Stork and Orca

Mint Choc Chip Ice-Cream Cookie Sandwiches

The chef has been off base on his second winter training trip this week, so Geek-Boy and I volunteered for a day of canned, dried and frozen food fun. 

Our canned carrots are generally quite mushy and tasteless, so we strained them for several hours, before adding them to a caramelised orange sauce. The frozen sausages are fairly reasonable and the liberal application of butter and dijon mustard turned the Smash into mustard mash. To finish I made choc chip cookies using a recipe sent to me by a friend from home; Geek-Boy loves mint chocolate, so I sandwiched two cookies around mint choc chip ice-cream.

Skiing down Middle Stork Col

Wednesday was dingle, so I took the afternoon off, in lieu of several weekends worked recently, and one of the GAs kindly took me out on a ski mountaineering adventure.

As far as I can tell, ski mountaineering involves about 80% uphill skiing ('skinning'), 10% ice climbing, and 10% of the fun stuff - downhill skiing. One spends a lot of time dripping with sweat either from exertion or fear, and very little time flying gracefully downhill with the sun on your face and the wind beneath your wings. We took skidoos out to Middle Stork and skinned as high up the col as we could. When it became too steep to skin, we took our skis off, strapped them to our rucksacks and climbed the rest of the way up. As we sat on the col eating chocolate, we took our skins off the bottom of our skins and admired the view of Orca Mount and the untracked snow that lay between it and us. For a few short and glorious minutes we skied down the slope, picking lines which avoided the dips and bumps that the wind had formed. At the bottom we put the skins back on our skis, roped ourselves together as we would be travelling over crevassed terrain for the rest of the trip, and spent the next couple of hours making our way uphill around Orca Mount, past North Stork and back to the skidoos.

Orca Mount from Middle Stork Col