Page 24 - AMA Summer 2023

EXPEDITIONNEWS
To illustrate let me give you a visual route map, assuming your compass is already set to South. Keeping going forwards, after about 7 days you’ll see the Pensacola mountains on the left (East), they will stay with you for two days then nothing for another 10 days, then the Theil mountains on the right, then the Theil Skiway straight in front (with toilet!). After passing through the Theil Skiway, which takes about an hour if not stopping at the metropolis for a rest day, nothing for about 23 days until the South Pole station appears in the distance. That then proceeds to taunt you for the final two days, never really getting any larger, until finally it becomes a tangible reality.
Along the way our time was punctuated with tent pair changes and the 5 daily ritual of exposing areas of flesh to be fat pinched, a task that got decreasingly inviting as the days went on and the temperature dropped. Unless of course you were part of ‘team shred’ watching the numbers in your logbook slowly descend as your hard-earned fat reserves were depleted by the workload and the environment.
To try and give an idea of a day, life was exceptionally, refreshingly, simple ‘on the ice.’ After waking up, never in the dark, it took about 90 minutes to get ready for the day once you had it dialled. Then a short chat as a team and we were off, usually at 0900hrs Chilean Time. We skied for an hour with a 10-minute break, then rinsed and repeated a further six times, with a bonus round if we needed to make up distance. By 1800hrs the tents were up, increasingly elaborate toilets constructed, and the stove was on. Then it was a case of rehydrating,
We’ll take the low road...
refuelling and preparing for the next day. Socialising depended on the weather and despite surprisingly clear schedules it was a bit of a struggle to get the whole team into a tent, with everyone happy in their own little worlds!
Although many flopped into their tents at night the drama and incidents were relatively few and far between. I imagine that was testament to the Mission
Rehearsal Exercise in Norway, though asIwasinMaliattheotherendofthe thermometer I can only suppose.
Our biggest challenge was probably navigating in a straight line. With a long line of us, in poor conditions you would turn back and see the snake weaving about, but that only seemed to make the compass wiggle about more. If I fleetingly compare our trip to Preet Chandri’s, she didn’t have this issue because she had no line behind her: buckshee! More seriously, our time gave me a tremendous respect for Preet as a solo traveller who had to navigate all the time, vice an hour a day for us. She was also always cutting the track, vice sitting back at 6th or 7th in the line for a few hours. To try and get a feel for the solo isolation I hung back from the group a few times on one pretence or another and after 10 minutes there was barely anything to be seen in any direction, just a thin line of track connecting us. Time to put a sprint in.
Now back and writing this in a torrential downpour we have the data to sift and the findings to write up, if anybody wants to go, I’ll come!
There’s a six pack under there somewhere
24 / ARMY MOUNTAINEER