them into solid snow or ice. It was disheartening to be running into equipment failures at only the end of the first week of the expedition. I felt pathetic about my mileage, regardless of how my body felt or the incredible force of the wind.

Camp AC07
80deg 12.687’S 80deg 41.715’W, Distance: 3 nm, Time: 8 hours, Distance to South Pole: 588 nm

Thursday, November 8, 2012, Day 8

The weather had deteriorated from yesterday, right along the lines of the area forecast. Now there was a ground blizzard and a whiteout, making it impossible to see anything. Never having been in such perpetually rotten weather, I decided to play it conservatively and wait to see if the winds abated. With the knowledge that other pro- fessional teams had lost their tents in similar storms, I didn’t want to be the fool and watch my tent blow irretrievably away. If that should happen, I would have to bundle myself inside one of the sled bags or fabricate a shelter until ALE could drop a tent. And, if they did that, my unsupported status would be wiped out. I was way too attached to the idea of completing the round trip, so I was being overly careful.

My thumbs and index fingers had split wide open, bleeding, when I woke up. The stinging was familiar, as I suffered from it many times when camping in the winter. I knew it was a result of improper hydra- tion, and it was depressing to be facing the same old problem. Nor- mally, my solution was to drink copious amounts of water, but thus far down here all that did was make me stop frequently to relieve myself.

Not wanting to waste my entire travel time with my pants unzipped, I throttled back my water consumption. It was clear I had not achieved the magic balance. I broke open a tube of super glue and patched myself together, careful not to accidentally glue two fingers together.

Not until noon did the sun finally pierce the gloom, so I rapidly bundled up all my gear and started towing. Even though the wind blew hard, I knew I had to be outside making miles. This wasn’t a summit attempt where the strategy was to wait for the best weather, I needed to travel as hard and as much as possible. I remembered the surfing bumper sticker “Eddie Would Go” as I exited the tent and pushed my way through the storm. The phrase referred to Eddie

Aikau, a legendary Hawaiian surfer, who surfed regardless of wave height or conditions. I needed to emulate Eddie if I was to even have a chance of repeating the feat of Aleksander Gamme last year.

As the clouds opened up even more, a 22o sunbow appeared cir- cling the sun, igniting up a brilliant pair of sundogs [brilliant spots of light on either side of the sun along the sunbow]. They flitted in and out of the low clouds. Then a large sun pillar rose off the horizon, making for a spectacular sky display. These usually mean there was ice in the upper atmosphere, indicating a possible storm. I hoped that wasn’t the case, but I enjoyed the shiny sky spots for what they were worth. Too bad my camera was buried deep inside the sleds for protection. I wanted to have it on me, but when the battery died from the cold so quickly, it was frustrating to be carrying an expensive paperweight.

Once the clouds closed up, plunging me into another blinding whiteout, the temperature plummeted, badly chilling me. The dis- orientation of being in a complete milky white forced me to stop and stare at my sleds, as I had moments of dizziness, causing me to stumble. Having only an hour remaining of skiing scheduled for the day, I did not want to take the time to stop and readjust my clothing, only to have the temperature change again, forcing another stoppage. Instead, I forced myself to dream of the hottest places my body has withstood. Bathing in a near-boiling Japanese onsen, hiking in the crushing sun of Death Valley, and sweating profusely in a 170deg F Budapest steam room all came to mind. Meditating on each of those experiences warmed up my hands and feet. Even though I was not skiing harder, and the wind and temperature were the same, my ex- tremities slowly lost their chill.

I recalled reading about a technique Himalayan monks used by envisioning tubes, leading from their core to the outside their bodies, spewing fire. Using this thought process, they were able to stay out- side overnight in sub-freezing temperatures in little more than their robes. Since the monks were doing nothing other than kneeling in the punishing weather, I could only imagine the concentration required to keep heat flowing through their body, keeping hypothermia at bay. I was hauling a heavy load and generating heat, and yet still fell prey to the cold. It took every ounce of untrained concentration to drive heat to my hands and feet, all the while endeavoring to effect forward progress and not fall over in the whiteout.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I mused about the purported vehicle tracks somewhere out here. To think that there was something out here that would impart the slightest advantage overwhelmed me. Thoughts of warm baths evaporated in the fog of fantasy. If only I could find the road, would I be able to ski the 12 to 16 miles per day I needed to round trip across Antarctica? I felt guilty about even considering it and yet, after being here over a week and having gone virtually nowhere, I sensed an urgency. Too, I had less and less energy each day and the coughing had progressively worsened. Knowing that I didn’t work my hardest to achieve my goal would be the worst result I could conceive.

Right at 5:45 p.m., 15 minutes before my stop time, I saw what was an impossibility. Right there, in a tiny pocket dug out of the ice, was a patch of sand. With a complete whiteout enveloping me, the grains appeared as though they were hovering in space. As the wind had picked up and I wanted to hide from it for a moment, I dragged the sleds windward of the pocket and then lay down to hide. Upon lowering myself to the ice surface, the wind disappeared and relative calm returned to my ears. Thinking the wind had stopped, as there were no cues that it was blowing, I poked my head back up, only to have it shoved backward from the wind pressure.

No, it was still there. These 20-odd grains of sand were so remarkable that I lay on my stomach unmoving and stared at them for several minutes. As there was nothing other than myself, the sleds and utter whiteness to look at, solid objects mesmerized me. At first I became terribly excited and thought they were meteorite bits that I could scoop up and take home as a souvenir. Then, after having a moment to mull it over, I realized the wall of mountains 12 miles to the south was the source of

this wayward grit. Never before had bits of rock been so captivating. After a few more moments of study, I rose back up and finished off what remained of the day’s skiing. The image of that little pocket of sand was burned into my mind, as all I could do was dwell on it until

I fell asleep.

Camp AC08
80deg 14.106’S 80deg 45.107’W Distance: 2 nm, Time: 4 hours, Distance to South Pole: 586 nm

End of the free Antarctic Tears chapter