]]> http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/09/29/last-one/feed/ 3 http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/09/28/at-sea-level/ http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/09/28/at-sea-level/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:18:44 +0000 Tarka http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/?p=568 Hi everybody. I just…I don’t even know where to begin with today’s epic adventure. The long and the short of it is that we have managed to descend almost 1 1/2 thousand meters and 4.6 kilometres. It is one of the steepest glaciers that I’ve ever seen. I can well understand if nobody else has ever been down here and we are the first then I can well understand why and I would well recommend anybody else that comes here to steer well clear of it. The good news is that we are down at sea level pretty much. We’ve been going for 12 hours now and we hurt from head to toe. I mean it’s just been absolutely epic with the culmination right at the end within 60 meter abseil just get off the last cliff face. But, we did it we’re down. Unfortunately Patagonia being Patagonia and all things brilliant. The fact that we’re down at sea level hasn’t help us quite yet. I do believe that this is a very sheer faced glacier at the mouth and the boats won’t be able to come close enough to pick us up. So, we’re actually gonna have to try and find an exit point somewhere else even though there are vertical cliffs all around as you’d expect from the base of the glacier.

So, although we are down at sea level we’re a lot warmer here and the wind isn’t blowing and it’s not howling and we manage to get the tent up, well the sheltered up pretty nicely this evening. But, tomorrow is gonna bring a bit more of an adventure. We got an inkling that there might be a way out, but we wont know until tomorrow.

What else can I report? Katies knees are incredibly sore and her eyes are a little bit better. My frost bite is doing fine and we hurt generally, but we’re incredibly tired but we’re all well. So, fingers crossed we’ll have some better news tomorrow. It might be our penultimate it might not. We might be here for a few more days. We just don’t know yet. But, talk to you tomorrow.

It was a terrible night, a real survival night. It was very serious, there was a moment where we weren’t sure that we could get enough shelter up for the night. When we finally did we were huddled together in a space not that much bigger than Katie and I huddled together. We touched the tent walls pretty much inside our sleeping bags but we did sleep.

Come today the weather has been better, although better is comparative with other days its still been horrific. Very poor visibility all day right up until the very end of the day when we finally got a glimpse of the glacier that we’re heading down. Its been quiet a cold day the visibility has been between 10 and 100 meters throughout the day. The visibility has been a disaster for travelling along a glacier. I think between us Katie and I have fallen down about 4 or 5 crevasses today. One of them was quite an epic episode, quite a deep one, it opened right underneath me and I was kinda wedged quite a bit down. It really is a terrifying experience trying to walk in zero visibility through these crevasse fields. You really are on tender hooks the whole way, your prodding with your poles and its really slow progress.

We’re half way down our exit glacier at the moment we couldn’t make it all the way off today so we’ve had to build a shelter again. We had a bit more luck because the wind wasn’t so strong today so our shelters a bit more impressive but still a shelter non the less. We’re huddled up inside our sleeping bags for another night hope fully getting a little more sleep. Then fingers crossed that tomorrow we’ll be able to exit this glacier, because as I understand it no body has ever exited this glacier before so it is fingers crossed that we can get off at the bottom. I mean our maps indicate that we can but that’s not an absolute given that today our maps didn’t indicate enormous cliffs that we almost walked off!

Apart from that we’re in much better spirits despite being absolutely exhausted. Katie has a touch of snow blindness, her goggles broke today and she had to walk with out so she’s got a touch of blindness and I have a touch of frost nip on my nose. But apart from that we’re very well really we’ll be even happier once we’ve made it off the glacier. We’ll check in again tomorrow to let you know how it all goes. Bye

Just for those of you, I suddenly realized that we’ve haven’t really explained what’s the Fella Reichert and the Bastion section is. And that is basically essentially a cerac crevasse field. You’ll see why,  the whole ice shelf been bottle necked. It’s essentially a glacier that runs off there and it’s a very steep dip that goes into it. And basically there’s a huge cerac and crevasse field, so that’s the first that we’re waiting at the top of.

And then from there it’s up to the top of the mountain and then it’s a, well depending on who’s accounts you follow, it’s between a sort of 400 and 900 meter absail down a ice cliff. So, that’s basically why we’re sitting here not moving. Hopefully that will explain why and we’re not just sitting in our tent doing nothing.

A couple of things, trying to cheer Katie up today, we thought that possibly we don’t know but we’d be really grateful if anybody does know that this is the longest trip across the ice cap by a woman, I’m wondering maybe? I don’t know, if anybody could let us know about that that’d be fantastic.

We did interview with the BBC this morning again, that was good. You can find out on their website more than likely. **Will add listen again link later – PM**

Lots of little things. We got our single tents  skin, that we chose  has faired  remarkably well. It is starting to wear a little bit. They are holes appearing around the place and we patch them up as best as we can.

What am I missing. Well, we seem to spend, especially today, we spend a lot of time just missing life you know, missing home and missing the best bits of life so the simple things. Being able to just turn a tap on and get some more water out, being able to go to the fridge and get some food out, all the really simple things, you know, even going through loo here is a bit of an epic adventure. So, we have a lot of time to think about that.

Incidentally if anybody can think of some good games for us to pass the time by, that’d be fantastic. We tried the obvious ones and we’d been really grateful for any new inputs. We’re getting quite hungry now we got to almost the finger licker and the wrapper licking  stage which is quite interesting where we really do just mop the last little bits. And then let me see… I think our feet are having the chance to recover which is also a good thing I suppose, not often we get that.

And also we got a very strange phenomenon which would be really interesting if anybody knows why but the tips of all of our fingers have become really hypersensitive. They’re really quite hard but hypersensitive on both us. And we’re quite interested just to know whether it was caused by continual manual labour in the cold  or perhaps some sort of deficiency. But that’s it for today hopefully we’ll update you tomorrow. Bye.

What else just happens, the video camera decided it doesn’t wanna work again. So unfortunately we’re trying to fix that so that we can actually do some filming when the time comes. Apart from that we are just try to catch up with some sleep. Nothing hugely exciting to report. A lot of whiteness! We’re quite tired and the bags are relatively dry. So we’re enjoying a little bit of a rest. And that’s about it really. So we’ll try and update you with some better and more interesting news tomorrow.

I know some of you are wondering why we’ve navigated… why on the map looks like we’ve navigated right out into the middle of nowhere. Probably on your map, it looks like we’re heading down, but we’ve actually headed west. The reason is that there enormous mountains in the way that we’re having to navigate around them. So we’re gonna have to go right over to the west so right down to the bottom of the map and then we’re looping back up where that tiny little neck is, hopefully in a couple of days.

This morning, in zero visibility we actually wandered into an enormous crevasse field. The crevasses were some of the biggest we’ve seen on the whole trip. And I actually fell off the lip as I was leading, just a momentary lapse in vision, of absolutely nothing at all and we just fell off the edge and we decided that it was just too dangerous to carry on that way. So we put on the tents and we had a little look at the maps and then doubled back on ourselves. We’ve actually gone through the mountains today and we’ve not made quite as much distance. We’ve only made 11.5K, which was a bit disappointing. But given the conditions that we were towing uphill through the mountain, it was pretty good. It’s been really, really slow progress today. I mean, the snow has been so deep for some reason. Just in here, it seems to be a collection of fresh snow, which has been deposited from over the mountains, which is just making pulling incredibly difficult.

And then just right at the end of the day, it just instantly changed to rain and we were absolutely drenched, so we got camp up as quickly as we could. We are still damped now. We’re doing our best to dry ourselves off and then we’re gonna bury ourselves in our sleeping bags.

Other than that, really, the only other thing is we were thinking today about was kit. For those of you that like kit, we were just trying to work out if we could do the whole thing again. Realistically, what would we change? And the answer is, realistically, we don’t think we could change anything because the weight of the packs at the beginning was so immense. But if we were a little stronger, we would have changes 2 things. We would have actually bought slightly warmer synthetic sleeping bags as appose to the down and we would have bought full length Neo Airs. But we could have change its because we couldn’t fit to those into bags and we couldn’t have carried them. But if we could change, then those were the 2 things that we would have changed. All right then, we’ll take them tomorrow. Bye.

So, that was our morning which was a bit depressing really ’cause we’d already eaten our full breakfast so we couldn’t go half rations really, and we were worried we weren’t going to make the distant.

However, it all cleared up and we had a little bit of visibility this afternoon. We managed to make, we think we haven’t check it but we managed almost our daily distance, slightly short.

The other reason that we were slightly short on our daily distance today and it’s becoming a bit of a problem is that Katie has development an infection on her foot which could or couldn’t be combined with frostbite. It’s very difficult to tell in the moment but anyway, her toe is very swollen and I’ve put her on an antibiotics course courtesy of Doctor Ed, but it is making walking very difficult. Her little toe is quite, although is also the whole right hand side of her foot, is quite swollen so it’s very difficult for her to put it in to her boot in the mornings. A lot of agony, a lot of tears. And then walking all day. She’s starting to take pain killers and we’re hoping that the antibiotics course will kill that infection pretty quickly.

Apart from that, we’re both feeling the hunger a lot more now. We are starting to dream about food and we’re eating our entire meals and still being quite hungry at the end of it. So, that’s all good. Apart from that, our morale is quite high today. We’re quite cheery and I think we’re doing maps after this, but I think we’re almost at the half way stage or maybe the day after in regards to food to distant ratios. So, that’s all good. And a part from that, that’s about it really. We’re all wrapped up, it’s snowing and we’re just about to go to sleep, chat tomorrow. Bye.

We got caught out 14 hours, we had really heavy rain. I mean real heavy rain coming in. Which, eventually after we pitched the tent, turned to small streams and they started to pour over the top of the grounds sheet. So that the entire tent floor was about a centimetre deep in water. Everything that we own was drenched bar our emergency warm clothes. So it was a pretty, pretty awful evening. We spent most of the night fending off hypothermia with hot water bottles. We use a couple of days worth of fuel, our emergency day of fuel, heating hot water bottles trying to fend off hypothermia till the morning. And today we decided that we were going to just stop, reset, fix everything, and try to dry as many of our clothes as we could.

Bit of sods law really it’s been perfect day outside and really hardly a breath of wind. I mean it has been windy but not compared to what we’ve been dealing with and the sun’s being out. So it was a bit of irritation that we are still sitting in pretty much the same spot. But I think it was a necessary day for both of us. We’ve been on half rations again all days where we sit, we’re on half rations. But the morals a lot better today and we’re fingers crossed for some better weather tomorrow hopefully. So we can actually make some more distance. And that’s about it really. Thank you very much for your messages and we’ll chat tomorrow. Bye.

So all in all it was quite eventful. I thought… I might as well tell you about navigation anyway since we started talking about it. You know, most people would probably assume that you navigate purely on a GPS and ultimately of course we do navigate on a GPS, that’s how we reference all our coordinates. But it’s not really practical to walk on a GPS all day. A, because you’d have to have it switched on all day, so you’re using valuable batteries. We can’t carry enough batteries to have it switched on all day. And B its actually quite awkward unless it was taped or strapped somewhere that you could see it as it would just get covered in snow. So we use three methods to navigate. The first method is to use our shadow. So on the days whereby the sun is just peaking through, enough to create a shadow. You basically, set a bearing on your shadow and then you walk keeping the shadow at the same angle all the time. *Katie – that’s pretty rare* Yes, it’s pretty rare over here but the advantage of it is that it’s obviously a good day and it’s quite a clean, crisp way of navigating. The only thing you need to be aware of is that the sun is moving all day. So if you don’t vary the bearing as you’re going, you just gonna go round in a big arch.

The next method that we use is actually using our watches. Our watches have got a fantastic function called an azmus which is probably far better describe, if you click throu the website and find the links back to Tissot, they probably explain it much better than I do. But basically, it allows us to set a bearing on our watch. And if we drift off the bearing too much, it will bleep at us and tell us that we’re walking in the wrong direction. So thats second way of doing it but again we’re using batteries so we don’t always use that one only when we have to.

And the third way to navigate is with a little bit of a fabric tied to our ski pole because the wind blows so hard here generally speaking, it tends to blow in a constant direction. You’d set your bearings… And then you walk keeping the flag fluttering always in the same angle to you. And that’s probably our most reliable method of navigating the **bad connection**… ..check that we haven’t drifted. There you go a bit of interesting information on how we navigate. And that’s about it really, we’re very tired and depressed this evening, but we’ll talk tomorrow. Goodnight.

What else? Last night we had a bit of panic because Katie lost all feeling. She got pins and needles in her arms and legs and everything. And so we made a very quick call to our good expedition doctor, Dr Mathers. Thank you very much for actually picking up the phone in the night, that was much appreciated. And yeah, he explains that essentially, it was a panic attack which sounds pathetic I think but it can have some fairly worrying symptoms. So anyway, worked our way through that and Katie is now good and well so we have no excuse to quit and go home. We got to stick it out unfortunately. Right. Excellent, We’ll report tomorrow hopefully having made some mileage.

]]> http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/09/07/daily-routine/feed/ 0 http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/09/04/record-distance/ http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/09/04/record-distance/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:34:15 +0000 Tarka http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/?p=524 It was a cold night last night. The water froze in the tent for the first time so we had to hustle it into the sleeping bags to keep it from freezing, it’s been quite a cold day today as well.

Today was our first real day man hauling, we’ve got new aches and pains in different areas our hamstrings, bums, lower backs are all aching a little bit. But it makes a massive difference and is a lot easier than carrying the packs, so we’re all for that.

Its been a white out most of the day, about 99 percent has been zero visibility and we’ve been navigating on a bearing following the wind. Then right at the 11th hour the sun came out and it was amazing, we saw the terrain and the beautiful landscape for the first time which was quite exciting.

Bit of a record breaking day for distance today. We made 17.2 km which is absolutely amazing compared to our record 5km before today, so absolutely winning today. Fingers crossed that we can keep it up for tomorrow.

Katie’s is very excited about the fact that I’ve got Spag Bol for dinner and she has Beef and Potato Hot pot. That’s her highlight of the day. Its a a far cry from home cooking but its quite a lot to look forward to when your out here. And that’s about it really. We have to go now as we’ve got Katies worse job of the day, which is melting all the water. It takes us about half an hour to melt the snow into drinking water and Katie gets really cross because she has to handle the snow into the pot for half an hour!.

Apart from that all is well, spirits are high, we’re quite chilly. Our sleeping bags are looking a bit damp and frozen but apart from that we’re all well.

We got up early this morning,  to have a good crack at the crevasse fields and we are walking by first light.  We had an absolutely the amazing day weather wise, it’s  held out with the sun pretty much all day except probably about half an hour when it went to zero visibility again. So, we’ve trundled along. It’s got to be one of the hardest days on record and  we’ve actually made it up onto the plateau.  Wheey, which, to those of you who don’t know what that means, that means that we’ve finished battling with the crevasses.  We have probably 10 more crevasses in front of us to battle with in the morning.  But apart from that, it’s then a case of making some mileage. You’ll start to see the dots on the map not sitting on top of one another anymore hopefully finger’s crossed.

To top it all off today we’re both harbouring a few injuries, sore feet, Katie’s got a sore shoulder, and she also sliced her finger while trying to open dinner which just tops it all off. Anyway, she’s just rolled up in her sleeping bag having had enough.  Excellent!.. We’ll speak tomorrow. oh and Happy Birthday Charlie

It’s incredibly windy here. We’ve been fighting with the wind constantly although we were kind of expecting to be. The biggest problem that we’ve got is bad visibility, we’ve been navigating in almost zero visibility all day for the last couple of days and I don’t think it’s such a problem up on the plateau but whilst we’re down here navigating through the crevasses it’s incredibly difficult. Every time I keep stepping onto a crevasse and having to back off them.

We’re almost up on to the plateau. Fingers crossed. We had to stop early today just again because of the poor visibility. We got a few running repairs going on with the back packs. They done absolutely amazingly. I mean, there were only officially rated to carry 23 kilos. We got over 50 kilos in them and they have lasted. A couple of stitches and seams have started coming undone but we don’t blame them for that.

Today is the last day of what we called  river rations which they were the rations that we’d allocated to get to the glacier and didn’t count in the actual expedition food. So tomorrow morning is the first day of our actual proper expedition food. We’re quite looking forward to having a bit of a change in diet.

There are few aches and pains, Katies ankle is quite sore, we’ve got a few blisters that we’re nursing but apart from that we’re in good spirits and we’re quite cheery. Bit frustrated with the poor visibility but apart from that, we’re good.

The snow is incredibly hard work to make your way through. As soon as you take your ski’s off you sink up to your waist, it’s a real real battle. Earlier in the day we spend about 40 minuets just trying to get our skis back on. – End of Transmission

**from PM** team sound in good spirits, although frustrated by the non working satellite phone. If any one from SELEX is reading this they have model 9505A or any one that has experienced similar problems them please get in touch my details are on the Team page.

I have been passing on your messages each day so please keep them coming, life is only going to get harder and they need that ray of light each night. And just in case any one has been losing sleep, Katie-Jane was not seeing tiny characters from a Disney movie but very rare Patagonian deer called Huemel.

]]> http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/08/30/first-ice/feed/ 0 http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/08/28/day-three/ http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/2009/08/28/day-three/#comments Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:37:33 +0000 Tarka http://www.rivers-of-ice.com/?p=511 It was quite a cold night we were tucked deep into our sleeping bags, it was quite a clear sky amazingly we had no rain. We’ve taken to zipping the sleeping bags togther for extra warmth. This morning, well no body mentioned that we were going to have to cross multiple glacial rivers, which were between knee and thigh deep each one. We had to cross each one 3 times with the shuffling, and their cold enough to lose the feeling in your toes so its very unpleasant. We have also had to contend with some serious vegetation this afternoon up the mountain.

It may be unclear, as we often get carried away in the planning and organising so it may not be obvious, in order to get up on to the glacier, instead of confronting the glacier head on we are actually coming around the side so that we can drop down on to it. The vegetation here is almost a cross between jungle and desert and its incredibly dense. You can be hacking with your machete and in parts its so dense there’s no room to swing your arm to get through it. All the plants are desert plants so their all sharp, spiny and spiky and they do their best to stab you whenever you go anywhere.

The weather has been pretty good all day, sunny and enjoyable. We have been able to dry some of our gear and ourselves out.

We are past the second leg now, we’ve got one more leg to go now and given the vegetation we have made some good ground today. Our ankles are really beginning to suffer now with the weight of the pack, sometimes the rocks look sturdy, but when you step on them all the moss slips away, which means you have to catch your self which is fairly hard work.

Katie’s coping very well, she had a massive burst of strength at the end of the day today. She was a little down to start with – end of transmission.

On top of the rain, we both have blisters on the inside of the arch of our left foot ’cause we’ve been walking all day on a slope all day in wet shoes, so adjusting those tonight.  Katie fell over a couple of times and almost damaged her ankle quite badly. But we’re still in quiet high spirits and we are about to have dinner and  we will chat with you tomorrow.

The good news is that we have arrived with almost everything we set out with. I say almost because when we arrived in Santiago we had to go through customs and we had to declare all the food that we had with us. Although all the expedition food was fine and they let that through they were deeply suspicious of out Peperami and a few varieties of nuts. The fact that we had 2 bags of nuts and 4 bags of Peperami taken wasn’t really a problem, the problem was that we spent so long in customs that we nearly missed our connecting flight. Whilst I was more than happy to spend the night in Santiago, the thought of Katie’s logistical plan not going 100% according to plan was enough for her to charge across the airport leaving stunned passengers in her wake, through the queue of 200 people waiting to check in and promptly ordered the poor lady at check in to stop the flight. Cutting a long story short, we made it onto the flight and despite taking bets that our bags were never going to make it to the other end we have to give due credit to TAM air who must have got some poor guy to run out onto the runway in order to get our bags on that plane.

This part of Chile really is very beautiful; it’s a strange mix to tundra and Spectacular Mountains, but what I love the most is the fantastically eclectic mix of architecture. I can’t even begin to describe it because no two houses are the same. They have just built houses in what ever shape and size seemed like a good idea at the time and it has such character.

Some of you probably don’t know this but we spent months testing out various cookers trying to see if it was possible to use the MSR Reactor. We had two major problems with the system, one being its efficiency in the cold and the second was obtaining sufficiently good quality gas canisters. On our little shopping spree this morning, as we were replacing our Peperami and nuts, I turned down an isle and there must have been at least 50 different sizes and makes of Iso-Pro (including the illusive 500ml)!!! So for any other expeditions that might be thinking of using a gas stove down here don’t worry about getting hold of the gas. With regards to temperatures we will log the temperature every day on the ice cap and post our findings to try and definitively asses whether it would be feasible to use such a cooker. White gas on the other hand is a nightmare to obtain!!! Well that’s not strictly true, it’s not that it’s a nightmare but the quality just isn’t very good. What they sell is called ´Bencina Blanca´ and although it is white gas its not quite as pure as what I was hoping meaning that we have to clean the cooker a lot more regularly and carry a little more fuel than anticipated.

Katie isn’t feeling very well so she has just gone to have a rest before our combined 20 hours of busing over the next few days.

When we started planning for our nutritional requirements we immediately assumed that the expedition food on the market was the best that we could get and didn’t give it a second thought. There are quite a few different brands out there and so we set about finding the ones with the highest calories. Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that in order to get enough calories from these expedition meals alone the weight of our packs was going to be totally astronomical. To add to the problem some of the major manufacturers of these foods were being a little on the generous side with their calorie estimations and they don’t include the weight of the packet in their figures. So suddenly we have gone from having 800kcal in a 162g packet (as quoted by the manufacturers) to actually being ≈ 735kcal in a 206g packet (what we tested)!!!

Realising that unless we could solve this issue the expedition was going to be a non starter, we started to look at individual ingredients within the meals. You have probably noticed that I have been talking obsessively about calories however you will now probably be pointing out that it’s not just about how many calories but rather what form these calories are delivered in. After all if it didn’t matter how we got those calories we would just take bars of lard and be done with it.

We have been working tirelessly and it’s been a long slog but not only have we finally managed to fit ≈ 896kcal in a 181g packet, but we have managed to do it with an excellent blend of protein, carbohydrates and fat. As if all this wasn’t enough there is also a very real chance that our food will need to be rehydrated using cold water due to the very limited fuel rations we have.

We have used all sorts of ingredients including ground almonds and a variety of nuts and seeds, cream powder, AMF, Cheese powder etc. and it really have been a steep learning curve. Knowing what I know now I am positive that it is possible to go even further and increase the calorie density significantly. However one thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is the psychological aspect of eating. As brilliant as it sounds on the face of it, if you increase the density of calories so far that all it takes is a mouthful for your whole days rations you will loss that all important moment in the evening after you have been facing the elements all day, your exhausted and cold and you get into your tent and have that hot meal and feel yourself come back to life.

If you are seriously considering an expedition that requires absolute nutritional control then I would seriously recommend visiting a nutritionist, getting a breakdown of exactly what you need and then go out and put it together from scratch.

The problem that arises here is that in order to paddle efficiently and cover the distance we need paddles. However the lightest paddle we can find weighs in at a rather painful 800g (approximately) and I am truly loathed to carry an extra 800g right the way across the ice cap that can’t be used at all while on the ice.

In the spirit of ultra light travel the most obvious thought is to reuse another piece of equipment that we have to take on the expedition. So what could double up as a paddle?

We are heading back out next weekend to try and iron out some of the problems we have discovered. Unfortunately there aren’t that many options, the best solutions we have come up with so far are:

1. We use our shovels as efficiently as possible.
2. We take a paddle and carry an extra 800g across the icecap.
3. We make a paddle out of wood and an ultra-sil dry bag when we get off the glacier.
4. We take a wooden paddle for the first section and leave it at the base of the glacier and use either option 1 or 3 at the other end.

Now we know that the raft and equipment works we off to a slightly more impressive piece of water to test it out.

Longitude west 73 degrees, 15 minutes, 12 seconds.

This is a test transcribe to see if we can get this phone message typed in to text and then emailed over to the expedition website where it will be converted into an audio file and place onto a map at the correct location. That’s it. Fingers crossed.