That night I fell asleep wondering if we’d wake to –30ºC temperatures again, and realising I’d only have to wake up to that kind of cold another 28 times before we reached the South Pole.
The next couple of days were quite kind to us in comparison. Within 10 minutes of starting day 13, we had all stripped off down to our thermals, which helped us make excellent time. We even had a bit of an extended lunch sitting in the sun, before the clouds blew over and it quickly got cold again. Unfortunately, I started feeling like I was getting sick, which was the last thing we needed. All I could think about was my upset stomach, the chilblains on my face and my excruciating polar thigh. In the final hour of the day, though, I decided to take my mind off the pain by practising zoning out. It worked and before I knew it, we were setting up camp while it started to snow.
In an earlier session, Ming and I had skied alongside each other for a while. We’d discussed the fourth dimension, which completely tripped me out, but I loved having conversations like that. Ming is a such a funny guy, even though he doesn’t really try to be, and he worked insanely hard throughout the whole trip to make sure it was documented the best it could be. What a legend.
I also spent a bit of time with Heath during a couple of sessions when I was really struggling and feeling quite upset. Like always, he helped me fight the negative feels and push on. He told me that every time you overcome something like that it pushes the best thing that has ever happened to you and the worst further apart. It makes you more able to cope with anything out of the ordinary that lies between these two ends of the spectrum. He told me a story from his experience as a soldier and it gave me a real kick to get a move on. The ability to just get on with it even when everything seems to be against you is so important. While Heath has very strong opinions, we share many of the same views. His motivation was always just what I needed to keep pushing.
For the last session, Dad let me borrow his headphones and music – it was such a good change after having no music for days – and it gave me an immediate boost. By the time I got to camp, I felt as though my attitude had completely turned around.
But for some reason, I couldn’t keep it up the next day. It wasn’t as though I was feeling sick anymore; I just couldn’t get going. At the end of a very slow second session, Eric had a chat to me about needing to do something to pick up the pace and not keep everyone waiting for so long at the breaks. I don’t think he meant for it to come across as rude, but for some reason that’s how I took it. It gave me the shove I needed, though. I borrowed Dad’s headphones again, put on some hype music and went as hard as I could. Eric and Ming had left the break early because they were getting too cold waiting, but I managed to catch up with both of them. When they next stopped and I was just behind them, Eric told me he was in shock.
Eric and Ming decided to do some interviews at the end of that break. They didn’t want me to listen in, so I kept going. I set off at the same pace and it took Eric about 20 minutes to catch up. When he did, he said to Heath, ‘Gee, good pace that session, huh?’ Heath agreed with him and looked at me, signalling towards his heart. I knew exactly what he meant.
We kept up that pace for most of the day, which made me incredibly sweaty, which is never a good idea because you get cold even faster when you stop for a break. By the final session of the day, I was completely buggered and spent most of it struggling along at the back. When I got into the tent, again I just sat there shivering and sobbing. I wanted to disappear. I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes and had trouble holding my head up. Like everyone else, I had icicles hanging off my face. I was in so much pain.
We were still about 20 days from the end, and it wasn’t getting any easier. I was struggling and Dad and I were bickering (again). At different times, I had stabbing pains in my stomach and was so cold I couldn’t feel anything or use my fingers. At one lunch, I couldn’t even hold my spoon and ended up sitting on my mat just staring at the cup of noodles and trying not to cry because I didn’t want my tears to freeze. Eric noticed what was happening and came over. He asked me what was wrong, and it was so hard for me to tell him. I didn’t have the words. It would take too much effort to say that I felt I had nothing left inside me. No energy. No will to keep moving. No desire even to eat. I didn’t want to feel weak or as if I was being supported, especially since all the men were just sucking it up, sitting there eating their lunch as if nothing bothered them. But not eating enough food was also stupid and dangerous. As it’s said, a team is only as strong as its weakest member and, at that moment, the weak member was me. I just had to be brave enough to admit it.
Eric spoon-fed me a few mouthfuls of whatever he could get out of my food bag so we could get moving again, as the wind was picking up. He had to help me strap my skis on and put the handles of my ski poles on my wrists, since my hands just wouldn’t budge. Even he had to admit this was no place for humans – it really was the coldest, windiest, driest place on Earth. At night, in my sleeping bag, I’d feel so cold I could barely hang on to a pencil (the ink in pens freezes in the cold) to write in my diary. Despite the struggle, we were still managing to cover 17 or 18 kilometres each day, which was enough to keep my head high.
It was almost 25 December and I was super excited to have my first white Christmas in Antarctica, except it didn’t feel like Christmas at all. The thought of what would’ve been going on at home and not being able to spend the day with family and friends by the beach was getting me down. The day before Christmas Eve in Antarctica it was Christmas Eve at home (following different time zones), and we were trapped in our tents during a blizzard. We’d had to set up camp early the day before as conditions had worsened. It was so bad we had to stack the sleds on top of one another as a windbreak, so we could get the tents up as swiftly as possible. It was dark, as the snow and clouds completely blocked out the sun, making it hard to see the features of the ground. It wasn’t easy, and we were forced to use ice screws to hold the tent down in the hard ice. Even though the ice was rock solid, Dad still had to try to shovel some around the edges of the tent to add some weight and block the wind from tunnelling underneath. Eric had already broken one shovel doing the same thing, so we had to be really careful not to make the same mistake twice, since we only had one shovel left, which we were now all sharing.
All night, the blizzard thumped against the side of the tent. The walls of the tent shook, and because the sun had been hidden when we set up camp, both of our air mattresses were parked on large clumps of ice. Normally I’m the lightest sleeper ever, but I somehow managed to sleep right through the noise until Eric woke us up at 6 am. He told us to stay where we were because we were going to have to keep inside the tents for the day. Luckily, we’d been making some great time, even over the difficult fields of sastrugi. It was a good chance to get some rest, while we waited out the storm. I crashed again until 9 am, when Dad woke me up for breakfast. For the rest of the day, we slept, ate, watched movies, slept and ate.
Later, when we called Mum, she read out some of the comments I’d been receiving on my Instagram posts. It really meant a lot to me that so many people were following the journey and backing the whole team.
It is possible to keep moving during a blizzard – we had the gear, clothes and high-energy food to keep us going – but it gets really dangerous when you have to stop to eat or hydrate. You lose heat a lot quicker than normal. It’s also very difficult to navigate in a blizzard. Any features in the landscape were invisible to the eye.
Thankfully, Christmas Eve in Antarctica brought some better weather. We were still moving through sastrugi zones, but from the old map we had of this unexplored area, it seemed as though there would only be another five or six days of it. That’s the big difference between the route we were taking and the traditional route most teams choose to take. In total, we’d spend about 10 days dealing with the ups and downs of the sastrugi and all the face plants and snapped ski poles that they brought with them (Dad had already broken one of his). The ice
was very hard – almost like glass in places – so, in theory, you should be able to cruise across the top of it. But the reality was different.
By now we’d covered around 100 kilometres of sastrugi and had about the same distance still to go before finding a flatter surface. It was like skiing on a choppy, frothy ocean that had been frozen in time – impossible to find any rhythm skiing across it. You’re constantly being jerked backwards when your sled hits a hard ridge or you fall over when the tips of your skis hit a solid bit of ice that you can’t kick through. It was really hard work, and you can’t mentally switch off and take yourself somewhere else like you can when you’re skiing across a flat surface. You have to concentrate on every step. Of course, we knew there would be these challenges when we decided to take on this new route, but knowing and doing are so different.
At one point during the day, Ming had taken his skis off to do some filming with me. The others had gone off in front of us, and once we’d finished filming I’d just dropped my pants to do a wee when I heard a yell. I turned around to see Ming, about 50 metres away, chest-deep in a crevasse and clinging to its edge. I completely freaked out – we must be in a crevasse field – and, with my pants still down, I unclipped from my sled and started running towards him, yelling at the others who were too far away to hear. Within a few seconds, however, he’d managed to haul himself out, rolled over on the flat ground and gave me the thumbs-up. Thank gosh. Once I’d pulled my pants up again and started moving, I skied past the crevasse on my own and looked down where it followed into the abyss. Thin walls of rough, rigid blue ice shards led deep down to nothing but black. It seemed bottomless and I felt a shiver up my spine. I was staring into my nightmare. Ming had had a very lucky escape and we were able to laugh about it later on.
Towards the end of the day, we hit another big hill of ice. It was a tough ascent, but luckily for us, we weren’t trying to navigate through a maze of sastrugi and crevasses anymore. The highlight of the day, though, was reaching the halfway mark to the Pole. Halfway made the whole way seem possible.
That night, in the tent, I opened a Christmas card from Zoe, who has been one of my best friends forever. There was a little block of chocolate inside – heaven – but there was also a photo of a roast Christmas turkey. What sort of person sends you a photograph of delicious food when you’re living off two-minute noodles and dehydrated beef and peas?! It was so cruel, but it made us laugh.
I don’t think there’s a stranger place to wake up on Christmas morning than a tent in the middle of Antarctica. Ming had snuck into the tent before I’d even opened my eyes to make sure he got the morning on film. The night before, we’d put up some tinsel and a little snowman key chain as decoration, so it felt slightly festive. Dad had a little present for me, as well as some cards from home. He handed them over and we opened them up while we were still wrapped inside our sleeping bags.
Dad handed me a tiny present and I unwrapped it to find a blue Tiffany box inside. Mum and Dad had bought me a beautiful bracelet – where it joined they’d chosen a design that they thought represented the North Pole and the South Pole. It was really special, and Dad told me it was one of the only presents that he’d been involved in buying (this was a big statement as usually Mum does that job very well).
Then I got a nosebleed, which was such a great way to begin the day, as toilet paper was almost as valuable as gold.
We had an extra 20 minutes on top of our normal morning time this morning, so we soon put the stove on and got on with breakfast and preparing for the day. Despite being Christmas Day, we needed to cover enough ground so we didn’t get behind. Moving would also be a good way to take my mind off the Christmas I was missing out on at home.
Eric had his Santa hat on while we were packing up our sleds, but that was about as much humour as he had for us that morning. He believed the day ahead of us was going to be really tough and we should be happy with even getting out of the tents. The wind had blown right up again overnight, and it felt colder than any other day so far. Aside from the howling wind, it was overcast, so we weren’t going to get any heat from the sun. The landscape hadn’t changed really – we could still see plenty of sastrugi ahead.
The first four hours were spent walking into the strongest winds we’d had the whole trip. It also began snowing, so my dreams of a white Christmas were coming true, except it was a nightmare. The wind wasn’t just making things extremely cold – it was also making it hard to communicate, making us all a bit tense and anxious. Taking a decent break wasn’t really an option either, since stopping for too long meant you’d end up so cold you’d start to lose all the feeling in your extremities.
The conditions were awful, but we’d made a commitment to ski as far as we could and we were going to stick with it for as long as we could. Eric was being really cautious in these dangerous conditions. No one was allowed to stand around for too long because he was worried we’d end up either frostbitten or hypothermic. We’d also come across a few crevasses the day before, but they are really hard to see when the snow is being pushed across the surface of the ice in heavy drift and there’s little to no visibility. When the snow drift is that strong it’s almost like you’re skiing into a rushing white river as the snow howls past your legs like an endless stream of raging ghosts.
Eric had packed a small shelter (a human-sized bag made of tent-like material to block the wind) in his sled and at lunchtime he got it out for the first time to see if it would provide some protection during our lunch break. Dad and I pulled it over and around ourselves. There’s nothing special about having lunch in what is basically an oversized rubbish bag. And we hadn’t packed anything special either, so Christmas lunch was the same as every other day – noodles with crackers, some butter and a chunk of frozen salami. The snow drift found a way inside the shelter and whipped around, so within minutes we were caked in a dusting of snow. It was a miserable failed experiment.
That night we had a little get-together in the other tent and celebrated Christmas Antarctica-style. I felt it had been the toughest day yet, but to make up for it, we all shared some chocolate, Tim Tams and Milo that Eric had been hiding, while Dad played some Frank Sinatra Christmas carols over his Bluetooth speaker.
Later we called Mum and Kane from our tent. The first time we tried to get through to them it rang out, but Kane finally answered.
For me, Christmas is about spending time with family and friends. I was with Dad, of course, but I also felt the rest of our team had become part of my extended family. We were sharing something that hardly anyone else would ever understand. Eric had spent about 10 Christmases away from home in Antarctica guiding different expeditions, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t easy for him to be gone either, especially because he had kids my age back home. Like Dad and me, he was missing his family a lot. He told us it would probably be his last Christmas in the Antarctic.
There were no hangovers or sore tummies from too much dehydrated turkey the next morning. What did arrive, though, was the weather forecast – and it wasn’t good. The winds were predicted to pick up even more over the next five to six days and it made my stomach churn with anxiety. Early on Boxing Day, it didn’t seem to be too bad, but that was possibly because the conditions on Christmas Day had been so terrible. Since it was going to get a lot worse in the next week or so, we really needed to step up the pace and get some kilometres under our belt just in case we had to stop again because of high winds. Dad told me he was once trapped in a single-person tent for 11 days at high camp on Denali, the highest mountain in North America, and had run out of food (and toilet paper!). That can basically kill an expedition. We needed to take these weather windows seriously and gain as much distance as we could.
By day 22, we had 18 days’ worth of food and fuel left and 267 kilometres to go to get to the Pole. At that point, it had all become about maths and battling the elements. We needed to cover very close to 15 kilometres every day for the next 18 days or so, or we were going to run out o
f provisions. But because the bad weather was on its way, I felt as though we should be aiming to do much more than that, especially on days when it was at least partially clear.
For four days in a row, we’d pushed to cover 17 kilometres, and it was our last day of trying to hit that distance. For the next 10 days, we were going to try to bump that up to 20 kilometres a day to reach the South Pole on 10 January as planned. That gave us four days’ leeway in case of any injuries or more bad weather. The terrain ahead looked a lot like what we’d been facing for the last week. The sky was blue at least, but, no surprise . . . it remained windy.
Dad had given me something to look forward to in the evening. With the sun shining and good solar power to our satellite modem, he suggested I make some late Christmas calls to my best friends, whom I hadn’t been able to speak to at all since we’d started the trip almost a month ago. When I called, Zoe spent the whole time running around trying to find better service in the small town she was staying in for the holidays. Mia was enjoying her summer holiday with another of my close friends, Paris, so she put the phone on speaker. It was so hard to get my head around the fact that my friends were at the beach and I was about as far away from one as was possible.
When I’m at home, my friends and I don’t talk about my polar expeditions. Our life together is in Melbourne. They see some of the media, but other than that, we don’t spend a lot of time on it. I really enjoy not talking about it with them and being able to relate in other ways. It’s hard to conjure up the person who lugged a 100-kilogram sled across Antarctica and sobbed with pain at the end of long tough days. Having said that, the letters Zoe and Mia wrote for me during the trips for motivation were incredibly special, and I always tried to open them when I was at a low point and needed a bit of loving.
My Polar Dream Page 12