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

We’ve had so much snow in the last 24 hours that when Tarka went out to check the tent and skis were in the right place, we were completely buried. The wall has made snow whip round the side of us. Unless you went over in a plane you would have no idea that we were here. We are completely surrounded by snow right up to the roof, so he had to dig out all the ski’s and stuff!

We have laid here all day in our bags cant do any thing, dreamt of food, mapped out our lives, normal stuff when you have nothing to do. So that’s about all we have to report today really.

Couple of extra things . We were doing some visual data gathering for Camino about 4 volcanoes that we’ve past on our route so far. Only 2 of them we could see, the others we past on one of our many white out days. But the two that we did pass have had no recent activity and we’ve taken various images as requested so I hope that’s useful.

The other thing I was going to mention was I know that our kit is ultra light and Tarka has shaved down to the last gram, but I did sneak a few things in my bag. 4 of which are little lucky charms I suppose. The first is a four leaf clover that my dear friend Sadie found a few days before we left so I felt that we should take that, I also have a tiny angel pendant that my Grandma gave me for our very first expedition on the Great Wall of China to keep me safe and it did keep me safe and I’ve taken it on each expedition since and thought it was only right it came again. I also have a tiny little wooden lady bird, from one of our youngest followers Hector who is absolutely bug mad and we’ve taken photos on previous trips of bugs and spiders for him. He was mortified that we wouldn’t see any bugs on this trip so though it was best that we should bring one with us, and how can your refuse!!

The final thing I have is a small photo of my mum and dad aptly dressed as Batman and Robin, so their fully costumed incase I need to give them a call and they need to come and get me, thier ready to go.

So there all in my camera bag, my very rarely used camera bag, Tarka hasn’t kicked up too much of a fuss and he hasn’t trown them away so that’s a bonus!

Other than that I cant really report anything more for today hopefully we’ll move 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.

The I got worst in the evening, having now spoken to a few people we are convinced that I had acute Carbon Monoxide poisoning last night. We actually think that the panic attack I had a week or so ago was a mild version of this also. But this was a full blown episode. I lost all control of my body, I went like a stiff plank, I had a seizure, full dilation of my pupils, nose bleed and then unconscious. I remember coming round to Tarka screaming my name, I was in his arms and he was screaming at me. I’ve never seen him terrified and the look on his face frightened me to death as well. So it was a horribly scary night and it took about 2 hours before I was under some form of control. Its knocked me for six really, this morning I didn’t want to leave the tent, it took 2 hours of tears and convincing you know “what should we do?”, basically it scared me to death. I’m finding it really really tough from every angle and that was really the extra nail needed to make me want to quit.

But equally I didn’t want to fail so I did get out of the tent and I have walked another day. And I am feeling much better today.

We had another blizzard today so we couldn’t see anything. We had a lot of  sastrugi.  So that’s really uneven ground and the sledges kept turning over. Tarkas sledge fell over far more than mine and at one point he was bashing the hell out of it with his ski sticks! He lost his rag, he was so angry it just kept going over and over and over.

We had to stop a little bit early because of the wind, we couldn’t stand up. But we’ve done 13km and after all of last nights fiasco we’re quiet pleased with that.

The only other thing to report at the moment is the bad infection on my foot is doing much better. I have 3 other wounds that are also infected. The problem is that tomorrow our medical bandage supply will run out and then we’re forced to use the repair kit, electrical tape and gaffa tape and obviously if we use all that up and then if something breaks we’re in trouble.

So its all going a bit Pete Tonge! But we’re going to carry on the best we can any way and I think tomorrow we’ll be half way in distance and we have 15 days of food left. Whether we make it, who knows?. That’s all for now bye!

Anyway, it was incredibly cold. So, we had another night with no sleep. So, that’s 48 hours now with not even 10 minutes between us, sleep. Yesterday, in our day off we actually cut up the sleeping bags and sewed them back together as one slightly smaller bag in the hope that we keep warmer. So we’ll see how that goes.

Right this morning, that’s where it’s all kinda started. Not everything had completely dried. The socks, the gloves, the boots and our trousers. So, that all froze over night. And if you could hear the swearing and the screaming, of me, having put on the bandage on my feet and the freezing socks, and then trying to get them into the completely frozen ski boots. You would have thought I was giving birth. It was just horrendous. And it was good 2 hours before I could feel my hands or feet. But everything did dried because we‘ve had clear skies today, all be it quite cold because we were walking into a head wind but everything is dry bar our socks. So that’s not bad.

We walked up hill all day, every step was up hill and over half of it was with our back packs on as appose to pulling our sledges. It’s the first time we’ve put on our back packs for 8 or 9 days now. They are considerably lighter but still a dam sight harder work than pulling our sledges. But we had to climb over a cole between some mountains, we are actually perched on top of the cole at the moment. We had planned to make about 20km today but with the terrain we only made 14.5km so that’s not too bad considering we were carrying rather than sledging.

Ok last bit of information, a wound that I did have a bit of an infection on my toe quite a while ago from a blister, had healed. But I’m having really bad pains and problems with it and we can’t work out whether I’ve got an infection inside or if I’ve got frost bite its looking a little like frost bite at the moment. So, I’m gonna start a course of antibiotics in case its an infection but I‘m going to look after it as if it could potentially be frost bite as well.

So, that’s the only problem of the day but we are happy and we’re looking and hoping for a good day tomorrow. Bye.

But, got up in the morning and again zero visibility. Wind, as I say wasn’t as bad as the day before but we just can’t see even a foot around you. It can make you feel quite sick and dizzy. So, we had two big climbs, again I’m waiting for this plateau to be flat! And, with one of the climbs came a steep descent. But, obviously when you can only see a foot around you we had no idea it’s gonna be quite so steep. And, I had a huge wipe out and took everyone with me all the polks, tarka! Tarks shouted at me and I did try and explain to him, you know this is quite steep and I haven’t got my heals fixed in here. I have only really done normal Alpine skiing before. I am not a telemark expert, so please you know bear with me here. Which he finally did see the point and apologised.

Eventually, 5 oclock just before we finished for the day the cloud actually cleared and the wind and the snow stopped. And, we could see where we are and it makes such a difference when can see it’s the most incredible scenery, but we see for like 0.5% and it’s ridiculous. But it really boost moral when you do see it. By 6 oclock it’s gone again winds blowing and Tarka’s building the walls. Thats pretty much it for today. Yes, bye now and speak tomorrow. Bye

The only light entertaining moment of the day, on the plateau (which isn’t flat by the way even though you would think that from the word ‘plateau‘!) We climbed a big hill in the morning and got to do some down hill skiing the other side. Although my attempts were pretty horrendous! Every time I tried to go even a couple of feet the sledge would shoot past me at a rate of knots and knock me over. So after a couple of attempts of that Tarka took over and stood in the middle and had a sledge either side and nicely controlled them down the slope whist I snow ploughed on behind!

Other than that we cant see a foot in front of us so its just heads down staring at the tip of your skis, there’s no scenery to look at and its too cold to stop for breaks. So its just generally miserably. I hate to say its miserable because we chose to be here!!

I have good news, the feet are slowly beginning to heal. Their well bandaged but today was the first time in about a week that every step didn’t bring tears to my eyes so that is good news.

Once again thank you for all your support and comments, it really does help when all those little niggling thoughts about wanting to quit and go home creep into your head, which they do. Its nice to know there people out there following us and supporting us and we really appreciate that. Speak tomorrow. Bye x

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.

When we woke up in the morning we couldn’t even see a foot outside the tent. So we were tent bound till about mid day when it started to clear a bit but still really no light but we thought we would crack on and see how far we’d get. Its pretty slow progress over all the crevasses and you cant actually see where they are. And then I fell over one. We were walking across a snow bridge crevasse on each side and my ski came off and the weight of the pack pushed me forward, and I went head first over the top, but was rescued by my leg, which got jammed down the snow hole and twisted at the knee and made a nice anchor. Painful anchor but it stopped me going all the way down. It was a daunting moment for a second!

We only managed about 3 and half hours before the light got bad again and my ankle is pretty sore, so we set up tent in another storm. Tarka has built huge snow wall around the tent hoping that it will……**end transmission**

It cleared in the afternoon and we’ve come into a huge change of scenery, we are through all the vegetation now onto the steep scree slopes of the mountains, heading up a valley along a waterfall. Right now we have just reached the snow line. We’ve climbed up a steep channel, over all the boulders and scree and just popped over the top and we can’t quiet see the glacier but we’re hoping in about 20 minuets in the morning it should peep over the horizon and we’ll see it, but it got quiet dark tonight so we have called it a day.

We’ve seen some Patagonian deer, I think their called Melan – although that may just be a Disney film about a dragon!! ***PM note. I could only find reference to a Pudu or the very rare nuemul, so lets hope they got some pictures!!*** But their Patagonian deer, stunning, and they have no sense that humans could be a danger to them and they just wondered out stared at us and all our kit, apparently their quite rare so that was quite exciting.

We’re in our tent now repairing our torn trousers from all the thorns and puncturing blisters, you know normal expedition stuff.

In general were pretty pleased with our progress, we’re on schedule and tomorrow hopefully we should be on the ice. All for now.

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.

Hang on a second, where is the wind and rain I hear you ask?! Every morning we have woken to the bluest of skies, glorious sunshine, not a breath of wind and a cool bite in the air, keeping the snow crisp. Probability would have it, that we are going to have bad weather for the next forty having used up our 4 good days!

A couple of little things to report. Firstly, Tarka’s allergy, that he suffered from in the Arctic earlier this year, has shown some symptoms again so we have had to bin several items of clothing used in the Arctic and replace them with new ones from the only Cochrane shop.

Last night we went out for a bite to eat and had a classic ‘lost in translation moment’. I ordered a simple pizza and mineral water, dull I know but I am currently loosing weight as opposed to gaining it, so thought I would try and aid recovery. Tarka, as ambitious as ever, tried to order two Empaladers (small samosar style parcel of food) but his brilliant accent actually managed to order him two bowls of lettuce and tomatoes (ensalada)…just what a growing boy needs. To top it off he had accidentally ordered a Chocolate Sunday for his drink, with whipped cream and cherry on top to boot!

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.

I believe the ‘why’ for each particular journey changes slightly, but also changes greatly from person to person. There are many expeditions happening right this minute raising money for particular charities, raising awareness of climate change and carrying out groundbreaking work in the name of science. So when your reply to the ‘why’ is none of the above, you are met with a sense of confusion followed by a look of “ well what’s the point, why are you only doing it for yourself, that’s selfish!”

We have worked with both charities and scientific bodies on previous expeditions, but to be truly honest, they are never the reason ‘why’. They are an added bonus.

George Mallory describing his motivation for reaching the summit of Everest:
“For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man.”

The best way I can describe the ‘why’, is that these are our Olympic finals, we have just happened to choose a sport a little less conventional than the 400 metres. No one questions why Olympic athletes are there, it is obvious, they want to push themselves to their limit in a bid to be the best they can possibly be in what they do.

We battle with ourselves both physically and mentally to understand our limits, to grasp what we are capable of and discover parts of ourselves we never knew existed. We dream and chase our dreams. If we fail, we learn from it and try again. If we succeed, well the elation and memory will stay with us forever. We will also have something to look back on in 50 years time, to know we made the most of our allotted days. This is our ‘WHY’!

In addition to our own personal quest in Patagonia, we will also be gathering observations along our route for a glaciologist and volcanologist. We will be passing 4 volcanic complexes on the ice cap, which have proven extremely difficult for the experts to get to and work at regularly, so the images and observations of activity (hashes, smoke steam etc) we can gather on their behalf will hopefully prove to be very useful. The largest and most active volcanic complex is Lautaro and Mimosa Volacnoes and they are expected to be guilty of the extremely fast advance of the Pio XI glacier, so we will do what we can to be of use.

The final reason for our journey is to make a documentary film. We have been passionate about travelling through remote parts of the world for sometime, but more recently this passion has developed into capturing our experiences and the landscapes through which we travel onto film. We strive to make enjoyable and exciting films that allow others to live our adventures vicariously, whilst keeping them factual. We hope to bring home footage that shows a true representation of the environment we have endured, allowing those who may  have seen little about this particular part of the world, a taster of its harsh beauty. The inner depths of the Southern Patagonian Ice Cap have yet to be even mapped in any detail, let alone over filmed!

Only a Person who Risks is Free†

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach for another is to risk involvement.
To expose your ideas, your dreams,
before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To believe is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the
greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The people who risk nothing, do nothing,
have nothing, are nothing.
They may avoid suffering and sorrow,
but they cannot learn, feel, change,
grow, love, live.
Chained by their attitudes they are slaves;
they have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
- anonymous