Day 45

S89 6' 55.80", W80 57' 33.48"

///resonances.courthouse.agar

Steady progress towards the South Pole.

“Hi everyone, it’s Martin on day 45 of the expedition, which is also New Year’s Eve – another special day. We’ve had some great weather today, the core temperature up on the plateau is quite cold obviously – it’s between -25 and -30. We’ve had no wind today. There’s a bit of high cloud, but the sun was penetrating through that, so that actually made it quite comfortable. So conditions are great. There’s a noticeable difference in the amount of snow up here, versus ice, in comparison to where we were before we had to head back, just after Thiels. It’s quite deep snow and we’re digging in around here around two or three foot of fresh snow, so they must have had quite a lot of fresh snow in the past couple of weeks up here. But that’s not having any impact on pulling the sledges, that’s all going well. But we’re just taking it steady.

So the plan at the minute is just to go until the Achilles starts to cause a problem. I mentioned it earlier – before we went back into Union Glacier – but there’s stages to the Achilles tendonitis coming on. So we’re just getting to the point where, each day now, I’m going to keep on going until I get these shooting pains basically. And that is normally an hour or two before the spasms start and I can’t weigh bear. So I don’t want to get to that point. We want to maximise our chances of getting to Pole, and still have enough in reserve with the Achilles for Mount Vinson, our summit attempt at that.

So with that in mind, we walked today until I started getting those spasms, those shooting pains, and that was at around half four; so we stopped as soon as that started, and we managed to get 10.7 nautical miles done before the pain started. So that’s good. I’m hoping that it holds out, and enables me to continue doing that kind of distance.”
— Martin Hewitt

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