Day 23
S84 23' 24.72", W80 50' 19.32"
///bounty.noontime.pedagogies
Flat light continues but the team encounter evidence of human life
“Hi good evening everyone, it’s Lou reporting in now on day 23 of the expedition.
We woke this morning to complete silence inside the tent, which was very encouraging. And we got outside, and there was literally no wind at all, it was completely still, for the whole day. Which was unusual, for the windiest continent on the planet. But the visibility wasn’t brilliant; there was a lot of cloud obscuring the sun. It wasn’t whiteout, but it was flat-light condition; it was quite hard to read the ground. We got packed up, and we set off. And because of the lack of wind, it was also really mild. And after about 15 minutes of heading off, we ended up stripping right down, taking our outer jackets off, and just skiing in our thermal tops for a while, it was that warm, with the strenuous work of hauling the pulks.
And in this flat light visibility, it was quite hard to make out the terrain we were going over; and for the first couple of hours, we were in amongst some pretty heavy sastrugi. It was really challenging going. Martin obviously finding it particularly difficult with only one ski stick to stabilise himself, so he took quite a few tumbles in that first two hours. And was feeling pretty demoralised at that point. But we made the right call to persevere, keep working our way through it, and then we got lucky. Later on, things really levelled out, the sastrugi calmed right down. We still couldn’t see anything, but we were pretty much onto a really nice smooth, flat surface, with very little sastrugi.
So we were able to make a bit of progress, which was good. We encountered a couple more patches of sastrugi later in the day, but they weren’t anywhere near as severe as the first section. And despite really not being able to see throughout the whole day, we managed to make 13 nautical miles. So for a poor visibility day, it wasn’t too bad. It was hard work, but as I say we got lucky as well. We heard an aircraft today, which was the first time we’ve heard or seen any kind of sign of mankind. Couldn’t actually see it because of the thick cloud cover, but there was definitely a plane, off to our right-hand side. Probably dropping into Thiels airstrip, which is where we’re heading towards. And it’s exactly half way to the Pole. We’re guessing it’s probably an ALE plane, dropping off some supplies, or some fuel up at Thiels. So that was a bit of entertainment to break up the day.
I just want to finish with a shout out, and a thank you. I want to thank our UK-based expedition manager, Wendy Searle, who is the person who is processing all these blogs. We’re calling her voicemail every night, and she gets these messages in the morning, then she’s transcribing it and putting it all on the Shackleton site. So massive thanks to her. She’s currently out in Chamonix on an avalanche safety course, and then she’s heading across to Switzerland, to hopefully go and bag some mountains out there, and get a bit of Alpine experience. Thank you very much to Wendy, from me and Martin for all the hard work that you’re doing, processing all this information that we’re sending back from the ice.
That’s all for this evening, and we look forward to checking in with you all tomorrow.
Onwards.”
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