Reading: The Antarctic Diaries of Edward Wilson, part deux

I've been a bit obsessed with the "winter journey" since I read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's account of it. It was, after all, the closest thing to a bird-watching expedition I have yet found described in the Antarctic literature. The modus operandi of the early polar expeditions was to arrive by ship in the Ross Sea in middle to late summer, once the ice had broken up enough to permit passage. After setting up camp, slaughtering some seals for meat and blubber, and trekking south to deposit advance depots for the feeding and heating of future sorties, expeditions then hunkered down for the winter. The goal over the long dark months was simply to avoid death by cold, boredom, starvation or lack of light and women. Travel was not seriously considered. It scarcely is today. Often the darkness and the weather were such that even to go outside was difficult and dangerous; Condition One in today's McMurdo terminology. But as Harry King, editor of South Pole Odyssey: Selections from the Antarctic Diaries of Edward Wilson, put it "this birdsnesting expedition was as close to Wilson's heart as the Pole was to Scott's, and it is almost certain that Wilson had made its realization a precondition of his accompanying Scott on this second trip south."

Erebus, en route to Cape Evans, in finer weather than that experienced by Wilson, Cherry-Garrard, and Bowers



"The Winter Journey," after which Cherry-Garrard named his book The Worst Journey in the World, was a trip taken by Wilson, Cherry-Garrard and "Birdie" Bowers from Scott's winter camp at Cape Evans to the Emperor Penguin rookeries at Cape Crozier during June and July of 1911, in the dead of Antarctic winter. Wilson, biologist and doctor to Scott's party on both the Discovery expedition and the fatal polar expedition a few years later, was desperate to collect the eggs of the Emperor, and considered that the study of penguin embryos would be invaluable to the advancement of our understanding of biology. Cherry-Garrard was Wilson's protege, an excellent sledger, and Bowers was an indomitable titan of a man, said to have been almost impervious to cold. Their route would take them all the way around Ross Island; sixty miles of man-hauled sledging over horrific, crevassed and sastrugied sea-ice. Here at McMurdo, Cape Evans is to the north of us, and Cape Crozier far to the east across the permanent ice shelf; the route of the winter journey passed directly around Hut Point, where the three had lunch on their second day out.


Mt. Discovery, across McMurdo sound



The men pulled 253 lbs worth of supplies each, on two nine foot sledges. They were equipped for a six week expedition. It was nasty and dark and cold from the very beginning and it went from horrid to horror. "The temperature was -47 F., and I was a fool to take my hands out of my mitts to haul on the ropes to bring the sledges up. I started away from the Barrier edge with all ten fingers frostbitten," writes Cherry-Garrard on the second day out. "The temperature remained at -50 F all day, and we felt the cold a good bit in our feet on the march, Cherry getting his big toes frost bitten and I my heel and the sole of one foot. A good many of Cherry's fingertips also went last night and are blistered this morning...." This from Wilson's understated account. When reading "felt the cold a good bit in our feet," keep in mind that much less serious frostbite injuries in the McMurdo of today generally result in the victim being evacuated on the next available flight off the continent. In fact, Wilson's diary so relentlessly downplays their difficulties that it can hardly be said to be the most exciting read of the polar pantheon. For facts and figures and concise descriptions it is an excellent source, but Wilson was much more a wonderful artist, sketcher and scientist than he makes a thrilling read. When it comes to physical hardships the group experienced, one needs recognize Wilson's solid and unflinching comittment to understatement.

In the distance, the Barne Glacier, at the turnoff to Scott's last hut at Cape Evans

On this torturous nocturnal expedition things went from bad to worse. On July 15th the party finally arrived on a ridge above the penguin colony and decided to set up camp there, rather than at an Adelie colony five miles away: "In the Adelie Penguin rookery we should have been sheltered from blizzards, but here we should be right in their track -- only five miles nearer our work." Having taken longer than expected to arrive, in part because of fierce blizzards, they now opted to save time by camping in a location dangerously exposed location in the event of more blizzards. Storms were not long in coming. The three men build a hut of stone and slabs of frozen snow, and then lay in their sleeping bags on the floor of it for 24 hours, roofless, becoming drifted into a snowbank, because the winds were blowing too hard for them to install their canvas tarpaulin over the top.

(Very) Little, and Big, the two Razorback Islands



In the dim twilight of the next fine midday they attempted to descend to the Emperor Penguins, in part because they were already running low on oil, and needed the blubber for cooking and heat. Lost in the ice pressure they managed no more than to descend into a sort of ice-canyon, from which they could hear the Penguins calling above them. "It was quite exciting work," writes Wilson, " but it grew very much more exciting as the light got worse and worse. All round us was a chaotic mass of tumbled blocks of ice with crevasses everywhere either gaping wide or else bridged with snow drift. We tried one opening after another and found them all impossible until at last we were faced by a small mountain of ice blocks shutting off any further progress and about 60 feet high all round us, we being in a drift-filled valley at the bottom." The next day they in fact managed to collect five precious Emperor Penguin eggs, which is when, perhaps out of some sort of divine Penguin retribution, their troubles really began in earnest....

Mactown Evening

Night is slipping through our fingers. Already the sun rises in the south-east, well before I rise, and then spends a long day describing a horseshoe-shaped arc before sliding down behind the Royal Society Mountains to the west and south-west. Soon it won't go down at all, and will begin to eliptically spiral upwards in ever-tighter circles over our head. From our perspective at this high latitude every shadow becomes a sort of solar clock; the peak height of the sun's rise easy to observe and marking midday.

About 11PM last night

Not Morgan le Fay: Have you seen this individual?

Only known photograph of Antarctica's most wanted man, ice-terrorist Ali Fatah Morgana

Morgan le Fay

We made an abortive attempt to drive out to Cape Evans across the sea ice yesterday. All morning the sun shone, and visibility was unlimited, but soon after we had loaded up the Pisten Bully and set off ominous clouds appeared to the south-east, and it wasn't long before the firehouse radioed us. They had recieved a call from Mac weather; with their profuse apologies came the order to return at once. Thankfully we were out long enough to see this mirage, a spectacular fata morgana.

Happy Birthday, Luke!

My beloved brother is living with some pre-Columbian Brazilians and learning to speak Tucano somewhere in the farthest upper reaches of the Rio Negro, near Brazil's border with Colombia, so it was a sort of miracle of telecommunications that I was actually able to speak to him in person all the way from McMurdo and wish him a happy birthday.

We're thinking of you and toasting your adventures!

I'm the good looking one.

Teatro del Absurdo in two acts

The solar tide is turning. We arrived in midday twilight; now, just more than a month later, it is nine or even ten o'clock at night before it gets as dark. This means of course, in the way that these things inevitably go on film shoots, that only days ago we realized that our film was dreadfully lacking in all things nocturnal. So we have rushed into night mode, staying up later and later to film in an ever-narrower midnight patch of obscurity.

Last night we ventured out to the ice runway, where the night shift of snow-blowers and bulldozers was toiling away to open the apron. Here the first flight, on October 3rd, will disgorge its fresh Antarctic passengers, refuel, and then turn and taxi before taking off to fly back to Christchurch. One can only hope that it will also unload many fresh vegetables.

We parked on the runway, facing south in the dim blue gloom. Across the plowed and blown ice before us, captured in the headlights, was an unbroken white sheet of drifting snow in constant motion, flowing along the surface, so that we appeared to be a ship moored in a wide river of translucent, rippling milk. To our left over the darkness of the apron roamed a dozen enormous Caterpillar tractors, dozers and snowblowers, like gigantic aimless lightning bugs. Entirely invisible save for their massive headlights, they crossed back and forth in a circular choreography of diesel testosterone. Endlessly they pushed the snow from one place to another, an absurd Sisyphean ballet about waiting for the next storm to bring more labor.

Tonite we sought the diesel-free wilderness, venturing out along the permanent ice shelf, where Ross Island meets that part of its sea that has remained unthawed for thousands of years. I had, for the first time, the opportunity to record silence, a topic that has been of some debate between Anne and myself. (I am a sound recordist, I told her, not a silence recordist). And so, with the pots controlling my stereo microphone turned all the way up, standing still as a stone, the mic pointed over the white void towards the south pole, I recorded. Nothingness. Not a light glimmering on the meters. My stomach gurgled and I wondered if I had heard the sound through the headphones or internally, within my body. Far away the ice creaked, but not even this registered the merest blip on the digital meters of the portable mixer I use.




Because we have had occasion to film once or twice a solitary soul wandering off across the ice, on a voyage of discovery or lost in an existential crisis, and because filming such wanderings requires the three of us, plus the subject, to crunch along like a herd of elephants marching across a field of styrofoam peanut packing foam, thereby rendering the synchronous sound unusable, we decided to take advantage of the silence to record isolated footsteps in the snow, in the hopes that they might help the editor later. I directed Sylvestre to walk purposefully towards a particularly perilous crevasse, and captured his crunchy stride for all eternity. There at the edge of the ice-shelf in the dim silent night, beneath a quarter of a moon, the three of us marched about, with no destination in mind, making crispy footfalls that echoed off the hillside behind us. Finally I burst out laughing. It was beyond surreal. "This is better than Beckett!" I shouted.

Reading: The Antarctic Diaries of Edward Wilson

Photo: M. Deany

Yesterday Deany and I went skiing on the Castle Rock trail. As was the case when Anne and I hiked up there a couple of weeks ago, we were met at the trailhead by a vicious headwind. It was full-on balaclava and goggles weather, with each of us peering into the face of the other to look for any slivers of exposed skin before setting out; frostbite was a real possibility. Neither of us said anything to the other until much later down the trail, but it turns out that as we were bundling up to get started we were both thinking "damn, what a stupid idea this is." As is usual with such ventures persistence is rewarded, and by the time we reached the first tomato (the emergency shelter) the wind was already slackening. It was blissful and quiet, with only the slide of the skis and the crunch of the poles audible in the air. The snow was hard and brittle so we weren't exactly kicking and gliding, but the skis beat trudging along on foot. Beyond Castle Rock conditions were much calmer, and we shushed our way down the side of the mountain with only a handful of spectacular and catastrophic spastic collapses between us. Tumbling on cross country skis down an icy hillside has the graceless, unnaturally angular quality of a shot heron falling out of the sky and plummeting to the ground. Deany managed to shatter one of his bamboo ski poles and had to finish out the trek using a bamboo flag as a replacement. This flapped over our heads all the way home, as if we were a very small parade.

It's a long walk for one run, but how many people have snowboarded from Castle Rock down to "the Great Ice Barrier"? Martin, thrashing.

The turn out of the steep slope down to the west of the rock opened the door to an immense vista of sea ice stretching endlessly to the south, towards the Pole. Here before us, had we stood on this spot some 104 years ago, on November 2nd, with binoculars, we might have seen Scott's party setting out on the "Southern Journey," of 1902. Accompanied by E. A. Wilson, biologist, artist and expedition doctor, and Wilson's close friend Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton, Scott aimed to reach farther south into the continent than any preceding expedition. Within days, in fact, they had pushed beyond the mark set by Carsten Borchgrevink some years earlier.

Wilson's diaries help illuminate the degree to which Scott was concerned with reaching record latitudes, and by extension, the Pole. "I am afraid this long southern journey is taking me right away away from my proper sphere of work to monotonous hard work on an icy desert for three months, where we shall see neither beast nor bird nor life of any sort nor land and nothing whatever to sketch," writes Wilson. Scott has just informed him that rather than do scientific research with Emperor Penguins he is to leave the relative pleasures of camp and ship and walk south. And then back north. For ninety days.

Erebus, smoking

As Deany and I could see when looking out from the slope behind Castle Rock, the southern journeymen had not even the prospect of encountering land to sustain them in their long uncomfortable slog towards the Pole. The icy winter slip for the ship Discovery, here at McMurdo, and the establishment of McMurdo as the US Antarctic Program base in the 1950s are both thanks to our being on the dividing line between the seasonal sea ice and the permanent ice shelf, which Scott's party referred to as "the Great Barrier." Immediately off the point, in front of the collection of pale green outbuildings that make up New Zealand's Scott Base, just a kilometer or so from our office as the skua flies, immense undulations of buckling ice mark the line. From the foothills of Erebus, where Deany and I were skiing, no land relieves the endless view across the permanent ice shelf to the south. Scott, Shackleton and Wilson sledged this way, butchering their weakest dogs to feed those that continued to pull weight. (It is notable that two of the major criticisms which continue to be used to diminish the accomplishment of Amundsen's stroll to the Pole are that he savagely killed his dogs off along the way and that he was single-mindedly focussed only on reaching that elusive spot on the end of the earth, to the exclusion of all science. Nothing in Wilson's account suggests that much about Scott's approach differed. In fact, the "failure" of Scott's dogs appears to have much to do with their being almost grotesquely overburdened, in contrast to Amundsen's.)

For sixty days the trio marched southwards, managing very little mileage, as the dogs could not cope with the overloaded sledges. The party ended up dividing the cargo, making two trips each day to move it all, walking three miles distance to cover each mile south, like a terrible and endless series of canoe portages. Eventually they did sight land, and even got close enough at the very end of the journey to some cliffs, from which they hoped to secure geologic samples of the rock. This proved impossible because of an enormous ice cliff, and finally, on New Year's Day, they turned back. We might describe them as returning empty-handed, but they were by now pulling their own sledges, and faced a full month of snow-blind twenty-four hour graylight ice-shelf trekking misery before they would stumble back into camp. Wilson's account of how he spent my birthday in 1903 is typical: "Turned out at 6AM to another hopelessly overcast day, with nothing to steer by or fix one's light-dazzled eyes on. After an hour's marching we found the steering so erratic that we camped and waited to see if it would clear. At 4PM there was enough break in the cloud ahead to steer by, so we had another breakfast and at 6PM started off again. We did nearly three hours and then camped as Shackle was feeling bad. Now it is nearly midnight and we have turned in. Outside one can see nothing at all, either in the sky or below it, all one uniform brilliant gray light without a break. One cannot see one's own footsteps in soft snow in this light, nor any of the inequalities that one stumbles over.... My eyes today have been very weak and painful."

What a contrast with our day yesterday staring out over the ice shelf from the hills of Ross Island! As we skied down the slope of Erebus onto the sea at the edge of the great barrier, we had brilliant blue sky overhead. Scarcely a breath of wind rustled the bamboo flags, and the snow was packed so solid that the edges of the skis left little trace. Deany and I peeled off our balaclavas, opened the vents on our technical parkas, and whizzed along, getting long smooth glides out of each ski-step. In the crisp subzero snow-pack each thrust of a ski-pole made a sound like the cry of a distant tern fishing over the ocean. "Man," said Deany, "we're skiing, in Antarctica!" At Scott base, the circuit complete, we unbound our skis and set off walking across the hill to McMurdo, warm and energized and looking forward to a good cup of tea.

"A nice cuppa Jasmine Green?" Photo: M. Deany

Angela, you look hungry

Angela, two views from: Vehicles of McMurdo




Whut the fizzuck? from: Vehicles of McMurdo

If you know, we have a comments section and would love to hear from you.

Just another day on the sea ice

Asked to discuss his sublime photographs of sea and sky, perfectly bisected by the horizon line, Hiroshi Sugimoto stated that one of his guiding concepts in creating his seascapes was a desire to photograph vistas that were in essence timeless. I'm not sure whether he ever came to Antarctic waters to take pictures of the sea while working on that project, but yesterday, as we travelled out onto the ice again for our official sea ice training, one needed do nothing more than walk a few steps forward past the inevitable line of bamboo flags in order to be plunged into one spectacular and chronologically infinite landscape after another.

We drilled holes to test the thickness of the ice, and filmed others drilling holes. We passed Inaccessible Island, too steep for the great explorers to have landed on; nobody else seems to have made so much as a mark since.



Those little black spots under the Barne Glacier are big fat Weddell seals

At the foot of the Barne Glacier a collection of enormous brown tubular sausages lounging on the ice constituted our first sighting of Weddell's Seal. Vast torpedoes of blubber, they rolled in the snow, occasionally lifting a languid flipper or a wedge-shaped tail. Years of birdwatching have taught me that committed efforts to watch wildlife always lead to the most spectacular natural settings on earth. Of all the places to choose, the seals were resting directly beneath the unearthly crystal-blue ice-cliffs of the Glacier. Science says they are there because the pressure cracks in the sea ice that radiate out from the glacier towards the outlying islands create access holes where it easy to pass from the water to the surface, but they seemed to me to have chosen the spot for its awesome surroundings.



Nonetheless the Barne Glacier has undoubtedly moved, travelled, broken, warped and calved far too much over the last eternity of millennia for the view to have been of any use to Sugimoto. Instead it was to the west, over an unbroken and untraveled sheet of sea-ice, that the vista, of only the narrowest slit of sunlit mountains, trapped between ice and low white sky, spoke of the infinite.

Do you have any Dr. Pepper?

The storm has passed on in the night and as Sylvestre put it, "today we are making a documentary about shoveling." We've been here just over a month now and virtually all of the 397 people currently on station are aware that a documentary film crew is in their midst. People we haven't even met approach us in the hall by the coat racks or come up to us at dinner and give us hot tips. Last night a thoughtful guy named Lenny, from building 159, which houses all the support for airplane repair, stopped by our table to let us know that 159 was snowed in in a pretty serious way and that their department would soon be getting involved in some profound snow-moving operations. After he left Anne said, "look, now people are doing our location scouting for us." We went down there this morning and found that their front door was completely drifted in, save for a forearm sized patch of sky visible at the top left of the door. Because their door opens inwards they had already converted this wall of snow into the world's smallest refrigerator by carving out one rectangular Diet Pepsi-sized niche. As if one needs a refrigerator here for anything other than to stop things from freezing....


The rectangle bang in the middle of the doorway fits exactly one can of soda.



Sylvestre films the half-demolished fridge.

Pickup Trucks of McMurdo

Ford F-350. Three Views from: Vehicles of McMurdo

Hokusai out the window Dept.

For the last thirty hours or so we have been hearing almost constantly that "they" are about to declare Condition One. During most of this time the weather state has officially remained at Condition Two, but the snow and wind is so thick that it is already quite exciting to walk the fifty yards from Crary Lab to the Galley, so the conversation about when the downgrade to Condition One will occur has become a constant. We discuss having pajama parties in Crary Lab and busting out our "sleep kits" and setting them up on the sofas upstairs and then realize it is still Condition Two and hurry off to eat something in the cafeteria.

Three Views out the office window

View of probable Condition Three

Unequivocal Condition Two

Possible Condition One

In other news antarcticiana always stands by its story; you will find no retractions here. However, I did receive an email informing me that it was irresponsible to have recently posted something to the effect that I could hardly wait to drive my own Pisten Bully out onto the ice and turn it off and lie on my back in blissful silence. The assiduous reader of this blog will already have picked up on the subtle yet persistent theme of the annoyance of idling engines, particularly as they impact my task of recording useable film sound. One can only hope that this thread, running as it does through various entries, has been appreciated for its humourous character. Just in case it has not, let me emphasize that I am in fact well aware that driving a motorized vehicle out into the middle of a frozen sea in subzero temperatures and turning it off in order to "let the engine cool down" or "record seagulls" is a recipe for, at the very best, a long and chilly afternoon spent waiting to be rescued by a posse of diesel mechanics. I am a wuss who is among other things almost pathologically uninterested in polar swimming, so rest assured that anything you have read to the contrary is, as they say, what passes for humour around here.

Snow Day

Sea Ice Training cancelled because of the storm....











Currently Condition 2, but we are all waiting for it to go to Condition 1 and trying to decide which building to be stuck in...

The bottom of a glass of milk

At 8:07 this morning I was still in bed in my minuscule half of a dorm room. Around here that constitutes sleeping in, but we had scheduled a bunch more sit down interviews for today and the first one wasn't to be until around ten. I woke when the phone started ringing, an occasion so rare that I didn't even know the room had a phone in it until a few days ago. "The weather has shifted, plans have changed we're going out on the sea ice, and we have to be ready in twenty-five minutes." Anne, on the phone. "That's going to be hard," I said. "Goodbye." I managed to go from boxer shorts in bed to seven full layers of ECW (that's extreme cold weather to you, you indian summerer) in the office in about twelve minutes, but I wasn't very happy about it. We grabbed more bags of ECW gear, sound gear, camera, tripod, E Z rig, thermoses of hot liquids, water bottles, snacks, bag lunches, ice drills and bamboo flags and loaded up Pisten Bullies 313 and 315. The whole time I was thinking: this is a rude awakening.


In memory of Clyfford Still


It turned out to be an inauspicious start to a glorious day. I don't want to badmouth McMurdo too much, but it was just wonderful to get out of town again. The three of us, along with Cece and Thai, who also took us camping at forty below, and Dr. Regina Eisert, our local seal scientist, headed out to examine the route over the ice to Regina's future camp, where she will take endless blood and milk samples from calving Weddell seals in what passes for the summer around here.



A storm was threatening and the sky was low and uniformly gray, but visibility was good and we could see a band of sunny mountains along the horizon line, a sliver trapped between blank white sea ice and cold gray sky. From time to time the wind came up and the view deteriorated. In the blowing snow there was no separation between sky, ground, air, or even windshield. Thai described this condition as "driving around the bottom of a glass of milk," or "being inside the ping pong ball." From time to time we stopped and drilled and flagged, leaving a trail of flapping banners on bamboo stakes to mark the route.

Two big Bull inna one pen

Following a pressure fault in the ice, we looked for a place to pass over the crack. By drilling a series of holes and measuring the depth of the ice Cece and Thai determined not only that we could not cross, but that a Pisten Bully would quite likely plunge through into the Ross Sea; in places there was less than a meter of ice, and at one point my foot went through a shell of snow down to my thigh before my foot came to rest on the thinner layer of ice covering the crack. Seal scat and blood on the snow indicated the presence of seals, and the presence of holes through into the water below, but with the water temperature a balmy negative one or two C Regina said she was sure that the beasts would stay under the ice, and indeed we didn't see any.

"Screw you, buddy." Cece performs an extraction--that's three meters of ice probe, son

We drove on and soon found a bridge, where another long series of bored holes showed the ice to be at least two meters thick. After drilling a few holes I lay on my back on the ice and looked up into the massive ceiling of clouds and felt a kind of euphoria. Anne and Sylvestre were filming some distant landscapes from the wind-shelter of the Pisten Bully. Since Cece refused to let us turn the vehicles off in case they wouldn't start again I elected once again not to record the sound of the engines as the soundtrack for the spectacular mountain scenery and instead just lay on the ice feeling wonderful and watching snow blow past. I don't know why I was enjoying myself so much but something was going on and I was blissfully content.

The black spots are Cece and Thai, drilling in the void


Tomorrow we are going out again for our official "sea-ice training" and I was so happy out there that I was tempted to ask them just to leave me out there until then. Once we have completed our sea-ice course we will be able to drive out onto the sea ice ourselves and take our chances turning off our own damn Pisten Bully. Of course then I'll actually have to work and not lie around like a seal.

The rear view mirror inside the ping-pong ball, and a bamboo flag floating in a bowl of milk...

Hokusai out the window

Two viewsfrom the office

This Evening

Last Night