Chasing Shackleton

by Tim Jarvis

  We ascended with temperatures hovering around zero but made far colder by the wind speed. The weather was pretty awful, but it was preferable to the intrigue and uncertainty of staying put, with circumstances beyond our control threatening constantly to destroy our dream and crush our efforts.

  For the second time, we trudged through the deep snow of the Murray Snowfield in poor visibility. Last time it was in darkness; now it was through mist. A thought struck me in that swirling mist: our plan had been for eight men to cross the mountains, but the Southern Ocean and South Georgia’s weather had seen off five. Now we had exactly the same size team as Shackleton and we even filled the same roles. He had done the crossing with Crean the strong man and Worsley the navigator. McNeish and Vincent were unable to continue and remained at Peggotty Camp, and McCarthy was required to stay behind to watch over them. As for our team of three, I regarded Baz as the Crean of our expedition, hard as nails and uncomplaining, while Larso had taken the sextant readings in rolling seas as navigator, just as Worsley had done ninety-seven years before. The parallels didn’t stop there. Just as Crean ended up being the “Primus expert and chef” of the Caird crew, Baz had taken on cooking duties among the six of us and, like Crean, also regularly provided musical offerings. While Baz’s songs were recognizable, Shackleton wrote of Crean’s singing at the helm: “Nobody ever discovered what the song was. It was devoid of tune and as monotonous as the chanting of a Buddhist monk at his prayers; yet somehow it was cheerful.” Which was preferable, I can’t be sure. Inevitable comparisons would be made between Shackleton and me as expedition leader, in terms of our role at least. Our Jarvis-Gray-Larsen combination was the precise equivalent of the Shackleton-Crean-Worsely team, and it felt right at many levels that we should be the ones doing the crossing and with no support.

  The going was tough, particularly after two days tent-bound with all of the crises that had unfolded. Having climbed up to a ridgeline, we now headed due east, knowing the bearing would mean at some stage we would hit the Trident mountain range. After four hours it still stubbornly refused to reveal itself until over the howl of the wind we heard the rumble of a distant avalanche ahead of us. It was nowhere near us, but it indicated that steeper ground lay ahead in the mist.

  As we made progress toward the Tridents, the weather began to abate such that at 10 P.M., some five hours into our journey, the clouds cleared for the first time, giving us all one of the most spectacular views we’d ever seen. There was the jagged barrier of dark, pyramidal peaks that were the Tridents, emerging as they did out of the deep, white blanket of the snowfield. We were standing virtually directly beneath them, with our crossing point being about 400 meters to our east. Conditions underfoot were heavy going and, just to ensure against complacency, each of us broke through thin snow bridges covering crevasses several times, reminding us to keep the rope taut to prevent us from plunging any deeper.

  The swirling mist came and went as we closed in on our target. Baz took a bearing to the right of the largest peak and the huge bergschrund, or main crevasse, that ringed it, giving both a wide berth in the knowledge that the saddle Shackleton descended so dramatically was close at hand. The Tridents have four possible crossing points in the form of saddles running north to south. According to both Shackleton’s and Worsley’s accounts, they tried them all from south to north, or right to left as you face them. The most southerly, lowest-looking saddle to the right as you approach from the Murray Snowfield was the most promising viewed from the Murray but, in Shackleton’s words, “the outlook was disappointing. I looked down a sheer precipice to a chaos of crumpled ice 1,300 feet below.” The second saddle presented the same problem and so too the third and finally the fourth where they “could not see the bottom clearly owing to the mist and bad light, and the possibility of the slope ending in a sheer fall occurred to us; but the fog that was creeping up behind allowed no time for hesitation.” The encroaching darkness forced their hand and they had no choice but to descend.

  The Tridents, gatekeepers to the glaciers beyond. We descended down the pass between the third and fourth peaks from the left.

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  Today, the best descent route—unless you have ropes with which to rappel—is the third saddle. The fourth, which Shackleton went down, now had several exposed bands of rock at intervals on the way down that would be difficult to negotiate and impossible to slide over as he had, the protective covering of snow now gone. On our arrival at the third saddle, the view to the tortured rivers of ice of the Crean and Fortuna glaciers far below eclipsed even our first spectacular view of the Tridents only an hour before. With the improved visibility lower down we could see all the way east to the jagged peaks of Breakwind Ridge, still twenty kilometers distant.

  The top of the saddle was a steep, wind-blown cornice of snow or, as Shackleton described it, a razorback. Immediately below it was a sixty-degree snow slope that was steep enough to mean that a fall, if not arrested, would send you tumbling toward a crevasse visible about 150 meters down and potentially pulling the others down with you. The crevasse’s downslope face of turquoise ice had been forced upward, appearing like a low wall from our vantage point, meaning there was no way to avoid it if we fell. We avoided it by traversing the slope in a northeasterly direction, keeping one eye firmly on the placement of our feet and the other on the crevasse that lay in wait below. Each man leaned back into the slope, with my heavy carpenter’s adze proving difficult to use given its weight and the ease with which the sharpened wooden handle buried itself up to the blade in snow each time I placed it. Increased effort was required to remove the three-kilogram ax each time, my arm burning with lactic acid.

  The snow conditions on the descent were at least stable, allowing us a good footing—just as well considering the quality of our footwear, the leather of mine having long since become slippery mush, with the centimeter-long hobnails providing little purchase. Baz meanwhile wore boots with four-centimeter screws protruding down through the welt, which, although longer than mine, had begun to splay sideways, rendering many of them useless. Larso wore modern, plastic mountaineering boots and crampons, giving him good grip, although he, too, was well aware of how exposed we were. As a nonclimber, he coped fantastically well.

  Once clear of the huge crevasse, we switched back due east, joining the fourth pass that Shackleton had descended about halfway down. Descending another hundred meters, we came across what appeared to be a relatively unobstructed, albeit steep, slope of perhaps forty degrees that went all the way down to the distant glacier. I commented that “ninety-seven years ago Shackleton would have come sliding past us at this point” just as Baz suggested that we, too, should slide to save time with darkness not far off. In true Shackleton style, roped together across the slope, we descended straight down the fall line on our backsides, finally coming to rest as the slope petered out and friction slowed us. In poor light this would have been extremely dangerous, as the odd large rock protruded through the snow. But in the reasonable visibility we had, we actually enjoyed the free ride and it was a thrill to be doing what Shackleton had done. By all accounts it was something of a thrill for Shackleton and his men too. “We seemed to shoot into space,” Worsley recalled. “For a moment my hair fairly stood on end. Then quite suddenly I felt a glow, and knew that I was grinning! I was actually enjoying it. . . . I yelled with excitement and found that Shackleton and Crean were yelling too.” Although he had no mountaineering background, Shackleton might have had an inkling that a controlled slide is sometimes safer than climbing down on foot, where one stumble can result in an uncontrolled tumble.

  Within a minute we had descended hundreds of meters and were down on the edge of a huge snow bowl at the bottom of the Tridents looking back up at the steep slope. We were relieved to have gotten a major obstacle out of the way and impressed that we’d managed to descend in the fashion we had. As Shackleton said at the time, “We looked back up and saw the grey fingers of the fog appearing on
the ridge, as though reaching after the intruders into untrodden wilds. But we had escaped.”

  The toes on my right foot were still resolutely numb as we made good time across the seemingly crevasse-free bowl, the ground to our north sweeping down to Antarctic Bay and ending in spectacular jagged ice cliffs. We were now completely committed, having descended the Tridents, and with the Crean and Fortuna glaciers and a climb up over Breakwind Ridge and then down into Fortuna Bay still ahead as darkness fell. Due to the delayed timing of our crossing, we made camp for a few hours until first light as planned, finding a small circle of rocks seemingly designed for the task that we referred to as Crean Camp.

  A steep climb down, followed by a glissade, or bumslide, awaits.

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  Crevasses, deep, frequent, and deadly to negotiate with very limited gear.

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  I quickly removed my right boot to assess my foot, revealing toes that were startlingly alabaster white and completely dead to the touch. I massaged them for an hour and then donned warm socks, resting my mug of hot milk against my foot and subsequently wrapping the foot in the emergency sleeping bag. Three hours later, I still had no sensation. I was shocked at the insidious way it had crept up on me; quite honestly, I was shocked it had happened at all given my experience of cold weather travel. But this wasn’t the dry extreme cold of the high polar plateau I was used to; these were wet, cold, constricted conditions wearing shoes that afforded no insulation.

  We broke camp, roped up, and surveyed the tortured landscape ahead, aiming to keep to the southern side of the glaciers in a line alongside the large mountain spurs that run into them. The ground underfoot was icy, making for better conditions in which to travel than the heavy snow of the Murray. Thankfully, the wind had also abated. The landscape was breathtaking, bathed in the orange glow of the early morning sun. Shackleton experienced the beauty of the spot in a different light. Having spent an hour in complete darkness at a spot near our Crean Camp, he noted: “a glow which we had seen behind the jagged peaks resolved itself into the full moon, which rose ahead of us and made a silver pathway for our feet. Along that pathway in the wake of the moon we advanced in safety, with the shadows cast by the edges of the crevasses showing back on either side of us.”

  We traveled through a surreal, honeycombed labyrinth of fissures and holes, teetering on the icy ridges and crust above. Like an abandoned archaeological dig, trenches and subterranean features lurked below us as we picked our way through in silence, often on the lip of a mighty chasm that descended into darkness. At least the crevasses were visible. Had we tried this the night before we would not have managed a hundred meters. There was a complete absence of snow for the most part, the wind having whipped it away, and our route was exhilarating as we looked down into these deep fissures. Most worrying were the ominous snow sections every few hundred meters that, at perhaps fifty meters across, were reminiscent for me of recently formed Arctic sea ice. You hope it will hold your weight but expect it to crack at any moment and swallow you up. With ten- to fifteen-meter gaps between each of us on the rope, it could easily have done so.

  We stopped to rest and surveyed the vast bowl of snow that lay ahead. We decided to light the stove, as our energy levels were depleted with the cold, concentration, and steady ascent of the past hour. The bowl was part of the river of glacial ice that spills down from the mountainous interior of South Georgia into Antarctic Bay to the north. This section between the Crean and Fortuna glaciers was unnamed but full of crevasse danger just the same, and we’d had multiple small falls with legs punching through into unknown voids below, and stopping for warm food boosted energy and concentration levels.

  Our crossing of the Crean had been very different from Shackleton’s. Temperatures for him were lower than we were experiencing due to both the time of year and climate change, which has resulted in the retreat of 97 percent of South Georgia’s glaciers since his day. This meant that the Crean he would have crossed would have been more like the bowl that now lay ahead of us than the fractured river we had just traversed.

  Our mood was good as we knew that this snow bowl, the Fortuna Glacier, and Breakwind Ridge were all that lay ahead of us if we could just keep our pace up. We needed to avoid another night out at all costs. Putting a tent up last night was forgivable since our timing and route had been dictated to us by the need to head off course to rendezvous with Australis to evacuate Si and the bad weather that ensued in that terrible location. To put the tent up again, however, would be straying too far from the spirit in which Shackleton accomplished the crossing.

  I took over the lead of the next section, having developed a good feel for where crevasse danger might lurk from our experience thus far. The three of us threaded our way across the vast landscape toward the Cornwall Peaks, the steady pace allowing us to visit a place in our minds rarely visited as we journeyed along. For me, the vastness of such a landscape strips life back to basics and allows you to experience an almost meditative state—the core of who you are that the normal pace of life seems to mask from view.

  Perhaps an extension of this is what Shackleton spoke of when he mentioned the presence of another with them on the crossing, a phenomenon confirmed by the two other men: “When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow-fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that there were four, not three.” Unprompted, Worsley said to Shackleton a few days after the crossing, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us” and Crean “confessed to the same idea.” Was it the presence of another? Or was it a part of their being that they were almost unaccustomed to experiencing? I had asked myself the same question many times.

  We looked out over the same scene Shackleton had all those years before, but now these “unnamed mountains” were called the Cornwall Peaks, named only a few years after Shackleton’s death by the 1920s Discovery expeditions, whose goal was to look at the viability of whaling. They marked the next of Baz’s predetermined “report lines”—locations where Larso would call Australis on the satellite phone to tell them where we were. Reaching the Cornwall Peaks meant we had successfully crossed the Crean and that the Fortuna and Breakwind lay ahead of us.

  We ascended quite steeply to a saddle between two nunataks—a smaller one to the north and the main 840-meter-high Cornwall Peak to our south. The climb had been tiring and we stopped to survey the wide sweep of snow and ice of the Fortuna Glacier we now needed to cross. Unlike the Crean, all of its dangers remained hidden from view. We decided to head east, aiming in a straight line for the last nunatak on the far side of the Fortuna some three kilometers distant. We knew that around that corner lay an ascent to another saddle that would finally lead down Breakwind Ridge into Fortuna Bay.

  Baz, now somewhat rested from his spell at the rear, resumed trailbreaking as we dropped into the wide bowl the mighty Fortuna occupied. The snow seemed solid enough, leaving us to think that our passage across might be a safe one. Suddenly Larso, 300 meters into the crossing, dropped in to his waist, reminding us of what lay beneath. Thereafter each of us had small falls, usually just a leg breaking through, although Baz and I sank to our waists on a couple of occasions. With our senses on high alert, we longed to reach the other side and be free of the crevassed terrain we’d been negotiating since we broke camp almost ten hours earlier.

  Looking back over the hidden crevasses, the steep descent of the Tridents we’d just come down marked in the distance.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  The scenery was spectacular but dangers lurked just below the surface.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  We approached the nunatak painfully slowly, as is always the way in the polar regions, where dista
nces are vast, travel on foot slow, and the air so clean and clear that it makes distant objects seem closer than they really are. The final approach to it revealed a bergschrund around its base. We decided to give this a wide berth, turning north to follow the Fortuna down toward the coast in the hope that any crevasses that might await us there could be crossed at right angles. This would allow us to step over them until we got down to a point where we could again turn east and head up the next pass to the saddle and then descend Breakwind into Fortuna Bay. It was not to be. Baz plunged waist-deep into a crevasse, the lip of which was soft snow that threatened to collapse at any moment. He bridged the gap with his arms, kicking out for purchase with his feet before finally finding a wall he could push off to extricate himself as Larso lay on his ax and I on the adze providing an anchor. Quickly composing himself, Baz walked back to the west around the crack that indicated the line of the crevasse. When he was twenty meters beyond it, he felt safe to move north back down the Fortuna but disappeared a second time, this time more dramatically than the first. He was only visible from the shoulders up as I lay prostrate on the ground, the flat head of the adze buried deep in the snow. Baz reappeared but not without a few choice words. Among other things, he cursed the decision to coil the rope diagonally around our bodies rather than retain the improvised sling we’d made from the hemp rope that had proved too uncomfortable to walk in. The coil had virtually strangled him, but we were through, and got a brew of hot milk going while we assessed the next steps. The Boss would have approved.

  The wind picked up at our backs, bringing with it rolling clouds of fog on the far side of the Fortuna and the distinct feeling that the mountains were not yet ready to release us. The mountains of Breakwind Ridge ahead formed a formidable barrier, the obvious chink in their armor being a more rounded, lower peak that lay more or less in line with the easterly bearing we’d taken across the Fortuna. With the cold nipping at our heels and anxious not to be enveloped in the advancing clouds, I led as we ascended a broad bowl several kilometers across to reach a saddle between the rounded peak and its more angular neighbor. We had reached the high point of our journey in every respect, and all that we now needed to do was concentrate on the descent into Fortuna Bay. We celebrated but did so prematurely: as we crept toward the edge of the saddle, it revealed itself to be a knife-edge, corniced ridge with a very steep snow slope beneath it leading to a second lip 100 meters below. Beyond that we couldn’t see, and for all we knew this second lip could end in a sheer rock or ice cliff of unclimbable steepness.