Unfortunately, when the wind is blowing, an extra layer of clothing can be tricky to use effectively. I still managed to get a numb leg and bum when I stopped for a toilet break, and couldn’t pull my skirt down properly. The zip came completely undone so I had to remove my mittens to try to fix it. That didn’t work. Everyone else had skied off and my hands had become so numb through the inner glove linings that I was losing any feeling in them. I confess I might have teared up a bit at this point, but I managed to get going again.
It didn’t take me long to understand that there are good reasons why so few people have skied from the coast to the Pole unsupported and unassisted. It was going to be one long and extremely tough trip. At the end of day five, we made it to the entry to the Kansas Glacier, a steep, moving slab of ice about 60 kilometres long, which no human had ever visited. We were heading directly up it to reach the Stanford Plateau. For the first morning we had to rope up because we were passing through the last part of a crevasse field we’d camped on overnight. It got us off to a late start, and my skirt presented as many problems as it had in the previous days. Our progress was slow since we were roped together for safety as we moved among the crevasses. It was very frustrating and stop-start as the ropes would get caught in our sleds, skis or ski poles.
Once we got to the point where we could separate, I put on some music to find a bit of motivation and lift my pace. It was foggy and windy, but that cleared after lunch. The sun came out and the view of the mountains and landscape was stunning. I led for one of the later sessions, which was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. It completely spun me out to think that no one had ever walked on this ground before me. I put on some Jack Johnson and the music, along with the stunning views, set my soul on fire.
The euphoria didn’t last long. The next day was rough and I busted my guts to keep going. Even once we’d got through the day, I had to stay out in the cold and wind to do some filming with Ming. I was really looking forward to getting into the tent and warming up a little.
Camp was supposed to be the place where we refuelled and recovered for the next day, but Dad and I were finding it hard to give each other the headspace to relax. It often felt like we were back home in the usual father–daughter patterns of bickering over irrelevant things. It was made worse because we were both exhausted, but there was still so much work to do just to ensure our survival in that harsh polar environment.
Often when I first got into the tent at the end of the day, I was so cold and broken that I had to just sit there in tears on the cold ground, fully clothed, with everything thrown into the tent around me, and not move until I recouped just a little energy. Dad operated differently – he was bustling around at a hundred miles an hour trying to get the nightly tasks done so he could be asleep by 10 pm. I needed time and space to process and think. I would often stay up writing in my journal or listening to music way past the 10 pm ‘cut-off’.
I also liked to spend a lot of time on my Instagram posts. Dad seemed to think these could be done in five minutes, but I would often spend up to an hour on each one – choosing the right photo, editing and writing exactly the right words to accompany it. Meanwhile, Dad was beavering away at melting ice and making dinner. This regularly led to arguments about my level of contribution in our tent. And when we were both tired and emotional, we said some things to each other that weren’t nice. It was a very unique additional challenge for us – on top of all the usual polar expedition issues, we had to suffer the stress of a strained relationship cooped up in a tent together for around 14 hours every day, while we were both completely destroyed physically and emotionally from the day we’d just endured outside the tent. A lot of the time we just needed to vent and, unfortunately, a lot of the time we were each other’s vent.
To make matters worse, that night we tried for ages before we could get Mum on the phone. The line kept dropping out every time she answered. Finally I got a chance to speak to her, and although it helped, I needed more. I wanted to rant to her. I wanted to release. But instead, I had to bottle it all up and just try to get to some sleep. Even now, months later, I can see where the tears made splotches on my journal as I was writing in it that night.
It wasn’t going to get any easier. For a start, my Spotify account had logged me out somehow and, because we had no wi-fi, I couldn’t log back in. Sticking my headphones in and using music to keep my pace up had helped me through my first two polar journeys, and not having it would make the rest of the days here so much harder. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to replace the lift listening to music gave me.
The day after, Dad and I had a big argument. We’d finished early, but a combination of sheer exhaustion and a deep conversation about the state of the world with the rest of the team made me wonder why we were even bothering. If people didn’t actually care about Earth or the immense danger it was in, they wouldn’t bother to make any sort of effective change. I was so far into my head I was in danger of turning inside out. Added to that, the next day we were going to be facing the crux of our journey – the most likely point of failure in this new route to the Pole we were attempting to plot.
It appeared as a huge wall of ice and it had been in our faces for two entire days. At first it just looked like a line on the horizon. It was so intimidating, but I also loved the uncertainty of setting a new route, even though we had no idea what was coming. If we didn’t make it over we’d have to find another way to exit the glacier, and we’d already started to look for ways to get around it if it was too massive to get across. The thought of having to backtrack again to look for another route was one of my biggest concerns. Time was so precious.
As it turned out, getting up this enormous rise was a heck of a lot harder than I’d imagined it would be. It was one of the toughest things I’d ever done. Everything else on the other expeditions seemed so much easier by comparison. It was so steep that any time we stopped, even for a few seconds, the sleds would start dragging us backwards down the hill. It was worse for me – I was at the back, and if my sled got away from me there was no way anyone else could help me to stop it. As we kept climbing and climbing, we could see massive crevasses all around us. We had to make sure no one accidentally veered off course.
Both Ming and Heath scratched messages in the snow for me at different points. Ming wrote, ‘Ming was here’ and ‘Go, Jade!’, while Heath’s message was: ‘Jade, you should be really proud of yourself today.’
Finally, we made it to the top, only to find there were another four similar rises – they appeared to be smaller than the first, but they were still large enough to count as major obstacles.
My heart sank. I was exhausted and every part of me screamed in pain. I felt as though I’d used up all my mental resources getting to the top of this rise. To find there were four more was so painful. For a second, my mind hovered around the words ‘give up’, and actually saying, ‘I can’t do it.’ What would that feel like? I wondered. But even thinking about it made me realise that this quick relief from pain would be nothing compared to the long dark disappointment I would feel in myself.
I put my head down and we trudged forward, everyone lost in their own thoughts, digging deep to find more determination and get through. I broke each rise into a series of single footsteps. One foot after the other, again and again.
We paused briefly at the top of each rise, in recognition that we had knocked off another one, then immediately moved on to the next.
By early afternoon we had made it. We’d opened a new route through the Transantarctic Mountains from the coast to the South Pole. When we’d thought there was just one hill to climb, we’d considered calling it Anzac Rise – instead we ‘named’ that part of the route Anzac Steps.
After a quick drink and a bite to eat to celebrate, the change in weather conditions reminded us that we were now at the start of the plateau. It was windier and about 10 degrees colder than it had been on the glacier. I put on my jacket, a hat, face mask and goggl
es, and marched on. In fact, it was much easier to keep going than it had been the day before when the weather was warmer.
We powered through the rest of the day, but I was also worried about what was to come. Arriving at camp, Eric told me, ‘This is the plateau. For the next four weeks, this is home.’ I wanted to make every moment count, even if deep inside me there was a massive knot of concern about what lay ahead.
A page from my journal – mapping our way through the Kansas Glacier.
SOME COOL
FACTS ABOUT . . .
Antarctica
• Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, highest, driest continent on Earth, and it is also the largest desert in the world.
• At the beginning of winter, as the sea ice extending from the coast begins to freeze, it advances by about 100,000 square kilometres each day until the Antarctic doubles in size.
• The Antarctic ice cap is made up of about 29 million cubic kilometres of ice. That’s about 90 per cent of all the world’s ice and between 60 and 70 per cent of its fresh water.
• A home freezer runs at about –18ºC. The average temperature on Antarctica’s high plateau in December and January is about –32ºC.
• According to some estimates, if just the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted, global sea levels would rise by five metres.
• Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Mountain Range stretches 1200 kilometres across the continent with peaks rising to a height of about 3000 metres. It is completely buried by ice.
• There are more than 400 subglacial lakes, the largest of which is Lake Vostok, buried about 3500 metres below the ice.
• The existence of Antarctica was unknown until 1820.
• The first person to reach the South Pole was Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who planted the Norwegian flag there on 14 December 1911.
• Robert Falcon Scott, who had already led an expedition to the Antarctic, believed he and his team of four others would be the first to reach the South Pole. When they arrived on 17 January 1912, they found Amundsen’s tent, a Norwegian flag and a note. On their return journey, they all perished.
• On 1 December 1959, after a year of secret negotiations, 12 nations signed the Antarctic Treaty, which ensures peaceful research activities are carried out there. Now 48 countries are signatories to the treaty.
• There are about 80 research stations located across the continent, and many of them are occupied year-round.
• Male emperor penguins are the only warm-blooded creatures to stay in the Antarctic during winter, where they sit on a nest containing a single egg. The female penguins take to the sea to fish and come back before the egg hatches.
• The largest land animal in Antarctica is a wingless midge called Belgica antarctica that grows up to 6 millimetres long. Most of its life is lived frozen in larval form; its adult life span is no more than a week.
13
DREAMING OF A
WHITE CHRISTMAS
The routines had been re-established. Each morning we spent almost two hours repeating the same tasks – breakfast, reheating the water for our thermoses (from ice melted the night before), hot drink, brushing our teeth without water, packing up everything inside the tent, ‘toilet’ stop, taking down camp and packing everything onto the sleds before setting off again for another day of skiing. Our goal was to be on the move by 8 am so that we could finish the day at about 6 pm. With a good pace, we estimated we’d be able to cover sufficient ground during the day to also have a decent amount of time to relax, have dinner and get everything else done in the tent before bedtime at 10 pm. The simple goal was eight hours’ sleep, eight hours on the move and eight hours of working time in the tent.
As soon as we hit the Stanford Plateau, the temperature dropped to –30ºC overnight, which was about 10ºC colder than it had been at the lower elevation. The difficult conditions were a good indication of what we might be facing over the coming weeks, but chances were they’d get worse. At that point, we still had about 450 kilometres to go and 30 days of food remaining, so we were in a good position. But we did need to ensure we were constantly looking after ourselves. To protect yourself from the wind, you have to be wearing lots of layers to ensure no skin is exposed. When we were walking into a headwind, I would always cover my face with a buff (a wrap-around neck scarf), neoprene face mask and goggles. A lot of the time, it could feel quite claustrophobic, especially when my goggles fogged up and I could hardly see where I was going. It was like we almost needed a headset to communicate in the wind (except we didn’t have one).
During the breaks, we would sit on our sleds to give our legs a short rest and at lunch we’d use the sleds as both a windbreak and a back rest, while sitting on a piece of foam on the ice. It did protect us a little bit, but out there it was cold even without any wind. Dad would often remove his outer glove so he could press the button on the camera to take a photo of me, and even though his skin was exposed for less than 30 seconds, it always took about half an hour for the feeling to fully return to his fingers.
During that first day up on the plateau, I ended up wearing an extra down jacket over the top of my polar suit. My chest was bitterly cold the entire time from the moisture in my breath, which froze, then melted again from my body heat and eventually soaked the upper chest of my thermals. When we finally got into our tent at the end of the day the ends of my hair braids were frozen solid to my buff and face mask. All I could do was huddle next to our little camping stove in my freezing clothes, sobbing, unable to feel my fingers and toes, until I thawed out and had enough energy to move again.
It didn’t help my mood that Dad kept getting on my case about toilet paper. He told me he only used three double sheets when he did a number two, but didn’t seem to understand that I needed to use toilet paper every single time I went to the toilet. I had already begun rationing – I was down to one sheet per pee – but I only had two and a half rolls left. This seemed as though it was going to be a problem with roughly 30 days to go. But Dad had secretly packed a few extra rolls, and he drip-fed them to me each time I ran out, never actually disclosing how many spares he had.
The first few days on the plateau were plain brutal. We were all completely exhausted from the tough climb up the Kansas Glacier, and the conditions – bitingly cold with a strong headwind – were a whole lot worse than I could ever have imagined. We also had to navigate through endless sastrugi. Time and time again, I’d get my ski caught on a ridge in the ice, which would result in a huge jolt and the occasional face plant. At times, I wondered if I was going to be able to go the entire distance, but I had faith that the conditions would get better and the thought enabled me to keep on moving. There was absolutely no way I wanted to quit – not at this point, when we had all come so far and put in so much work.
When we’d stop for a break, it would only take a couple of minutes to lose all the feeling in my fingers. Then my hands were pretty much useless – I couldn’t move them. The cold injuries on my thighs were also rubbing against my thermals – something called ‘polar thigh’. It was painful while we were skiing, but even worse when we’d finish for the day and climb into the relative warmth of the tent. The frost nip on my butt was aching and was so itchy it made it hard for me to sit still. One night, I couldn’t sleep at all. The wind was bashing the canvas of the tent and, for the first time, there was no sun to warm the inside of the tent – it was like being inside a deep freezer. I kept moving and curling up in different positions in an attempt to get warm, but there was just nothing I could do to get comfortable.
Midway through day 12, we were forced to finish early due to horrible conditions, and set up camp. Annoying, but an upside is that eating lunch in the tent is a whole lot easier than trying to get food in your mouth when the bitingly cold wind is whipping around your face and you’ve got mittens on. Instant noodles and frozen salami also don’t taste any better when you’re slightly warmer. We did get to eat Pringles, though, and chocolate, and we had Milo too, so that was
a big treat. I started watching one of my all-time favourite movies, Interstellar, on Dad’s phone, but decided it might be a good idea to take a nap before dinner. Once I shut my eyes I was completely out for about two hours – drool and everything. When I woke up I was disoriented and feeling a bit unwell, but when it was time for dinner I was really hungry again.
That night, I also had a proper chat to Mum. Usually we only have a couple of minutes and it goes something like this:
Mum: Hey, gorge, how’s everything?
Me: Good, but tough. How’s everything there?
Mum: All good here! How are you coping?
Me: I’m okay. Anything new happening?
Mum: [at this point Mum always found the right story to tell to lift my mood]
Me: I’ll just say good night now before it cuts out again.
Mum: Night, baby. Love you.
Me: Love you, Mum. Night.
The satellite phone would cut out multiple times even during such a short conversation. But that night it didn’t once, and I spoke to Mum over the phone for a solid 10 minutes. It was the longest call we’d had since Dad and I had left Punta Arenas.
The lack of sun in the bad weather conditions meant we hadn’t been able to charge the satellite modem using our solar panel, so we had to keep phone calls to a minimum. Calling Mum was always a priority for me. Sometimes I got to speak to Kane, but that had only happened twice in those first 12 days and I missed him heaps. I hadn’t had a chance to call any of my friends yet either, and I thought about what they would be doing back home at that moment, during our summer holidays. The phone calls with Mum definitely gave me an emotional boost. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for the early explorers who were cut off from the world completely while on expedition.
My Polar Dream Page 11