A Slightly More Eventful Week

After our uneventful last week this week turned out to be slightly more full. As I mentioned,  it was my birthday on the 13^th.  It was a great day. I worked most of the day, knocking off early to do gymnastic ring exercises with Hazel, Kalinka (a government scientist who was here observing the effect of rat baiting on the island’s avian population) and one of the rat team air mechs, Mark. After that I returned to Everson to find the kitchen a hive of activity. It turned out that everyone had been working very hard to make my dinner. It was a very special occasion. We had roast beef and all the trimmings then they produced a very large and delicious carrot cake. It was a triumph, especially since we only have frozen and tinned carrots on base at the moment. It was a really nice evening and I very much appreciated all the effort that everyone put in. It was apparently Joe (sparky)’s first ever attempt at decorating a cake and it went spectacularly well.

The rest of the week continued in much the same way as normal. The real excitement happened at 0500 on Thursday. The base was roused by the fire alarm being set off. There was a muster and all were informed that the base had been issued a tsunami warning. A 6.6 magnitude earthquake had occurred to the south east of the South Sandwich Islands and since that is not far away at all there was a warning issued and the base evacuated. 

There is a lot of tectonic activity in the area around here. There is also a thought that South Georgia may be its own tectonic plate which would be amazingly cool. Because of the possibility of a tsunami we have a tsunami shelter on the top of the hill by Gull Lake. There is stashed a cache of food, medical equipment, tents, sleeping bags etc to last the summer complement of the base (up to 40 people can be on the island at one time in the summer months) for enough time for a ship to come and relieve us if the base is wiped out. We take the threat seriously but there is very little chance of anything actually happening. However it did mean that the base members (including those of the rat team who were here) spent a couple of hours before sunrise up a hill above Hope Point. The idea is that we get to high ground with all the kit that we would need for a day walk and then if the base is wiped out we would make our way round to the tsunami shelter once the waters had receded. Before anyone starts thinking that is a real danger you have to remember that there are whaling stations dotted all around the island, at sea level, which have survived intact for 100 years or more.

As if to make up for the disruption she had caused, Mother Nature has been very kind for the rest of the week. On Saturday it was an incredibly beautiful day. Rod, Hazel and I walked across Penguin River and the Hestesletten to climb Osmic Hill.

Hestesletten

Crossing Hestesletten

It is not the most pleasant hill to walk up, the beginning was a mess of tussocky uneven steps when then led onto scree covered in just a thin enough layer of snow to make it very slippy. Once we had got over that, all we had to deal with were some very nice gentle slopes covered in snow so lit up by the sun that it looked like we were walking on diamonds. While Osmic is not a high hill, once we made the top (after several false peaks) we could see all the way down Morraine Fjord and all the way across to the base. It felt as if we were on top of the world. Crunching our way back down the slopes we had the sun on our backs and it felt warm. However as soon as we had waded Penguin River again (with slightly wet feet on all fronts) we were out of the sun and soon found that the salt water on our trousers had frozen. It was quite spectacular. 

 

Morraine Fjord

Hamburg Lake

 That evening Erny made curry for his Saturday cook and the base decided that it was time for a Fancy Dress night. We had everyone turn up, from Mother Teresa to Gandhi,  with everything in between. It was very colourful. 

On Sunday the weather was not quite as beautiful  but Jo (GO), Hazel and I still decided to walk over to Maiviken and after a cup of tea at the hut there we headed down to the beach to search for a cave other than the sealers cave. It was incredibly slippy since it was cold enough for the spray to have frozen on the rocks, making our traverse across them treacherous. 

We did find a tunnel though which was very impressive. It is amazing what a little change in light does to somewhere you know quite well. We all know the route to Maiviken very well but the snow which is now on the ground had transformed it into a completely different place. As we crested Deadman’s Pass there was an apocalyptic cloud hanging over West Cumberland Bay, making the whole world grey. The sun came through to light up the diamonds in the snow again and we also saw a corona - a ring around the sun that is only seen at high latitudes. It is created by ice crystals in the atmosphere which refract the light to create a halo. It really was beautiful. 

Cumberland Bay

 

The Apocalypse

The enjoyment of the evening was diminished slightly by having a power down that was so severe that they couldn’t start the hydro up from our end which meant that the generators had to go on. We lost the server and everyone had to spend a while wandering around in the dark trying to make things work again. However it was only for a short time and I spent a very enjoyable evening eating far too much pasta and watching Dirty Dancing. I always love films that leave you smiling. 

So I will leave you now dreaming of coronas and diamonds dancing in the snow.   

Corona

An Uneventful Week

I am going to apologise now for a short and rather boring blog post. This week has been remarkably uneventful. 

On Monday we took Joe (Sparky) and Daniel (Higher Predator Scientist) to Sorling for their St Andrews Holiday. Poor chaps had some awful weather and were hut bound for an afternoon but Daniel was in heaven living in the middle of the largest colony of King Penguins in the world. I think he took more photos in his 4 days there than in the rest of the 6 months. 

I spent my week inside engine bays or underneath RIBs doing 6 monthly services on the engines or, when the weather was just too poor, scraping the remains of the old keelguard off the bottom of Alert. The only excitement (well I am not entirely sure that is the right word) was when I was in Prion’s engine bay and slipped. To stop myself from falling in the bilges I stood up rapidly, unfortunately very hard into the engine bay doors support. I managed to gash my head and give myself a nice dose of concussion. At least it gave Hazel something medical to do when she cleaned me up and glued the cut closed. It was a stupid mistake and one that I have learnt my lesson from. I will NEVER be doing that again. 

The base as a whole had a lovely dinner at Carse House (Jo Cox’s house) on Wednesday. She taught us how to clean squid (they go inside out very easily and then the right way even easier, it is quite cool). Because we had some spare we then had Calimari for lunch which was a real treat. The dinner consisted of marinated squid stuffed with feta and paprika, lasagne made with mince that Hazel and I had to make from a huge chunk of meat (we have run out of mince) and then for dessert we had chocolate cake made by Sue. It was a real treat, especially since it came unexpectedly midweek. We talked about a whole range of things, from splicing two sorts of daffodils together to make a new type, to the political situation in Argentina and that effect on the Falkland Islands etc etc. It was really very nice. 

Unfortunately when we returned on Friday to pick up Joe and Daniel the conditions deteriorated fairly rapidly while we were out there so the trip home was slightly white knuckled to say the least. We all got home for tea and medals which was the main thing and boy was there a lot of tea drunk. 

RIB in the wake

Speedy Gonzales!

 The weather over the weekend was filthy so the only walking we did was rather close to home. Hazel and I took a quick walk over to Maiviken and then had a well earned cup of tea in the hut, steaming gently. We then almost couldn’t bear to go back out into the pouring rain but Hazel set a good pace and the return over Deadman’s Pass, via Cardiac Hill, was quicker than I thought it was going to be. On Sunday we had a sunnier and more leisurely walk to Penguin River where I spent a happy ¼ of an hour playing pebble tennis: you through a stone straight up (not on your head) into the air. Then as it comes down you throw a smaller stone at it and try to hit it. It sounds deadly dull but it has occupied me for hours and I was once not bad at it, I have obviously lost the knack now.

The only good thing about the changeable weather was that on Saturday evening we had the most incredible rainbow. I am including a picture but it can’t even begin to capture the beauty and grandeur of the drizzle and the sun on the mountains, all crowned by this glorious shock of light and colour The weather unfortunately looks rather like it is going to stay dismal for the rest of the week. Other than keeping an eye out for more fantastic rainbows I think it might be time to find some inside jobs!!

Rainbow

Today (13^th) is my birthday so I will sign off this short post by saying “Happy Birthday Me”. Have a good week.

Cols and a cave

I thought that I had done with indenting last week but it seems that it is not my destiny to get away with it so easily. I thought it was a little harsh for poor old Hazel to have to do her medical indent and the food indent all by herself so I volunteered to help her out with both of them. I am NOT looking forward to the food indent but the medical indent was actually OK. I was able to ask a lot of questions as to what the drugs and bits of kit did and Hazel, being the very good teacher that she is, explained their use to me very patiently. We did have to have quite a lot of loud music to push us through though. Also I got a lesson in unpronounceable drugs which will never be useful but it gave me something to do while she was finding the use by dates. I can also now say Sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff) which I have never been able to do before.

Yesterday was a perfect day. Every walk that we have done so far I have thought that we couldn’t top but yesterday I think was my favourite of all. Rod, Hazel Jo Cox (GO), Erny and I all set out into the bright, crisp, cold, almost painfully beautiful day to climb Glacier Col.

Breakfast view

Glacier Col

 It was a little windy but we arrived to just below the Col in good time. Once there we were meandering our way up when we spotted an ice cave. Or more to the point, an ice arch. It must be a relic of the glacier and is covered on the top by bits of moraine. However you can walk all the way through and when we did so we could see right through the ice. At eye level it was full of little bubbles of gas and at the bottom it was completely clear and you could see every single pebble trapped in it right back through to where the light no longer reached. It was absolutely incredible and made me feel so utterly tiny to think that I was looking at pebbles that had been trapped for thousands of years. It really was stunning.

Ice Cave 1

Ice Cave 2

Thinking that we couldn’t really top that we continued up to the Col and found a land of ice and snow. It is a bowl of wind sculpted snow and ice with a ridge at its back. Erny, who had lugged his skis all the way up just for this, promptly got into his ski boots and started skiing while we went up the ridge to have a look down the other side.                                                                                                                   

Crazy Skier

                      It was incredibly icy and slippery. It was so slippery that if you were on a bad bit when the wind gusted you had to make sure that you didn’t slide too far. We decided not to go too far because it wouldn’t be safe without crampons and an ice axe but we did manage to look down on the Lyell Glacier which had a very forbidding cloud hanging over it. I felt like I was on top of the world, it was glorious.

 

Looming over the Lyell

Today (Sunday) we decided that we would have a short walk. Unfortunately it turned into a bit of an epic one. We went up to Deadman’s Pass and then up to No Name Col. To get up the Col we had to put on our crampons and get out our ice axes (we had learned from Saturday) and make our way gingerly up what we have renamed Fear Gully.

 

Fear Gully

 It was Jo’s second ever time on crampons and I am not entirely sure how much she enjoyed it. I had been in crampons for a couple of weeks over the summer last year and was surprised how quickly I remembered how to walk in them. We didn’t need them for long though and once we were up in the Col we hurriedly sat down and had lunch looking over West Cumberland Bay. We decided that we didn’t have time to do Stenhouse Peak (luckily because I didn’t really like the look of it) and since going back down the way we had come up was not an option we traversed the valley and made our way back through Boulder Pass, thereby completing our weekend’s tour of cols.

The snow, except where it had been blown into sheet ice, was perfect, a real joy to walk on and I am looking forward to more of this type of walking. I know that everyone wants a big dump of snow but I am very happy like this. The snow will come though, at some point, it will come.