Day 2
S80 2' 34.08", W80 14' 35.16"
///shorn.seaward.transferability
Strong headwinds and steep gradients made for slow but steady progress today.
“Hello everyone, Martin here, at the end of the first full day. We’re now at camp 2….
Today started pretty good actually; we were on a bit of an incline last night, so we carried on with a fairly gentle incline, and then we hit a bit of a plateau and we started pushing across from there. But it was immediately obvious that we had a big wind – the wind reached about 40knots and during the day it was coming from our left as we were walking - we’re heading towards waypoint two – to avoid crevasse fields – so the direction of the waypoint changes. So we hit the next waypoint and we basically turned straight into the headwind and the incline increased and it got hard. Very hard. I think the combination of high wind, the weight of the pulks at the minute obviously at the beginning of the expedition, and the gradient, I was sweating. I was trying to go at a pace when I wasn’t sweating but I just can’t do it – you’re just putting so much effort into making this thing shift on an incline. (The pulk is ‘this thing’).
So slow progress, but we wanted the first week to gradually increase our distances each day, and I’m not looking to go at full pace and full distance to begin with. That’s the advice we’ve been given from everyone, including Lou, so we’re going to just keep on slowly increasing each day. But as we got towards the top of this feature, we starting experiencing blue ice, and that was quite tricky. We couldn’t get traction, even with the full-length skins.
We kept on slipping and sliding, so we ended up having to do a detour round this area of exposed blue ice. And then we got back into it again. But then gradient picked up again, and I slipped over a few times so we decided to take our skis off and walk to get a bit more traction. We got to the top of plateau and then it kind of flattened out but by that point I was quite tired. So when we got to the change over, I said to Lou ‘can we just call it a day there for today.’
I don’t want to go too hard too early. And I’m actually quite tired now. It was hard effort for me that was – that headwind making a huge difference.
And then to top it all off, I’ve got a harness system with a few smaller pieces of rope attached to the side, and some bigger pieces of rope attached to the pulk itself. And then
there’s a bungee cord. That basically stops it jarring on your back. Well that bungee cord unfortunately is fraying and those two small pieces of rope have snapped. I’m not sure if it’s
kit failure. So we’re going to bring it in in a minute and see what we can do to repair it and if we can’t, I’ll have to just stick with the rope which isn’t great it’s going to put a lot of pressure on my back along the journey but such is life.
So far so good, some nice food. And that’s it. Hope all’s good.”
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