Uncharted Territory

Travel in the modern day, even in the wild areas of Europe, has been made unbelievably easier due to the amount of information available on maps easily bought, which have been surveyed and ground-truthed over a couple of centuries by professionals whose sole job it is to improve and add to the knowledge already present. For example, the entirety of the UK is covered by 1:25 Ordinance Survey maps which have contours at every 10m and can show the presence of even tiny bridges over insignificant streams in the middle of the highlands.  I thought, while on expedition to Arctic Norway this summer, that the 1:50 maps we had there were tricky enough. These only have contours every 20m which means that there could be (and very often were) several 19.5m high hills in between the contour lines that you couldn’t guess at on the map but were very much there on the ground,  as attested to by our aching legs.

This was nothing compared to the mapping down here. I knew I was in for something different in my interview when my boss, Les, put in front of me a marine chart which looked completely normal until I noticed the “uncharted waters” sections in various parts of it. And this was the most up to date chart we have. People have been sailing around South Georgia since Cook, and therefore the charts of its waters are actually fairly good; they had to be for the whalers and sealers not to wreck themselves every time they came in. But yet still there are “uncharted waters”! This is nothing compared to the land. Other than the areas immediately around the whaling and sealing stations and, in more modern times, the areas around KEP  held by the military, very little on land had been mapped.

We use maps which look rather like some of my childish creations whilst inventing new countries with “Here be dragons” and “Giant’s land” scrawled across them in my neatest scribble. The people who produce these maps are actually real professionals working under extremely difficult conditions to create maps for use by BAS scientists. MAGIC (the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre (one of my favourite BAS group names)) use the latest techniques with the most up to date technology possible and yet still we have maps which have 50m contour lines, hiding huge hills inside their innocuous lines. I walked over Deadman’s Pass yesterday to Maiviken. Before I set off, as usual, I had a look at the map to see where I was going and the terrain I could expect. The Pass looked flat with one easy contour line up its side and I thought that it should take me about forty five minutes. The truth on the ground was brought home to me in an hour and a half of up and down hill toil along Bore ‘Valley’ (the term is used loosely) in snowshoes facing into a driving wind.

Even the slopes which do have contour lines on them are much harder than you would expect from the key on the map because “scree” in the UK and scree here are two completely different beasts. Scree in the UK, while tricky, is usually not a problem because it is generally on the slopes that most people don’t climb, unless they really know what they are doing. But here, because of the freeze-thaw effect, the scree covers every slope and if you want to get anywhere you will eventually find yourselves on your hands and knees negotiating a tricky patch. Last weekend Les and I walked up Osmic Hill. This is considered an average hill in SG and an easy day out. It took us an hour and a half to get solely to its foot and that included wading through Penguin River up to our thighs in glacial melt water. While climbing up a relatively gentle but scree covered slope I realised that an average hill here is nothing of the sort. In climbing one is told “ keep three points of contact at all times (ie two feet and a hand or two hands and a foot)” This is simple advice but when two and a half of those points of contact are coming away in your hand or from under your foot it is easier said than done!

It does send a frisson of excitement down my spine every time I look at a chart or a map here and see a blank. It gives me a real feeling of kinship with the explorers of the Golden Age when, after a certain point, every step was on new and uncharted territory. Most of the ground that I will cover here has in reality been travelled over, whether by BAS or military personnel, but every so often I will find myself somewhere new and finally when I explore “uncharted waters” in my dreams, my reality is not as far removed as it once was.