Day 37
S79 45' 39.60", W82 51' 24.84"
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While they await news on the flight back to the last degree, the team are planning new adventures.
“Hello everyone, it’s Martin, on day 37 of the expedition.
Good news today, I saw the doctors this morning, and they’re pleased with the progress that the Achilles tendon is making. So tomorrow, I’m going to go out – there’s a 10km route around Union Glacier – I’m going to go out with the pulk and do a ski. And if that goes well, we’re going to get the all-clear to redeploy.
The weather’s pretty poor back here at the minute, so there’s quite a few teams that have come back from Mount Vinson here at Union Glacier, and there a couple of teams here to do the last degree. It’s a real logistical challenge going on for ALE at the minute, trying to get people out when the weather improves and it’s safe to travel. That’ll have an impact on when we can get out, and that in turn will have an impact on what distance we can realistically do, before we need to get back in time to get ready for our Mount Vinson summit attempt on the 9th of January. So hopefully it’ll be around Boxing Day, if all goes well. We’ll redeploy and do the last degree. And if we manage to achieve that and it all goes okay, that’ll take us to around the 400-mile mark on the expedition. So good news.
I thought I’d say a little bit about Adaptive Grand Slam in terms of what we do really. The big expeditions are really about trying to demonstrate what can be achieved with disability. And provide examples to people who’ve perhaps recently had a disability, or who are struggling with disability, to push themselves and stretch themselves to achieve their goals. The crux of what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to scale up in the future, is to provide opportunities for people with disabilities to take part in outdoor challenges and events, in a supportive environment, with experienced people that can help them achieve the goals. So if you know of anybody who’s registered disabled, then please do spread the word about our project. We’ve got a number of different challenge events available, if you go onto the website adaptivegrandslam.com there’s a mission section and down there we have a number of different challenges which we do annually, including the hillwalking weekend in Cumbria, one in Herefordshire and one in Yorkshire. We also have a week in the Alps, which is an introduction to glacial mountaineering, and of course we run selection processes and training processes, and take people on bigger expeditions overseas. On this expedition it’s just myself and Lou, and the reason for that is – partly because of covid – we weren’t in a position to be able to run a selection process and training process because we couldn’t travel, and therefore we couldn’t get people to the cold-weather environments to get that necessary training in. ALE, who have been providing all our logistics and safety, and rightly so, wouldn’t allow that to happen. I could come, because of the experience I’ve got. But normally we take a disabled team. And when I get back from this, we’ve already started planning other expeditions and more challenge events. And we’re looking to scale the project. Please do spread the word if you know of anybody that is disabled and would like, or who would benefit from a challenge. Tell them to get in touch with us. We are very fortunate in that we’ve got some fantastic sponsors, and they have clients that come on most of our events as well. All of that generates cash to enable us to take disabled team members at no cost to them. It’s good opportunity for people, so please do start spreading the word if you can, and if a take a little bit of time to respond, because obviously we’ve got no comms down here in Antarctica, apart from the sat phone, but we intend to start scaling the project up this year.
More updates tomorrow and we’ll let you know how the practise run goes.”
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