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| Patagonian Icecap Expedition - Nov 2002 |
| TWELVE MANKY MEN - by TOBY GEE |
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“Southern Patagonia … is a stark, inhospitable land, which, until late in the nineteenth century, was inhabited only by a few scattered Indian tribes. …There are two great Ice-caps, which are the only examples of their kind outside Polar regions. Many of the innumerable glaciers which radiate from these, flow down through dense “tropical forest” (as Darwin described it) and thrust their massive fronts into the intricate system of waterways surrounding them. … Apart from scores of unclimbed peaks, much of the region had never [until 1961] been visited. … That so much of the region remains unexplored is due almost entirely to the physical difficulties of travel there, for during the last fifty years many attempts have been made to penetrate it. The chief problem is presented by the weather, which is said to be some of the worst in the world. Heavy rain falls for prolonged periods; fine spells are rare and usually brief, and above all there is the notorious Patagonian wind, the savage storms which often continue for weeks at a stretch, with gusts up to 130 mph. The terrain too, is unusually difficult. Most parts…can only be approached by water… The glaciers in their lower reaches are often so broken and crevassed that it is virtually impossible to travel on them, and lateral moraines rarely provide an easy line of approach, as they usually do in the Himalaya. In the foothills the forest often presents an impassable barrier, … where the wind has twisted the stunted trees into a low-lying mass of tangled trunks and branches. It is these obstacles which have prevented most expeditions to the area from achieving more than a limited objective or covering more than a very small proportion of the region.”
Eric Shipton, Land of Tempest, 1963.
The igloo was filled with the smell of fresh garlic frying in olive oil. Outside, the blizzard was still raging, icy gusts hammering the tents only a few metres away, burying them in snow, the spindrift roaring blindingly, chokingly into your face if you stepped outside. But in the dim blue light of our snowy shelter, all was calm, the silence virtually complete. The only sounds were the sizzling of garlic and an occasional whisper of wind. On the ceiling flickering wisps of shadow chased each other as the racing spindrift blowing over the igloo howled across the Upsala Glacier. We were still 3 days’ walk and a 70km boat ride from the nearest town, but we had completed the bulk of our traverse across the Hielo Sur Patagonico, the southern Patagonian Ice Cap, the largest body of ice in the world after the Polar ice caps.
Our trip had started 14 days earlier in far off England. It was late October. The British days were growing depressingly short, damp and chilly. After my inevitable last-minute errand, going on a wild goose chase to buy the lightest quick release attachment to enable me to fix my camera to the top of my ski pole in subzero temperatures, I somehow managed to stuff my ridiculous quantity of gear into an 80 litre rucksack and jumped on the train to Gatwick, where I met a relaxed Nick Parks, international mountain guide, friend, and leader of our 12-man expedition to the South Patagonian Ice Cap.
19 cramped and almost sleepless hours later Nick and I stepped off the plane into the late spring muggy warmth of Buenos Aires, the air of anticipation and discovery in our nostrils – neither of us had been to South America before. Before passing through customs we met Our Man in Buenos Aires, the incomparable Thom Reilly, “air-side”. A British Diplomat based there, Thom had obtained a special pass to go through customs, in order to assist us in taking our dried expedition food through customs. It is apparently illegal to import food into Argentina, especially meat, and we had enough for a small army. So Thom nonchalantly took up the hugest sack of food. The customs officials wanted to open it. Thom claimed diplomatic immunity. I now realise this is like a red rag to the customs bull: Within seconds customs officers surrounded Thom like a pack of hungry hyaenas. He could not claim diplomatic immunity, they sneered, because he had not travelled on the flight. They wished to open the bag. Alternatively, they would call the Internal Ministry. Thom capitulated and the bag was opened. They pulled out a green vacuum-packed packet. What was it? Pasta with tomato sauce. Thom explained that this was expedition food for a special British Embassy expedition to Fitz Roy. Something of a lie, but it seemed to do the trick. Serendipity smiled on us. “Aha! Mucho energi!” the customs man smiled, admiringly. “Si, si!” Thom agreed. The packet was replaced in the bag and the bag closed. We were through. More importantly, so was all our expedition food. A close shave. Closer than we realised in fact: The next packet was chilli con carne, the discovery of which would have led to the confiscation of all our precious food.
Back at Thom’s comfortable Foreign Office flat, we met Pete, another member of the team, who had arrived in Argentina the previous week. Large, smiling, ginger-haired, and lobster-pink from excessive sunbathing on the ferry from Uruguay the previous day, Pete joined me in the not inconsiderable task of preparing 154 breakfast portions from the numerous packets of rolled oats, wheat, bran, dried fruit, nuts, sugar and dried milk which Thom had assembled. 4 hours, 4 bin liners, two tastings and a grand sweep of the kitchen floor later, we had bundled the whole lot into 154 neat little packets.
After a short taxi ride, we arrived at a trendy restaurant, where we met Marcello Cominetti, his wife Agustina and their baby. Marcello, a mountain guide from the Dolomites and veteran of 15 previous expeditions onto the Patagonian Ice Cap would lead the trip with Nick. We soon settled down to beer and the first of the many enormous, juicy, rich steaks we were to consume before leaving Argentina. Marcello, tall with a finely chiselled face, sparkling eyes and a smile which inspired immediate confidence, turned out to be a fount of knowledge about the Ice Cap, the great explorers De Agostini, Tilman and Shipton, and an unbridled enthusiast for the mountains of Patagonia, which, he said, are for him the most beautiful in the world. And he has seen many – he first met Nick on the classic Himalayan peak Ama Dablam. Last time he was on the Ice Cap, he said, during a 2-week expedition, the weather had cleared for a view for only 15 minutes – but that 15 minutes made the entire expedition worthwhile. This sounded distinctly ominous, but I was impressed by his zeal.
Eventually, a mere 3 hours late, Thom arrived from work and immediately said, “Right, now we’re going to play polo!” Whereupon he drove Pete, Nick and me at breakneck speed to his polo club 60 km away, explaining en route that the only rule of the road in Argentina is, if you are in front then you have right of way, and that he had only had 4 crashes since arriving in Argentina 18 months earlier. I wished fervently for a pair of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s peril-sensitive sunglasses, but eventually we arrived, miraculously still in one piece, at an idyllic spot surrounded by willows and small bare-foot boys playing on farm tracks. None of Pete, Nick or I had had ever ridden more than a few times. So Thom explained in faultless Spanish with an expansive gesture that we were all experts. We were quickly provided with riding hats, leather chaps, polo sticks and fine polo ponies. Now my hockey skills at school were such that, aged 14, I was permanently deselected from every team. So I have to admit that the idea, at 35, of taking up hockey again, but this time with an extra-long, whippy bamboo stick, wielded one-handed, while simultaneously riding a horse, was not encouraging. Nevertheless, I was delighted to find that controlling a polo pony is as easy as driving an automatic car. There are 5 gears: walk, trot, canter, gallop, and reverse. The reins are held in one hand and you change gear by moving them up the neck towards the head, steering with light sideways movements of the same hand. Simple! We galloped fearlessly around the polo pitch and even managed to hit the ball a few times. A perfect introduction to Argentina.
After an episode in an Irish pub and another huge steak, having had only 10 hours sleep in the previous 70, Nick and I flaked out. Next morning Thom provided us with some of the most crucial gear of the expedition: a tinsel-covered top-hat for Nick, an exceptionally ugly, bright green curly wig for me, and a Father Christmas hat with flashing hearts on it for Thom. At the airport we met our remaining eight companions, weary from their long overnight flight from the UK and somewhat surprised by our headgear. The Fellowship was complete.
The flight from Buenos Aires to El Calafate takes 3 hours. Incredibly, the airline did not baulk at our mountain of gear, including our 10 large orange plastic sledges, most of our food for 14 days, skis, snow shoes, tents, and packs, amounting to over 30 kg each. At Calafate airport, the gear was crammed into the back of a minibus and a trailer. We soon arrived at the dusty little frontier town, where one end of the main street evaporates into a vast expanse of scrubby semi-desert, and to the north the huge Lago (lake) Argentino stretches westwards towards the Andes and the ice.
Next day, while Nick and Marcello made the final preparations for food and transport, the rest of the gang joined an excellent “alternativo” tour of the massive Perito Moreno glacier, one of the tourist highlights of a visit to the area. The snout of this giant is 5 kilometres wide, and it almost blocks a narrow part of the Lago Argentino. Every few minutes, 6-storey tower blocks of blue ice calve from the body of the ice-river and crash into the waters of the lake, floating off as bergs while a wave sweeps across the water from the impact.
Until 1988 periodically the glacier formed a natural dam, and the lake level on the south side would build up until finally, 30 metres higher than the northern part of the lake, it burst the 60m high dam with a thunderous roar and explosion of ice, and a powerful waterfall was created until the waters were level two days later. This spectacular event occurred about once every 4 years. However, for the past fourteen years the ice has not formed a dam: like the bulk of glaciers in the world, the Perito Moreno is getting smaller, and now appears an almost somnolent, grumbling giant.
It was a sunny day and ice-berg strewn, cloudy blue lake was stunningly beautiful, so I suggested, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a swim. Andrew Denton, product manager of gear manufacturers Mountain Equipment and one of the team, rashly offered me $10 if I went in. So I stripped naked and jumped in. Whether due to adrenalin or otherwise, the cold did not seem to hurt. But it was not a place to stay for long, and within 20 seconds I was out on the rocky shore, to be met by a grinning Andrew carrying a $10 note and, more ominously, a Mountain Equipment hat – would I model the hat in the water? I suggested it would be better if I were surrounded by ice bergs. Around the corner was a cove full of jostling pack ice. So I gingerly hopped, naked bar Andrew’s hat, from the steep rock onto a flat ice berg. After ensuring that the lake was reasonably calm and that the tidal waves from the calving tower blocks 500m away were small enough not to crush me between two ice bergs, I lowered myself into the water. It was noticeably colder in this titanic ice bucket than just around the corner by the beach. Turning to face the assembled gathering, after a few seconds I said through a smile which was rapidly freezing into a grimace, “Hurry up and take the photo!” Then the deed was done and I struggled out, seal-fashion, onto the ice berg, gathering some rather fine grazes to my chest, elbows, hips, thighs and knees in the process, from the abrasive old blue glacier ice.
Back at El Calafate I checked that wonder of the modern world, e-mail, and found an urgent message from Heather back in the UK that I had left all my hats behind while packing. So I rushed out and bought another fleece neck warmer and a rather fetching yellow and green striped baseball cap with the mantra “BOCA JUNIORS” emblazoned on the front, to supplement a borrowed balaclava.
The evening saw an explosion of gear in the hostel, as 12 piles of food and group kit were assembled. Everyone scratched their heads to work out a way of stuffing all the requisite objects into their bulging sacks, and to decide what they could possibly leave behind. Every gramme seemed to count, and suddenly the desperate measure I had taken of cutting half the handle off my toothbrush, which I had never been sad enough to do on any previous trip, seemed perfectly reasonable. Thom repacked 8 times before giving up. Somehow I triumphantly squashed everything including my ski boots, but excluding my cameras, into mine, only to find that my day-sack, which I was not intending to take up onto the Ice Cap at all, was also full.
The following day we took a minibus the 4 hour journey to El Chalten, a hamlet which has sprung up only since 1986 to serve climbers, trekkers and other tourists. It lies in the shadow of the mighty rock faces of Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, not particularly high, but two of the most fearsome and difficult peaks to climb in the world, their vertical faces frequently scoured by tearing icy winds and frost, their summits crowned by mushrooms of ice which overhang in every direction.
The weather was perfect and the air unutterably clear. As we passed the eastern end of Lago Viedma, we were treated to an uninterrupted view of the jagged peaks separating the wide Patagonian plains from the 325km long ice cap. Fitz Roy looked a day’s walk distant, but in fact was over 100km away. The minibus roared along the grit road, pursued by a cloud of dust. Unfortunately the sound of the gravel was insufficient to drown out the endless wailing of Enya and Barry White: The minibus driver owned only 3 tapes, and by the end of the journey even the saner members of the group were losing their apparently balanced demeanour.
Then, finally, the next morning we started walking. While we took a scenic route through the hills with light day-packs, our gear was transported by pony to Piedra del Fraile, the first camp and last refuge of our journey across the ice cap. Piedra del Fraile, the Rock of the Priest, was discovered by the great Italian explorer and missionary De Agostini. It is an enormous boulder giving shelter from the murderous winds which descend from the ice cap. In its lee a wooden refuge has been built, with a comfortable adjacent campsite where we had our first practice at putting up Marcello’s Italian tents, and wondered how we would cope with this task in gale-force winds on the unprotected, exposed plain of ice. The refuge cooked an excellent dinner and a cake for Alistair, our expedition doctor. What finer place could one seek for a 40th birthday? The hut was soon festooned with balloons and specially imported party poppers, and Thom and I solemnly presented Alistair with a birthday present of artisanal chocolate from Calafate and a superb latex gorilla mask complete with black micro-fleece hood, which was not only light but, we were convinced, would provide excellent protection from the sun and wind on the ice cap. We were sorely disappointed that he never saw fit to wear it.
Next day we had our first taste of hard work. We had to carry our huge packs from the refuge up the Marconi Glacier to the Paso Marconi, several kilometres away and 800 metres higher. Fortunately we had porters to carry the tents, skis and sledges. But our packs were still the heaviest most of us had ever carried. Some needed help to put them on, and others could not stand up once they had sat down. Marcello made a quick call home on the local emergency telephone which is made entirely of wood and sits on top of a tree stump outside the refuge, and we were off, accompanied by a friendly, glossy but flea-ridden black dog which, for some unaccountable reason, we named Sheila. As in Himalayan tradition, we saw her as a good omen.
The Ice Cap itself is a vast expanse of almost flat ice of 13,000 square kilometres, surrounded by a ring of peaks, over which the ice spills east and west, forming 48 major glaciers and numerous smaller ones. On the west side the glaciers descend into the innumerable long, snake-like fjords which form the fragmented southern Pacific coast of Chile. The east-facing glaciers run down into huge Argentinian lakes, some over 100km long – Viedma, Argentino, O’Higgins (yes, really) and others, before beginning their long river journeys to the southern Atlantic. The Upsala Glacier, some 60km long and 10 km wide, which descends to the northern branch of the Lago Argentino, is generally reckoned to be the largest. Not far from where its tongue meets the lake lies Estancia Cristina, the remote ranch which Shipton made his base on his first pioneering expedition to the Ice Cap in 1961.
Our proposed itinerary was to climb westwards up the Marconi Glacier to the Paso (pass) Marconi, then turn south so as to pass across the ice cap “behind” the fearsome peaks of Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre, spending a day in a cirque nearby, and eventually to descend via the Paso del Viento (windy pass) by the Viedma Glacier, back to El Chalten. As Shipton observed, it is strongly advisable to travel southwards along the Ice Cap, as the prevailing wind is from the north-west. Days 10-17 of the itinerary were reserved for ascents of peaks or waiting in case of bad weather.
The Marconi Glacier is one of the smaller glaciers which spill off the Ice Cap. Within a few hours we were onto the snowy slopes above the lower, flatter section of “dry” glacier, and put our skis or snowshoes on to stop us sinking into the snow or falling into crevasses. Even so, route finding demanded some concentration, and Nick almost fell into a thinly covered but heavily disguised crevasse, stopping short only by throwing himself backwards as the apparently solid ground gave way beneath him revealing the ominous chasm of blackness below. Plodding up the glacier in warm sunshine, the views were only of the immediate rocky summits, and there was no hint of the vast expanse which awaited us at the top. Even the notorious Patagonian wind, which should have been blowing across the ice cap and into our faces, had died.
Approaching the top of the glacier, the gradient gradually, almost imperceptibly, eases, and ahead the view opens to reveal, not a col and another valley as one might find in the Alps, but the beginning of the ocean of ice which forms the Ice Cap, stretching off into the distance, with the far tops of remote peaks jutting over the horizon like far away monsters lying in wait for the few who venture that way to enter their bleak and dramatic demesne.
Sheila clearly relished the attention - and food scraps - she was getting. She apparently thought staying with us would be a good bet, and followed us past Lago Electrico, up the steep unstable moraine, through a field of rocks onto the Marconi Glacier, through the thinly covered crevasse fields, into the snow, and all the way up the glacier to the edge of the Ice Cap.
Shortly before the pass, the porters dumped their loads so they could descend to the green of the valley and home, and we could try out the sledges for the first time. The porters tried to take Sheila down, but after a few minutes she wriggled free of the climbing rope around her neck and bounded joyfully through the snow back to the group busily lashing their rucksacks onto the orange sledges. The porters brought the rope back and tried again. Again, she wriggled free and ran back to us. Shouts and pointing fingers were useless, and in the end we sadly resorted to kicking the poor animal and whacking her with a ski stick until she finally got the message that she would be better off with the porters than with us, and ran off to join them on their descent of the glacier.
After months of anticipation it was wonderful to feel the reluctant backwards tug of the sledge as we plodded up the ever-gentler slope towards the great flatness ahead. But we were tired. After an hour Thom told Marcello he was not going a step further, and Marcello said, “I am very ‘appy you said zat!” So this was our first campsite: a section of flat snow just like the billion others surrounding it. The notion of a sheltered campsite was fanciful. Here there was just a monumental flatness, across which the howling winds would blow. Marcello instructed us to build a wall of snow behind which to put the tents. “Een case eet ees windy een ze night,” he explained, as there was not a breath of wind. It took all 12 of us two hours to build a decent wall, cutting blocks of snow with shovels and heaping snow up into a ramp on the windward side. “Eef you have a good wall,” he said, “You can use ze sheetiest tents”. This did not give me confidence in the quality of the diminutive Italian tents, whose only apparent merit was their light weight. However, they turned out to be surprisingly sturdy, if cramped.
Immediately the tents were up, there were shouts of, “Good night!” even though it was only 7 pm, and everyone disappeared, shagged, into their tents to cook the first dehydrated meal.
Next morning we were up at 6.30. It took about 3 hours to cook breakfast, strike the camp, load the sledges and set off. This turned out to be our standard time, although I’m sure we could have done it an hour faster if pushed. One of the factors which slowed us down was that, despite ordering propane/butane fuel beforehand, the only fuel Marcello had been able to buy in El Calafate was pure butane in tall, aerosol-can style containers. The difficulty with the butane was that it is not so volatile as a propane/butane mixture, so that in the cold its vapour pressure fell and the flame of the stove became weaker and weaker until it almost petered out. Even keeping the can in your sleeping bag overnight did not seem to rejuvenate it for more than a few minutes. The tall cans were also unstable, but standing them in the snow simply made the fuel freeze more quickly. Eventually Chris and I worked out a reasonable system, standing the fuel in a plastic stand on a piece of plywood which had formed part of the sledge harness, and dipping the base of the fuel container into a mug of hot water every few minutes to warm the fuel[1]. (It was some days until I recalled that not long before I had been involved in a legal case where a spray-paint canister had exploded, taking out someone’s eye, allegedly through being heated in a kettle. The memory made me a little more wary of our turbocharging procedure. It was also rather cumbersome and slow, and it made me realise, even in the relatively mild conditions we generally experienced, how complicated life can be in low temperatures.
But the trip was surprisingly relaxed – in fact, so relaxed that I was not once accused of faffing, and even occasionally had to chivvy the group to move on after our frequent and almost interminable stops which could easily last half an hour, much to everyone’s surprise.
That day we covered 15 km in blazing sunshine. The snow was soft and sugary, and pulling the 70kg sledges was an effort, although still readily possible for only 1 person except on significant uphill slopes. Despite plastering on factor 30 suncream, most of the team ended up with some burnt flesh. At about 5 pm, we stopped in the lee of a nunatak, a mountain under the ice whose peak protrudes through the glacier which flows around it. This was Nunatak Witte, most of the way towards Nunatak Viedma, which Shipton had proved not to be a volcano, despite earlier explorers’ reports of a volcano in the area. The real volcano, Lautaro, was visible to our right. Again, the air was so clear that it seemed as though any part of the Ice Cap was within easy reach. How deceptive: Lautaro was in fact separated from us by 42 km of ice.
Again we built our snow wall, while taunting Marcello that clearly all the tales we had heard of terrible Patagonian weather and wind were clearly a myth and a conspiracy designed to preserve it from the crowds. This time the snow wall went up with greater efficiency and improved technique, and was complete in an hour. Snow Camping Top Tips gradually evolved, including keeping the fuel can off the snow; digging a pit in the porch to the tent so that it was easier to put boots on and take them off while sitting comfortably inside the tent with your legs dangling in the porch, and also to provide a good sheltered cooking spot; and leaving a pile of small lumps of snow by the door of the tent to melt for water without having to get out of bed in the morning.
That evening we were treated to a beautiful, calm sunset painting Cerro Torre and Fitz Roy gold to our east, a few ghostly clouds clinging to the summits. Fitz Roy was called Cerro Chalten by the indigenous Tehuelche Indians, who apparently thought it was a volcano because of the fiery colours which surrounded that great hulk of pale granite. The blue sky gradually deepened and turned first pink and then a deep mauve, while the shadows crept up the peaks and the last peach-coloured sunlight gradually diminished and finally vanished. Again it was windless and I was enveloped by the sensations of isolation and peace. But the peace was a slightly eerie one - that of a place which, if it chose, could turn itself into a howling hell.
It was a cold night, perhaps –15 to –20 °C, and in the morning all the tents were covered with a heavy frost. Chris’ and my tent was frosted internally too, as we had not quite mastered the art of getting the right balance between adequate warmth and adequate ventilation, and had assumed that it was necessary to heap snow onto all the snow flaps around the tent. While we packed up I was glad, not for the last time, of my down jacket. I had left my cameras outside the tent overnight, and was pleasantly surprised that their light meters were still working. However, when I took a picture with the larger, medium format camera, despite its being fully mechanical, the shutter jammed.
Nick was keen to ski Nunatak Witte. Some of us were keen to get moving while the snow was still hard and sledge-friendly, but, as Nick said, this was supposed to be a ski trip. So by 8.30 he and most of the rest of the skiers among us had set off up the mountain, following its north-eastern ridge. I went part-way but after half an hour decided that my desire to gain an additional 10 minutes of skiing down the hill in mediocre snow was not enough to persuade me to plod for another hot half-hour to the top. The view, however, was stupendous. To the east in the distance you could just see the point where the Viedma Glacier turned from a placid sea of flat ice to a broken nightmare of crevasses stretching 15 km from side to side, a smooth ice stream turning suddenly into turbulent rapids in suspended animation. To its left, the ridge of hills was visible over which the descent back to El Chalten lay via the Paso del Viento: our original itinerary. Our camp was a speck in the vast expanse of whiteness. It was hard to believe that the camp was less than a kilometre away, and yet beyond it the Ice Cap continued for a further 40 kilometres.
In the end only Nick and Pete bothered going all the way to the top of Nunatak Witte, and eventually, from back at the camp, we saw Nick’s tiny figure set off down the steep unbroken snow of the main face of the mountain. A moment later a faint yell was borne down to us on the still morning air. Nick had fallen on his first turn! But after that he telemarked gracefully back to the camp, his face, indeed his whole figure, dominated by his boyish grin.
We continued towards Nunatak Viedma. As we approached the eastern end, we could see that the ground dropped away “downstream” of the peak and that two streams of dark moraine trailed from its sides, gauged from the rock by the force of millions of tons of ice flowing past it. Of more concern, the area immediately to the east of the nunatak appeared through binoculars to be not only crevassed but also peppered with blue lakes sitting on the ice. It would be foolhardy to attempt a crossing with heavy sledges on a warm afternoon, so we decided to take the safer option and climb to the pass at the western end of the nunatak. It was a fair old slog, but by 5 pm we had reached a flat and apparently crevasse-free area between the nunatak and the impressive Cordon Mariano Moreno, the long range of mountains which runs down the Ice Cap. Marcello told us how the great Italian climber Walter Bonetti had climbed from El Chalten to the base of Cerro Moreno (3,393m) in one day, climbed it on the second day, and returned to El Chalten on the third day: a prodigious achievement. It is remarkable that the peak has apparently only ever had one further ascent.
Again, the evening was calm and clear, and the sunset gorgeous. Although Nick had suggested a quick afternoon ascent of Nunatak Viedma, for some reason that idea fell by the wayside, even though it would not be dark until 9.30. Perhaps it was the long hot plod uphill to reach the campsite which had sapped everyone’s energy.
And again, there was a fair quantity of sunburn. Andrew won the competition for the most disastrous nose, with a fine blister on the tip. It seemed that the main problem was not the direct sunlight but the more dispersed and extremely intense reflection from the glacier: I was burned on the underside of my chin and on my forehead, despite putting suncream on both and wearing a base-ball cap. About this time people started using duck tape, supplemented where possible by something softer, to make nose-pieces for their sunglasses. For some reason I chose not enquire into, Alistair had brought an old pair of black tights with him, which were very useful for this purpose.
Next morning, after yet another peaceful night, albeit punctuated by a few gusts of wind, we found that the previous day’s cirrus had presaged a huge and ominous bank of cloud which was now burgeoning over the Moreno range. Marcello warned us that the storm would be upon us in half an hour, and we had better hurry up. So we did. The first few kilometres towards the Upsala Glacier were a gentle downhill slope. We headed slightly right to avoid a heavily crevassed area, towards two distant dinky-looking peaks which turned out to be rather less dinky than first appeared. On the downhill slope, skis were considerably faster than snow shoes. So Thom sat on a sledge and was pulled, in Nordic skating style, first by Andrew and then by me, poling energetically, with his snow shoes flapped up in front of him.
Over to our left, on the south side of the Nunatak Viedma, lies an old Argentine army base. It was used for training soldiers for Antarctic conditions, but apparently abandoned as the conditions there were more severe than those in Antarctica. Slightly to my regret, we did not make a detour to visit it.
After a couple of hours we came to two small rocks protruding some 60 cm out of the glacier, the only non-white object for some kilometres. I was at the front of the strung-out column of sledges, and imaginatively decided to call the rocks Cerro Tobi 1 and Cerro Tobi 2. I made the triumphant first ascent of both. This was soon followed by Nick’s first ski ascent. We considered reporting the first ascent of Cerro Tobi, altitude 1211m, to the British Alpine Club. As long as they did not discover that the surrounding glacier had an altitude of 1210.4m, I reasoned, fame and glory would be mine. But it was not entirely clear that these rocks were in fact attached to the ground under the glacier, so later verification could prove difficult and we decided that, for once, discretion was the better part of poor humour.
At Cerro Tobi, recorded on GPS equipment along with the other main waypoints of our route, we turned left, southwards, so as to descend the Upsala Glacier towards its left-hand side. Soon afterwards, the storm Marcello had been promising since the morning finally reached us. The cloud enveloped us, the wind whipped up and brought snow flying across the Ice Cap. We were soon trudging along in the white-out wrapped in full waterproofs, goggles and balaclavas, neck-warmers pulled up over our noses. In the late afternoon we stopped at yet another completely unremarkable place. Marcello said we should build individual walls for the tents, as they would protect better against the wind. So a couple of lines of semi-detached snow wall shelters developed, most of the group following Marcello’s advice with each tent huddling behind its own wall, sharing a side-wall with the next tent. About 7 pm, sitting in the mouth of the tent, I heard a gust of laughter which rapidly grew to a gale. I peered out of the tent. The ostensibly most professional snow wall, built by the engineers in the group, had completely collapsed, exposing their tents to the wind. They were all snug inside their tents drinking tea and wondering irritatedly what all the hilarity was, and why their tents were flapping so much, all of a sudden. After a few minutes laughing at them, the onlookers helped rebuild the tumbled ruin.
In the morning it was still windy and the snow was intermittently blowing up above head-height although the sky was relatively clear causing the visibility to drop to a few dozen metres. I was the last to set off, after trying unsuccessfully from a prone position to photograph the ghostly veil of snow sweeping the ice. All I ended up with were a very cold, wet face, a camera covered in half-melted snow, and, eventually, some off-white photographs. The others had disappeared into the blown snow and I was alone with the snow walls, the wind and the whiteness. I remembered Shackleton, alone on a piece of pack-ice in the southern ocean while the rest of his team floated off into the darkness, saying to himself, “For a moment I felt that my piece of rocking floe was the loneliest place in the world.”[2] Since I had taken a compass bearing on the direction in which the group had gone, I was not in a predicament at all, let alone one such as Shackleton’s. But my surroundings were at least evocative enough to allow the imagination to wander: What must it have been like to experience those dark days of the Endurance expedition?
After a few hours, a glacier peeled off to our left, flowing off the Upsala to another glacier, another monster which in turn flowed into the Lago Viedma. At this point there was a significant downwards slope, which allowed the skiers a chance to practise pulling their sledges downhill. This turned out to be both more skilful and more amusing than I had anticipated, as it was all too easy to allow the sledge to veer off to one side and overtake you. Several sledges capsized, some aided by the fact that they were carrying a snow-shod passenger as well as their usual load. The unfortunate snow-shoers were obliged to plod downhill, while the skiers had it easy. By this time I was glad that I had opted for skis, despite Marcello’s preference for snow-shoes and the additional weight to carry up onto, and off, the Ice Cap[3]. We eventually arrived at the base of a ridge, below Cerro Cristal, a classically gnarly-looking peak whose summit was smothered in ice and snow in a typical “mushroom”. Marcello hoped that there was a refuge further up this ridge, despite having searched 3 times for it previously and not found it. He blamed an inaccurate map. Although the lower part of the ridge was composed of flaky, shattered rock and moraine, and was a bit of a pig to walk up, it was immediately comforting to feel rock beneath your feet after several days on uninterrupted ice. Fortunately it transpired that Marcello’s new map was accurate as to the location of the refuge, and within 20 minutes we were chipping the ice off the floor of the aptly named Refugio Favela - Shanty-town Refuge - two small corrugated iron shacks perched on a flat area on the ridge, overlooking the Upsala Glacier. Not only did we have the luxury of not having to build snow-walls or put up tents, but there were wooden boards, no less, to sleep on, glass in the windows, and meltwater pools nearby, so that, for the first time since climbing the Marconi Glacier, we did not have to melt snow for cooking and drinking.
The refuge was also well-stocked with pots and pans, and proved the ideal place to open our packets of pancake mixture. Until then, only Kevin and Andrew had tried them, with limited success. The titanium pan cooked them unevenly and they stuck firmly, resulting in thick, gooey lumpy globules which resembled cow pats from very ill beasts. But the refuge contained an excellent cast iron frying pan, and that evening we feasted on increasingly professional-looking pancakes, some almost qualifying for the appellation “crêpe”[4].
One of the benefits of staying at the refuge was that, because we were not cooped up in 2-man tents, there was a great deal more general social interaction in the evening, and from this point on the group gelled more effectively as a team.
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By this stage we were pretty stinky. I had not taken off my underwear, washed or changed my socks for a week. The stench of ammonia reminded me of school chemistry lessons. I didn’t enquire too closely as to others’ personal condition, but it was clearly similar. Some people had small sections of nose threatening to drop off through sunburn. I had a couple of small sores on my left leg which had turned septic. And the smell of our ski boots was indescribable. Dave’s feet were a grotesque mess of bloody blisters. He had been treating them with gaffer tape. New Zealand helicopter pilots refer to mountaineers as “the smellies”. We were indeed Twelve Manky Men.
So the next day, the seventh after leaving El Chalten, was designated a rest day. Sleeping bags were dried out. Dave’s blisters were dressed and aired. We had several games of perudo, the dice game memorably described by Stephen Fry as “the second most addictive thing to come out of South America”. Marcello barely rose from his sleeping bag all day. Thom and I went down to the cache of gear which had not been brought up to the refuge, to fetch various items for people. While down there, in a typical display of puerile pranksmanship, we buried one of Andrew’s ski boots under a pile of rocks and tried to make it look as though one of Nick’s skis had blown away during the night: He had not tied or weighted them down, and it had been very windy. So one of them ended up at a strange angle, 10 metres away, and we buried the other under our tracks of the previous day, marked by reference to 2 nearby ski poles.
Much of the day was spent discussing food. Mainly the fact that we were not getting enough of it. I calculated that we were eating 2,500 calories per day. We were undoubtedly burning at least 3,500 calories per day. On their epic walk across Antarctica, Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud burned 7,000 calories per day, on average. So our rations were demonstrably meagre, despite the extra-large breakfasts Pete and I had put together, which I was relieved to find were popular. I made a note to bring more day-snacks next time: 3 power bars between 7 am and 6 pm was simply not satisfying. However, as Mike Stroud memorably said in a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, on a 10 day-trek, your body in fact has enough fat to burn, and can do so quickly enough, for you not to require any food, from a physiological standpoint. I remain unconvinced, and prefer the theory that food is not merely fuel but is also a vital aid to morale.
There was also some discussion of the overall objectives of the expedition. We had already travelled a good deal further than envisaged in the original itinerary, and were now planning to descend, not the Viedma Glacier, but the Upsala Glacier, to Estancia Cristina, some 60 km further south. Cristina was not only Shipton’s first base for exploring the Ice Cap, but was also the finishing point of his great traverse of the Ice Cap in 1961-2. We had made the best of the excellent weather (Marcello said that in 15 previous expeditions to the Ice Cap he had never experienced such a prolonged period off good weather). But we had in fact spent only 4 days on the Ice Cap proper, out of a 24-day excursion from the UK. Some of us were concerned that it would be downhill from now on. We needed a clear objective. There were no suitable exit points from which we could regain access to humanity for a long way south, so continuing our traverse southwards was not a viable option. The obvious alternative was to attempt a peak or two. Many of the peaks in the area are still unclimbed, or have had at most 2 or 3 ascents. Marcello suggested Cerro Campana immediately to our north, or Cerro Cristal directly above us. However, Cerro Campana was in cloud and festooned with ice, and some of the group wagged their chins at the sight of the summit mushroom of ice on Cerro Cristal: Due to weight considerations we had only lightweight crampons and ice axes, and very few ice screws. As Andrew said, “This is a skiing trip, not a climbing trip, and there’s no way I’m telemarking across that snow slope up there!” I was not convinced that the peak would be too difficult, apart from the summit mushroom, and thought it might be worth a go, but in the end a decision was made to attempt Cerro Don Bosco on the other side of the Upsala Glacier instead. We could probably ski to the top of Don Bosco, which had almost certainly never had a ski ascent before[5]. The attempt would mean a 3-day trip from the refuge: one day trekking across the glacier to make a new camp on the ice, one day climbing and returning to that camp, and then a day to trek back to the refuge before commencing the long descent to Estancia Cristina. Since we had 7 days of food left this would leave us 2 days in hand in case of bad weather or to attempt another peak if the conditions were good. So it seemed a sensible plan.
In the afternoon, after I had taken a couple of photos of Thom diving off the roof of the refuge, the two of us went for a walk up the ridge. I was wearing my lightweight trekking boots with mini-gaiters. It was a relief not to be in ski boots. But the snow was very soft in the warm weather, and we frequently sank in up to our thighs, so my feet rapidly became completely soaked. Amazingly, part-way up the ridge we found a small black spider walking in the snow, the first creature other than ourselves which we had seen since saying goodbye to Sheila. After an hour of climbing we emerged onto the next flat section of the ridge. The view was stupendous, the hut a tiny dot 400m below, the Upsala Glacier stretched out beyond, and the Ice Cap to our right, like an ocean of smooth sugar icing stretching, unblemished, to the distant Moreno range some 40km away, over which rolled a 1000m thick, bulging bank of cloud. The only colours were pure white, black and deep glacial and sky-blue. The view was utterly breathtaking in its enormity and extremeness. To the right of the Ice Cap, blocking the view to the Nunatak Viedma, the beautiful Cerro Campana rose, with ice falls tumbling down to the glacier below. As I was changing the film in my camera, Thom said, “Quick! Look up!” I did, and, wonder of wonders, a great condor was flying directly overhead, low above us. He circled us a couple of times, presumably wondering if we were dead, and at one moment turned his head so we could see the complete circle of his white collar. Then he was off and away, soaring downwind at great speed, like a messenger of Gwaihir. A magical moment.
After a few more photos we were getting cold, especially Thom, who was not wearing a windproof layer. The wind had increased and was, as usual, bitter, clawing us after chasing across the massive expanse of ice. So we started down. As we descended, intermittent clouds covered the sun, and part way down we were treated to a magnificent display of colours in a thin ice cloud: In the black-and-white, blue-tinted landscape of ice and mountains, the only other colour in the entire scene was a bizarre glowing smear of pinks and greens around the sun.
We ran down through the deep snow, tumbling amusingly a few times on the way, in time for dinner at 6.45. After dinner and another heavy pancake session, everyone was in bed by 10. I wrote my diary, lying in my voluminous sleeping bag, by the light of my head torch, to the sounds of the slow, heavy breathing of the sleeping bodies crammed around me and the whistling and buffeting of the wind on the shack. Every few seconds a gust rose up and a few dozen crystals of spindrift floated down through some cranny in the roof and onto my sleeping bag. Not enough to worry about, I thought as my eyelids drooped and I turned off my torch.
Next morning we were up at 6. It was a struggle to get our esteemed leader to leave his bunk. He was disgruntled and alleged that the only reason he had not got out of bed was because of the other people faffing around him using up all available space. We descended to the cache, where Andrew found that one of his ski boots was missing. He immediately asked, “OK, where has Thom hidden my ski boot?” It was difficult to remember which pile of rocks contained it, and unfortunately the ski poles marking Nick’s buried ski were moved before we had located it. So our joke went down like Eddy the Eagle. We set off around 9 am in poor visibility to cross the glacier. Thom went in front, roped to Marcello and the sledge behind, as there was a crevasse field ahead. We could not see the horizon and were following a compass bearing. Enveloped in whiteness, it proved almost impossible to walk in a straight line, even on flat ground. You needed to look at your compass continuously, which made it difficult to spot crevasses, and also to have a person behind you shouting, “Left a bit!”, “Right a bit!” and so on. We frequently stopped to take stock of how far we had travelled, and to adjust our bearing, gradually veering to the left until we could see the base of the ridge ahead. As we approached, the cloud lifted and, looking back, it appeared that we had passed right through two significant areas of crevasses without seeing them. Fortunately they were fairly well covered with snow, most of us were on skis, and the front 2 people were roped up, so the chances of falling in had been small.
After two nights in the cramped tin shed, building a snow wall and putting up the tent again felt like a comforting return to home life. Once again, Marcello recommended individual walls for the tents, and a couple of terraces developed. The wind was increasing, and Marcello told us that this place was always windy. “Great”, I thought. Chris’s and my tent was flapping, so while others lay in their tents reading or drinking tea, I spent an extra hour building up our wall another two or three feet, which was therapeutic and kept me warm. After dinner Thom and I decided to build a luxury loo. So we spent a happy hour making a curved, overhanging wall partly surrounding a deep trench, with steps out of the sheltered area on either side and a platform for gloves, shovel, toilet roll, etc. The finishing touch was to add on the outside, in large, friendly, self-supporting letters, “W.C.”.
It was during the making of the WC that the idea of the igloo was born. I had always wanted to make an igloo. There is something intensely satisfying about an igloo. Perhaps it is the shape. Perhaps it is partly that it is made entirely out of a natural material. Or perhaps it is that that material is snow, a magical substance which, on the one hand, can be fun, incredibly beautiful, or a wall to save you from the cold, or on the other hand can kill you by cold, avalanche or suffocation. It is a wild, white magic. Thom and I agreed that if we did not get to the top of Don Bosco the following day we would build an igloo.
Next morning we set off up the glacier towards Don Bosco. The wind came in bursts, and we were walking into wind, so goggles were required and faces wrapped in balaclavas. At one point when I stopped to take a photo, the wind whipped my soft camera bag from my hands. The bag started tumbling along the snow back down towards the camp. Quick as a flash, Thom galloped after it in his snow shoes, looking like a demented penguin on speed, and caught the bag with a surprisingly stylish rugby tackle. Unfortunately this aggravated an old shin injury from which Thom had been suffering for the past few days. When we finally caught up with the rest of the group a few minutes later Nick told us to stop arsing around. We were duly castigated. Unfortunately I forgot to remind Nick that a few days earlier he had dropped his bumbag down a snow slope and I had carried it 200m up the hill for him. We plodded on up the gentle slopes below Don Bosco, which was largely enveloped in cloud. The weather showed no signs of improving. The slope steepened and suddenly, in a virtual white-out, Nick called to Thom, “Watch out! There’s a big crevasse there.” We were in a chaotic crevasse field. The snow was so smooth and the visibility so poor that you could not see the downwards slope of the first big crevasse until the tips of your skis failed to touch the ground. It was impossible to see a safe route, so in 15 minutes of warming shovelling we dug a hole in which we huddled, wet but sheltered from the windblown snow flying over us.
After an hour it was obvious that there was little point in continuing upwards towards the summit, still some 700 m above us. Even if we reached the summit safely, we would not see anything. The general desire to reach the summit in a white-out was insufficient. So we turned back. The skiers had an easy run down. The snow-shoers tried tobogganing on the otherwise empty sledges they had towed up, but with limited success. By 3 pm we were all back at the camp.
The weather was deteriorating. Everyone else retired to their sleeping bags. Thom said to me, “Well, are we going to build an igloo then?” I replied, “Actually I was thinking of going to bed.” I paused for thought. “OK. Let’s build an igloo.” So we did. As we had not thought to bring The Idiot’s Guide to Igloo-Building, our technique evolved as we went. The wet, sugary snow was sticky in the near-zero temperature, but the blocks frequently fell apart. Somehow the walls kept getting higher and gradually curving inwards with our truncated wedge-shaped blocks of snow until they had turned into the beginnings of a ceiling above us. But for a few minor disasters, the snow was sticking incredibly well. We made a self-supporting lintel for a doorway wide enough to crawl through. Neither of us believed for a moment that we would be able to close up the roof, but incredibly, four hours later the roof was complete. Nick asked whether we were going to sleep in it. Initially we both laughed this off as a madcap idea. But, after a few minutes, in the words of the professor from Back to the Future, I figured, “What the hell?”. After all, you don’t get the chance to sleep in an igloo every night, if you live in London. Thom declined. So after supper I returned and smoothed the inside walls to stop dripping, plugged dozens of small holes and gaps between snow blocks, drilled a small ventilation hole in the down-wind side and kept it open with a ski-stick, and made a platform big enough for a single bed. Eventually I was ready. I put on extra warm clothes and went out into the blizzard to gather my sleeping bag, sleeping mat and other important items from my tent. As I passed Thom and Marcello’s flapping tent I shouted at it, over the near-howling wind, the snow blowing in my face, “THOM! ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE NOT COMING TO SLEEP IN THE IGLOO?” Much to my surprise, a muffled reply came back that in fact he would, as it might be quieter than the tent. Within minutes we had all necessary gear in the igloo. Thom was freezing, having run from his tent without putting on his cold weather clothing, in the mistaken belief that if he was outside for only a minute he would not get cold. So we set to work feverishly. Thom built the sleeping platform up so that it was big enough for two. I went outside and built a downwind tunnel from the door “like in all the pictures,” to stop the wind blowing snow into our shelter all night. Eventually, at midnight, we had a flat sleeping platform and a 3 metre-long entrance tunnel. Mindful not only of the extreme fun we were having but also the fact that we were behaving like 12-year-olds, we tucked into a midnight feast consisting of most of Thom’s snacks for the rest of the expedition. Having closed the door with a rucksack and a goretex jacket we finally lay down to sleep.
I had first met Thom at the wedding of two friends some 15 months before the expedition. We had soon discovered a mutual interest in mountains, and had agreed to keep in touch when he went to work in Argentina for the Foreign Office, in the hope of climbing Aconcagua, South America’s highest mountain, together. Since the wedding we had kept in email contact and I had sent him details of the Ice Cap expedition. I was extremely pleased when I heard from Nick Parks that Thom would be on the trip. On the expedition I found him constantly full of fun, energy, enthusiasm and generosity – an ideal companion in a team, even if his choice of clothing was sometimes suspect.
As we lay looking up at the ceiling of the igloo, it seemed almost inconceivable that the roof could stay up. We had every expectation that we would be woken in the night by half a tonne of snow falling on our heads, and would have to abandon ship in a dark and furious blizzard, groping wildly for head torches and waterproofs while our belongings blew away. For although the igloo was a haven of peace, the wind was still raging outside. As we lay there, the howling wind whispering weakly through our pale roof, Thom said, “Who would have thought that Phyllida and Matthew’s wedding would have ended like this?” We both slept remarkably well. Amazingly, the roof did not fall on our heads. And there were no drips.
I awoke at 6. Inside it was as calm as ever. But as soon as I stepped outside it was obvious that nobody would be doing much that day. My diary reads:
“No activity - Weather too bad. Hard to walk at times. V. strong wind – howling gusts + snow blowing, spindrift blowing in through door, back along tunnel past goretex! Like midges of dust made of snow. Freezing out: Almost numb hands in 30 seconds with thin gloves on.”
The tents were very heavily snowed in. Marcello’s tent was completely buried. I fetched the stove and invited Chris to join us for breakfast in the igloo. Soon we had a brew on and were admiring the chaotic pattern of holes which seemed to have spontaneously developed in our ceiling like pale constellations in a translucent blue canopy. Breakfast in bed in an igloo on an ice cap was an excellent experience. After breakfast I went around the tents and invited everyone for tea in the igloo at midday. Thom and I then set about adapting the sleeping platform into a central table with benches around the edge. By the time we had completed this conversion and shipped the excess snow out of the entrance tunnel, 2 hours had elapsed and our guests started arriving, until there were 9 of us sitting on the perimeter bench, passing hot drinks around. After a two-hour party with lots of hot sugary fruit squash and tea and several games of perudo, everyone left and we started reconstructing the sleeping platform. We also decided to lower the door by a metre, so that its top was below the level of the bed and the heat would be more effectively trapped in the dome. We lengthened and deepened the tunnel and constructed a kitchen and storage area, with separate “cupboards” for food, cutlery and “crockery”, fuel and water-bottles; a bedside shelf for torches, cameras, suncream etc.; a narrow shelf made from a good hard layer of snow above the door, for guests’ gloves and hats; some hooks made from tent pegs; and a hanging rail made from an ice axe sunk into the wall. Remodelling your igloo is fun and easy. Not only that, but if you want a cup of tea, all you need do is dig out some of the wall to make another shelf and drop the extracted snow into your cooking pot. You just have to watch that you only dig well below ground level. By 6 pm we had a truly luxurious igloo. We chopped fresh garlic, poured the olive oil into the pan, and their fabulous smells filled our magical dome of calm.
Unfortunately all the digging of snow and the damp of the previous night had left our down sleeping bags distinctly thin, and we had to resort to wearing our down jackets in bed. I made a mental note that, as Ranulph Fiennes explains in Mind over Matter, one ordinary sleeping mat is not enough to insulate you from the cold of a glacier: next time I will make sure I have either two or an extra-thick one.
Looking up at the ceiling at our private constellations, the moonlight showing dimly through the roof with a faintly luminescent glow, we christened an obvious face Charles and another Terence, our two (extremely posh) guardian angels.
Next morning, the third at this camp (camp 5), we would be leaving our home-made home. I awoke at 4 a.m. needing a pee. We had been advised to bring pee bottles in case of calls of nature during sub-Antarctic storms. But I had already given my pee bottle to Thom to use as a water bottle (I had not peed in it, as it happens). So, spurred by the ever-increasing pressure from my bladder, I finally screwed up my resolve and decided to go out. Peeing at night is a logistical problem when camping on an ice cap without a pee bottle, as it is necessary not only to get out of your sleeping bag but also, unless you are already wearing it, to don a significant amount of warm clothing: hat, gloves, waterproof trousers and jacket, head torch and, most annoyingly, boots. In really bad weather conditions a compass is also wise - In Antarctica there have been instances of people getting lost only a few metres from the safety of a hut, and freezing to death. I prepared myself, and took the shovel with me. The wind-blown snow had all but blocked the exit tunnel, leaving a small hole barely a foot across. I dug my way out expecting to find myself once more in a howling blast of snow. It was calm!
Having satisfied the call of nature, I decided to try to photograph the igloo from outside in the dark, which I had been meaning to do for a while. I called in to Thom to shine a torch at the inside of the roof. He did. The translucent dome glowed with a warmth which was completely in keeping with the amazing protection it gave from the cold outside. The camera clicked once in the cold air, and then a second time 20 seconds later: The shutter had jammed open in the freezing cold. In any case, a tripod was essential and all I had was a ski stick converted into a monopod. So I gave up and walked over to check that the other tents were not collapsing under the weight of drifted snow. I suggested to Nick that it might be a good idea to get everyone up immediately, as it was calm, so that we could set off by about 6 am, by which stage it would be light and, hopefully, still calm. He thought this was a good idea, but Marcello seemed to have a stronger preference for staying in bed, so we stuck to our original plan, which was to get up when we felt like it. This turned out to be about 6.30.
After a leisurely breakfast and packing up, someone asked Thom and me if we thought the igloo was strong enough to stand on. We doubted it, but decided to test our hypothesis, even though the prospect of falling through the roof 7 feet to the floor inside was not particularly appealing. Starting from opposite sides, we climbed towards the top. Incredibly, it held our weight. We stood triumphantly on the top, and shook hands. I started jumping up and down, and suddenly disappeared through the roof with a tumble of snow blocks to the floor within. I later felt rather ashamed that I had despoiled our edifice. But it was fun. As was the sledge-race we then held down the gentle slope to the flat expanse of glacier beyond.
Soon we were plodding back across the Upsala Glacier towards the Refugio Favela. This time the weather was relatively clear, and we could see our objective. It took only 3 hours to complete the 10 km journey on fairly hard snow, as compared with the 5 hours in a white-out in the opposite direction a few days earlier. Fortunately, when we arrived, the sun was almost out and the weather was warm and dry with an unusually temperate breeze. So we were able to hang out our bedraggled sleeping bags and other gear to dry, and settled in for games of perudo and a serious pancake session in the hut.
I borrowed Nick’s satellite phone to find out whether my brother Hilary and his wife Siobhan had had their baby yet: It had been due the day before I left. I was standing in the wind outside a tin hut, halfway up a ridge on an ice cap. It was snowing lightly. And I could hear the telephone ringing at home in central London, 12,000km away. An astonishing situation which would have been unthinkable to Eric Shipton only 40 years ago. The phone was answered: the answering machine. I tried Hilary’s phone. Another answering machine. Finally I spoke to Heather on her mobile phone. She was on a train on the way to Cornwall. My first nephew, Samuel, had been born the previous Friday, weighing 12 pounds, 4 ounces. Twelve pounds, four ounces! More than twice as much as my birth weight. I shall have to get him to carry me on future expeditions.
Soon it started snowing more heavily and the wind began to increase again, so we brought in our gear. My sleeping bag was looking much happier. The wind continued to increase, until, by the time we went to bed around 10 pm it was howling again, and flecks of spindrift wormed their way through cracks in the roof and again floated gently down onto my face as I fell asleep.
Next morning (16th November) we finally said goodbye to the Ice Cap. At 9 am we set off down the Upsala Glacier, initially on good snow and downhill, but gradually coming into more broken, crevassed areas and hard ice where those on show shoes for once had a definite advantage over those in skis. We were fortunate that the snow extended much further down the glacier than it usually did at this time of year, so that we were able to use the sledges for significantly longer than expected. Eventually we stopped using the sledges by two small lakes and packed them up so that we could carry all our gear, including skis and sledges, on our backs. This was a moment which most of us had been dreading: Would we be able to lift such packs? Some needed assistance to put them on or stand up, but it turned out that they were surprisingly portable. They weighed nearly 35 kg and were awkward, the sledge protruding nearly a metre above your head. Walking into wind would have been difficult. Walking downwind it was hard not to be pushed into a jog, which was not ideal on crunchy old glacier ice interspersed with thinly covered crevasses. But amusing, nonetheless. Jamie, who was videoing the trip, fell into a crevasse but became wedged by his pack and was hauled out unhurt. There were no other accidents. My left calf was hurting – a recurrence of the pain of a torn muscle from over a year earlier. But as long as I was careful not to stretch it as I jumped across the crevasses it did not cause any worse problem than intermittent pain. The old glacier ice was grey with black lines of crushed rock embedded in it. In between lay stripes of fresher white snow, some covering crevasses. Beyond the edge of the glacier, dark red cliffs reared up to a ridge above us. It was a spectacular descent, even in mediocre weather, and enjoyable to be negotiating the variety of crevasses and uneven slopes rather than simply plodding across the endless flatness of the body of the Ice Cap.
At about 4 pm it suddenly crossed my mind, with a pang of guilt for my absence, that it was the wedding day of my friend and colleague Claire Toogood. When I told her, some 6 months earlier, that I might not be able to come to her wedding, she said, “You’d better have a bloody good excuse!” I was not sure that pulling a sledge across an Ice Cap 12,000 km away was adequate. But at least I bore her in mind, as I had promised I would. After all, it is the thought that counts. Isn’t it?
At last we came to the point where the glacier became too crevassed and broken to provide a feasible route. We descended by a lake and climbed over a pass and through a rather convoluted hilly area. Jamie and I were walking at the back, some way behind everyone else. At one rest-stop, I asked Jamie where the tent was which had been on his pack. It had fallen off. It was in a grey bag, which would be fairly camouflaged against the surrounding rocks. It could have rolled down into the lake. There was little chance of finding it, but I thought it was worth spending half an hour trying. Leaving Jamie to tell the others what I was doing, I ran back along the edge of the lake and after 15 minutes found it nestling in some rocks. I felt triumphant, in a small way. Eventually, after being inspected fairly closely by a condor, at about 8 pm we arrived at a small refuge called Refugio Pascale. The refuge was by a small wind-whipped lake which was a deepest blue-purple colour. In the distance the snowy battlements of Cerro Murallon (2,656m) were visible over the rocky ridges: Our last sight of a mountain in the heart of the Ice Cap. But we took little notice of the view on arrival. After an 11-hour day carrying 35kg packs for most of the way, over varied and some quite difficult terrain, food and sleep were uppermost in everyone’s mind. We ate extra rations and huge quantities of chocolate mousse, and settled down on wooden bunks for our most comfortable night for some time.
The next day, 17th November, was Thom’s birthday. It was a sunny morning, the wind still strongly blowing off the Ice Cap, so that the blue-purple lake looked more like a choppy sea. The wind and sun completed the drying out process for my sleeping bag, which had not quite recovered since its igloo experience. It was now finally back to its normal state of being outrageously puffed up again like the chest of a frigate bird. While I was photographing the blue-purple lake, my bumble-bee coloured baseball cap caught the wind and sailed off into the lake. I wonder if it will ever be seen by a human again.
Thom and I were last to leave the refuge. It was easy to see the others ahead. Each huge orange sledge was mounted on a backpack, rearing up above the carrier’s head, and down to their thighs, so that from behind all one could see was the orange sledge bobbing up and down, with a little pair of arms attached to ski poles sticking out of the sides of the sledge, and a stubby pair of legs pumping away underneath. As the crocodile of limbed sledges walked off down the rocks, they resembled a line of cheap Doctor Who? Monsters, made out of giant mobile phones. Thom and I could not quite decide whether the addition of bright orange rectangular blobs to the landscape would enhance or wreck our landscape photography.
Soon we came to a pair of lakes separated by a small rocky ridge, the remnants of some glacial activity. In the bright sunshine of his birthday and the stunning surroundings, Thom suggested a swim, and I readily agreed. Strangely, nobody else did. I wondered why. Could it be the temperature of the water? Someone suggested that a sledge race would be appropriate, down the steep, smooth slab of rock into the lake. Undressing in the icy wind, it suddenly became painfully clear why everyone else was keeping their fleeces and goretex jackets on. But it was too late to turn back. Stuffing my socks into my boots to stop them blowing away, I shouted to Thom to hurry up and get his clothes off. It was not a place to hang around undressed and motionless. After a (very short) discussion, mindful of the risk of scraping our nether regions if we fell off, we decided to keep our boxer-shorts on. I donned the green wig, and Thom his Father Christmas hat, its LED hearts flashing bravely, not anticipating the impending onslaught of freezing water. Two empty sledges were unloaded from packs and placed high on the sloping rock slab. While my second held the sledge back, I sat rather dubiously on one, trying to see whether the rock which Nick had recently trundled into the lake was directly in my path. Thom sat in another on my left, whooping nervously. We were still a long day’s walk from the nearest habitation of any kind. This could all go horribly wrong. With an umpire standing by, our seconds gave us a simultaneous push and the sledges lurched down the hill, screeching their way down the rock in an ever-rising howl. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Thom’s sledge had slewed around to one side and was threatening to roll him off. I was ahead, and had somehow managed to keep facing straight down the fall-line. The water came rushing up to meet me and in a moment I was submerged in freezing water, spray flying, the sledge capsizing, and my feet coming to rest in soft glacial silt under the water. Gasping, I stood up, grabbed the sledge and started floundering back to the shore. Thom was doing the same. “Again!” we both shouted. Being twelve years old again is definitely fun. After the re-run, we were soon hurriedly drying ourselves on a bandana and putting on our fleeces and fleece-trousers, ready to continue down the valleys towards Estancia Cristina. At last, we could claim what was presumably a “first”: As far as we are aware, there is no previously documented sledge-race into the glacial lakes of the Patagonian Ice Cap.
After several more hours of walking through barren landscapes of strange-curved rocks, red and black, some containing thousands of small bullet-shaped fossils apparently called “belemnites”, we eventually came to the end of a ridge, and descending on steep scree reached the first area of vegetation we had seen for 12 days. The valley was filled with scrubby grass and stunted, twisted trees. The grassland was liberally scattered with clumps of hardy yellow flowers. The varied greens were pale, dry, dusty. A grey sky hung heavily above. Yet to us, after nothing but rock, ice and snow for nearly two weeks, this was a verdant paradise. The sounds of trickling streams were like soft music. And the smell of wild herbs was a scent of freshness and life. It reminded me that one of the reasons I go into the mountains is that, after the stark beauty and emptiness of rock and glacier, the first experience of a green valley again is a revelation, making one feel with great intensity the wonder of life. Anyone who has done this kind of journey will empathise with Eric Shipton after his epic traverse of the Ice Cap in 1962 when he wrote of the same spot I was now in,
"An hour later we were on a broad path, walking through enchanting woodland, our world alive again with the song of birds and the smell of growing things. We stopped frequently to lie on soft beds of moss and leaves, gazing up into the trees and taking deep gulps of sweet-scented air. The change of our environment was so sudden, the contrast so complete, that I sank into a kind of opiate trance, from which happy state I did not emerge for several days.”
I stopped to dig another film out of my pack, a very cumbersome business as it involved dismantling about half of the carefully constructed edifice I was wearing on my back. By the time I had done this, found a film, and then finally realised that, contrary to my previous belief, I had had a spare film in my camera bag all along, nearly half an hour had elapsed. A classic faff. The rest of the group was long gone. But what was the hurry? It was relaxing to be alone in what now seemed like a friendly land. No crevasses. No navigational problems. No need to build a wall to camp. Instead, trees, grass, flowers, tinkling streams and the sounds of birds. And, not far over the next small pass through a range of grass-covered old moraine hillocks, a farm! I shouldered my pack and strode across the marshy grass towards the low hills, confident of seeing a small train of orange Doctor Who? monsters way below and ahead of me as I crossed the ridge. At the top I looked ahead at the new vista, to see a maze of small lakes nestling in low hills. Swans, geese, ducks and lapwings dotted the scene. There was not a speck of orange in sight. But in the distance I could see a tall bank of cypress trees, the Estancia’s windbreak, and remembered Eric Shipton. There was no danger of getting lost now. Soon afterwards, lost in pleasant reverie as I meandered through the low hills, I heard angry shouts from way off to my right. Thom was sitting on a path, waiting for me. I could not hear what he was shouting, but it sounded urgent. So I abandoned the horse-track I was on and headed in his direction, only to discover as I came nearer that he had been telling me to keep going on the path I was on, which I thought with slight annoyance was somewhat unnecessary. Anyway, within a few minutes we were reunited with Nick and Marcello, and could see pairs of tiny orange monsters weaving around lakes ahead of us. The last couple of hours were among the longest of the whole expedition: The estancia just didn’t seem to be getting any closer. My legs were tiring of the 35kg+ pack, particularly as I was now carrying a rope and Jamie’s crampons as well as Chris’ and my sledge, and my heels were sore. In the end we crossed a rickety wooden bridge and soon found ourselves lying on the well-tended lawn of the Estancia’s garden. A few tourists on the daily boat-trip from El Calafate, bemused by our hair stiff with dust and suncream, our beards, sunburn, orange sledges, green wig (in my case) and obviously filthy condition, were training their video cameras onto us. It was interesting to be the subject of others’ photographs for once.
I took off my boots, normally comfortable. Due to the unusual weight of my pack, my heels had developed two almost completely symmetrical elliptical blood blisters each about the size of a 2-pound coin. At my request, Doctor Alistair drained them for me, leaving my heels exquisitely tender. For the next 3 days, in an effort to avoid pressure on them, my gait was that of a pigeon-toed John Wayne. Thom found this irritatingly amusing.
In the half hour before the tourist boat left for El Calafate, the staff of the Estancia plied us with tumblers of red wine and a huge tray of left-over chunks of lamb. The first fresh food for 12 days! We fell on the lamb fragments like hyaenas, tearing the succulent meat off legs, shoulders, backbones, and glugging red wine between mouthfuls. As Mark commented on the boat afterwards, it was a great snack.
As we stepped onto the boat, in our euphoria and, evidently, own little world, some of us thought it would be amusing to lower the Argentine flag and replace it with a pair of underpants. Memories of the Falklands war did not enter our heads. I marked my technogrollies, which are dark blue, with the letters “E.S.C.” in white zinc oxide lip salve, and fixed short sections of cord to the edges. We waited until the staff’s backs were turned and lowered the flag. An excited babble of voices flared up and Thom warned us we were rumbled. “They’ve lowered the flag!” they were saying. Two of them came up onto the top of the boat and started remonstrating with Thom. They were not happy. Thom, in a flash of true diplomacy, explained to them that he had been telling us about the symbolism of the sun in the middle of the Argentine flag, and we had lowered the flag to take a closer look. The flag was raised again, we were ushered inside unceremoniously, past the smart tourists, into the lower deck of the boat, which unfortunately had no opening windows and was therefore a poor place to store leaky and poorly maintained chemical weapons such as ourselves.
After a 3-hour boat trip past deep blue ice bergs and crags we arrived back at the road, and by the evening were showered, clean and changed in a restaurant, celebrating Thom’s birthday again before collapsing at 2 a.m. onto real mattresses on the floor of the hostel. Our traverse of the Ice Cap was over.
Post script
Next morning I was woken by a small rugby ball landing on my nose, which promptly started to bleed. This was Thom’s idea of a joke. Fortunately, although perhaps in retrospect worryingly, I found it extremely funny. That day, Thom, Nick and Marcello and I found an excellent restaurant for lunch. I had intended to write an email to friends and family telling them all about the trip while it was all fresh in my whirling mind. But instead we spent three hours in the Casimiro, where we had a fabulous 3-course meal with an excellent Argentine wine made by Felipe Rutini, capped with excellent coffee, extraordinarily generous brandies and, at Thom’s insistence, a shared Davidoff cigar. We rolled back to the hostel just in time to be picked up for 4 hours’ horse-riding from a ranch in the hills. Four of us went on this excursion. Nick’s horse deliberately threw him at the start. I was surprised his lunch did not follow suit. But we were soon up on the steep rough hillside, our new gaucho-style hats blowing off as we cantered through the freezing twilight. After the ride and an excellent barbecue, we found the minibus would not start. We were 20km from town. After much pushing, my drained blood-blisters screaming at me not to do this to them, we got the vehicle started and arrived back to a dark room of comatose companions.
Next day, after our bus’s clutch had died we managed to switch vehicles and arrive, via a ridiculously poor road, at Torres del Paine for two days. Now we were officially in Chile. Most of the team took it fairly easy, only walking for 6-8 hours per day. Some of us went riding for a day. On the second day Nick, Thom and I ended up walking along the wrong side of a ravine in a screaming gale – the wind down in the campsite reached 110 km/h that day, and we were up on a ridge. We pulled our balaclavas over our faces, ducked behind rocks as the dust and grit blew over us, and soon, armed with twisted sticks as guns, started a ridiculous game of soldiers, much to the bewilderment of the trekkers we tried unsuccessfully to hold up, after crossing the ravine and finding the path. We found some puma tracks in the sand by the stream, but unfortunately no puma. The Torres del Paine, renowned as one of the most impressive sights in South America, seemed prosaic in the grey afternoon light after the exquisite emptiness of the ice cap. But it was worth a walk.
Andrew and Kevin had decided to attempt to complete the circuit of the Torres, which usually takes 5-8 days, in two days, bivvying out. They arrived back by boat at the end of the second day, exhausted and hobbling somewhat. Mark McDermott, by contrast, set off at 6 am on the first day and completed the entire circuit in one day, arriving back at the camp nearly 17 hours later, shortly before 11 pm. But then, he has climbed Everest solo without oxygen, and has run up Aconcagua, South America’s highest mountain, and down again to base camp in a day. So one need not compare oneself with him, I told myself.
A few days later, clean and tidy, we were back at Buenos Aires airport, most of us boarding the plane back to the UK. The Fellowship was finally broken. Two days later I was back at work in the heart of London, noisy, full of machines, greyness and colour, dirt, business, crowds and the complexity of modern life, thinking: May the stark clean wilderness of the ice cap endure for a long, long time.
Toby Gee, January 2003
Final notes
Thank you to everyone involved in the expedition for your excellent company and teamwork.
If you have read this far, congratulations! Please let me know if you spot any mistakes or have any comments, suggestions (other than taking up football) or queries.
Thank you! Toby.
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