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I secretly hoped for a rest day, but that storm was still headed our way, so Mike gave the order to pack up and break down the tents the morning after our summit. Motivation was not high, and the team was slow to get going. The perpetual winds didn’t help either. Seems like this camp’s normal weather is shitty, and a good day is “less shitty”.
I was on Mike’s rope team again, this time as front anchor – which meant I was the front-most climber on the way down. That was somewhat problematic as my goggles had completely frozen over and no amount of cleaning was going to fix it. The temps were too cold for glacier goggles, so that meant I was pretty much flying blind. I called this out to Mike, and he had the wisdom to tell me to look for the black flags posted along the route. That at least I could barely see, and so we managed.
Back down to the fixed lines, then down the lines to Low Camp. The team moved slowly down the steep fixed-line incline, which we found out later was because Terry had just gotten frostbite through his gloves, from holding his ice axe. So now he had to tightly grip the rope on his way down, with frostbitten hands and nickel-sized blisters. I can’t even imagine how painful that must have been. But in a feat of superhuman fortitude, he sucked it up and make it down – that’s some real Aussie military grit right there.
We stopped at Low Camp for 30 minutes, dug up our cache and sleds, and headed on down to VBC. Though downhill, we were hauling weight so it ended up being a slog, but we made it back before sundown(ha!), and Mike had a can of Heineken for everyone. I don’t drink, but drinking something other than water or hot chocolate for weeks was refreshing, especially after a slog like that. My sled’s brake was not quite functional, so it was fun dealing with it zooming ahead & trying to make me trip as well.
Turned out no Otters were flying on account of weather, so we pitched our tents & hunkered down. One day to the storm.
The next day was the same deal – no planes. So we built ice walls and got ready for this epic storm.
The next morning – blue skies, no planes. Same with the day after that.
And the day after that. The one after that too, and the day after that one. And several more.
11 days.
The planes never came because weather wasn’t quite good enough to fly. These planes fly by visual so they’re very sensitive to things like fog and cloud cover, even if there’s no wind and temps are good.
Oh and that storm of the century? Never happened. Not even 5 mph winds. Weather forecasts in Antarctica seem to be as terrible as anywhere else, though we did hear that Vinson Base Camp got a few feet of snow. That might not sound like much, but keep in mind parts of this continent have had no precipitation of any kind for millions of years.
Christmas came and went. Santa and a reindeer even came out after the crew built a Christmas tree out of – you guessed it! – ice. Glorious snow and ice.
The planes did finally come for us on the 28th, right as we were thinking we were going to have to spend New Years there. Of course, everyone’s return travel arrangements had been thoroughly wrecked, and some had their jobs to worry about as well.
We called it the Ice Prison – Red flags marked camp boundary. Anything past that hadn’t been scouted for crevasses, so we weren’t allowed to roam. Our days consisted of sleeping, reading, walking the 1/4 camp perimeter…and more sleeping.
ALE has a ground vehicle path from Union Glacier to the South Pole – they’ve scouted out a route free of crevasses via Ground-Penetrating Radar, and the South Pole trip is far longer than the one to Vinson.
They’ve been operating alone out here for decades, yet they have no ground route to VBC. In our case it was just an inconvenience(though those with frostbite probably felt differently – one member not from our team was going to lose some fingers). What happens when there’s a real emergency and the planes can’t fly? What kind of publicity would that be for ALE when the news headlines tell of a tragedy that could have been averted with a ground route?
Mountaineering is synonymous with risk, but mountaineers try to minimize risk wherever they can. It seems to me like ALE is not, and I question why.
Planetary Muffin Expeditions 