Right, well, with no huge surprises with the weather here today. We have absolute zero visibility and amazingly, we’ve now… in about 5 days, we’ve actually seen absolutely nothing and no exaggeration… I mean, nothing other than each other. It’s the only break in the relief of whiteness that we’ve seen. It’s quite incredible. We could be anywhere. We could be in a completely alien planet, for all we know. Today, there was absolutely no wind, we had a total dead wind day. Which made the navigation really quite difficult.
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.
