Winter-Trippin'

Caboose Sunrise

During the winter everybody leaves base for two one-week winter skills training trips. It means we have the opportunity to be trained in any number of winter skills, including skidoo travel, ice climbing, ski mountaineering and crevasse rescue. On my last trip I went over to the other side of the island, visited the Chilean base, Carvajal, and did some ice climbing. I might get round to blogging about it as a back-dated post one day...

This time Geek-Boy and I were scheduled to go together, and having been to the other side of the island last time we decided to keep it local and just stay in the Caboose, which is about 4km away from base.

The first day was spent taking kit up to the Caboose and getting Geek-Boy's amateur radio antenna set up. We attempted to get a kite up so we could try kite skiing, but the weather turned quite suddenly and the rest of the afternoon was spent drinking tea and untangling the kite's ropes!

Looking Back Along Ridge To Pict

There was a lovely sunrise the following morning, and we set out with our GAs for some a line of hills at the northern end of the Fuchs Ice Piedmont. Team Geek-Boy parked at the Western end, while Team Miss Adventure set out from the Eastern end. We skinned up the hill, and not seeing any sign of the others at the far end of the ridge, had a quick climb up to the top of Pict to admire the view over the Shambles Glacier and up towards The Gullet. When we got back down we still couldn't see the others, so decided to ski back down to our skidoos, where my GA would then run me back to the top on a doo, before skinning back up himself. The ski back down was an amazing long run of fresh snow but over too quickly. In the mean-time Team Geek-Boy had appeared along the ridge and we met up for hot Ribena and chocolate before we set off along where they had come and back down to their skidoos.

The highlight of the week was our day exploring a crevasse near Trident. We set up ropes and abseiled down into the main chamber for a look around, before abseiling down two more levels until we reached bedrock. The light inside was amazing, but hard to photograph. Fortunately I had taken my mini tripod with me and used it to get some longer exposure shots, which seemed to bring out the colour.

Having abseiled in with the assistance of gravity, we then had to jumar back out, which was not so easy, but at least waiting around for each other to get back up gave us ample time to admire the icicles!

Crevassing near Trident

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