The thing I fear the most

In the dark recesses of my mind, I still have nightmares about the crevasses of the west coast of Greenland. The last 3 days of the crossing are hard to recall in detail without talking in the 3rd person about the experience, as if somebody had told me the story of how someone else had crossed them and I was relating the story to a friend.

It took me nearly a month before I could sleep through the night without waking in the early hours, convinced the floor had cracked and the bed was going to fall into a deep crevasse.

One evening in particular, I think it was the 3rd night before the end of the trip, Charlie and I had just left the plateau of the icecap and the ice was starting its decent towards the coast. At the cusp of its descent, the ice starts to split up into huge deep blue, bottomless crevasses, caused by ice stretching as it falls towards the sea. These cracks run across our path, and therefore we need to cross them, they are all we can see for miles (in fact it took us 3 days to get out of the disturbed ice zone.) Traversing them can sometimes be as simple as finding a stable snow bridge and skiing across as quickly as possible before the bridge collapses, or they can be so wide and precipitous that you could spend 20 minutes negotiating them, or at worst, be forced to detour for many miles before you can safely cross.

Our campsite that evening was a square of ice about the size of a tennis court, with deep and wide crevasses bordering us on all sides. While we put the tent up, I fell into 2 small 12 inch wide pressure cracks that were hidden by a thin layer of snow, this doesn't happen when you have your skis on, as your body weight is spread evenly across the length of the ski preventing you from sinking. Both falls freaked me out! As the glacier ice is moving all the time, the cracking and splitting is very noisy, its like sleeping near a military firing range, a constant din of muffled cracks, from a hundred meters deep within the ice, to super loud snaps where the ice has opened on the surface - these will wake you up (and keep you awake as you wonder if the next crack will open under your sleeping bag!)

The next morning there was a tension in the super chilled air, Charlie and I ate our severely depleted rations (another story all together!) in silence, we would have had to have shouted to hear each other above the cacophony of wind. I poked my head out of the tent and saw that the storm had not abated and had closed in again to near white out conditions, not very conducive to safe crevasse negotiations. Charlie broke the silence with his Aberdonian brogue and gave a portentous warning, on how I had to be really [deleted expletive] careful today. He (quite correctly) predicted that today would be the most dangerous of the whole trip and the weather conditions were making things even more dangerous. We were so low on food we couldn't wait for better weather so we had to march and face the crevasses in the storm. I was so nervous about what lay ahead - I wrote a letter to my family, in case I shouldn't make it through the day - when I re-read the entry in my journal, a shiver runs down my spine. Just as we were getting out of the tent, the wind got even stronger, making it difficult to break camp - loosing the tent in the wind would have spelt disaster for the trip!

Were we ever going to get some relief from the relentless weather, in the 31 days it took to cross the icecap, we had 21 days of white out or bad visibility. The day turned out to be as bad as we had expected but somehow we made it through some of the worst terrain of the whole journey unscathed, that night we camped in another blizzard.

The photo with this entry, is just after a near miss that Charlie had towards the end of the day.

Anyway after the whole diatribe above on crevasses, these are not the thing I fear the most about what lays ahead (even though we will come across them on the way to the Pole) - it is without doubt, the cold, I am most concerned about!

With only a few days until we leave, the temperature at the Pole this morning is -36 Celsius (-52 with the windchill) if you don't believe me take a look here. This is 3 times colder than a freezer and is really the thing I fear the most.

The coldest it got in Greenland was about -20 and in January, in New York I experienced -26 with windchill. Cold of this type makes simple everyday tasks, extremely difficult and sometimes dangerous to perform - the risk of frostbite is always present and with it the inevitable repercussions if it gets too bad.

The relentless cold is also debilitating, yes you can dress for it, but even with all the layers we have with us, you cannot sit still in it for more than a few minutes, so unless we are hauling our sleds (and thereby creating body warmth) we need to be in our tents and in our sleeping bags. So operating in this environment calls for immense discipline. I do not have too much experience functioning in this level of cold and so I will just have to learn quickly as I go along.

I have however, learnt that this type of apprehension is good for me, I can now, in a perverse kind of way, enjoy the feeling. It heightens my senses, that rumbling and tightness in the gut and chest are what makes me feel alive and will get me through the inevitable difficulties that lie ahead.