The most awesome Halloween costume on earth inspired me to take these photos. Enjoy.
Tad with Mt Erebus
Nacho Libre, Hulk Hogan, Iron Shiek, Manager, Brook Hogan, Superfly Snooka, and Macho Man.
Kress Vehicle
Attacking trash right back.
Observation Hill- yes, it was cold up there!
Even Hulk ponders the meaning of life sometimes.
Flexing at Hut Point
Frosty Boy!
The most problematic area on the entire traverse route would undoubtedly be the Shear Zone. Just 30 miles from McMurdo the greater Ross Ice Shelf tries to bend its way around Ross Island. When this happens the glacial ice rips apart, forming massive crevasses. Crossing this area is dangerous. The crevasses must be detected, assessed, and sometimes destroyed if necessary.
A Shear Zone passage can be intimidating, especially if you’ve seen pictures of how large the crevasses can be. A quick observation of the area reveals no indication that there could be a giant void underneath your feet. From the surface it looks completely flat and unthreatening. We must use Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect the crevasses.
All the crevasses are marked with 2X4 posts and some have names. There is Mongo, Strangebrew, Personal Space, Baby, Battery Crack, Baby 2, Juanita, Ten O’clock Break, Snap, Crackle, Pop… just to name a few. And in the middle of all this chaos, there’s the ‘Miracle Mile’ where for some reason there are no crevasses at all.
Today we blasted the two suspect crevasses. We believe the snow bridging them is too thin to support the weight of our tractors. So we blow them up and then fill the resulting hole with snow.
The explosions were impressive. The first crevasse was relatively small. The second however was quite large- over 100 feet deep and 20 feet wide in places.
This is a NEW crevasse and we got to name it. We gave it the name…wait for it… Justin Bieber. Yup. I’m not sure why we gave it that name, but Derrick keeps calling it Justin BEAVER and this annoys me.
These giant canyons underneath the snow have never been viewed before. That’s a rare thing this day and age to see something that no one has ever seen. We took the time to repel into the largest one to check it out.
Above: View from inside the crevasse looking up.
Below: A crevasse as seen with Ground Penetrating Radar
Miles Advanced: 50.6 Weather: 14 Degrees, Overcast Elevation: 216 ft.
We are doing well with heavy loads this early in the trip. We got to waypoint ‘Kelly’ and to our surprise we found the trail had moved a half-mile east since last year. That means this area of the Ice Shelf is moving approximately 7 feet a day! That’s mindboggling! In every direction there is nothing but flat white, but far in the distance, beyond the horizon, the gigantic Byrd Glacier plummets off the Polar Plateau and thrusts itself into the Ice Shelf creating a faster moving area of ice known as an ‘Ice Stream’. With all this movement you would expect to find a few crevasses but thankfully there are none in the vicinity of the trail.
We passed the area where Captain Scott and his companions had met their end. They died during the return journey from the Pole in 1912, just 11 miles from One Ton Depot- the resupply cache that may have saved them. In his book ‘Worst Journey in the World’ Cherry Garrard (a would-be rescuer) describes the grizzly scene as he found it.
“Scott had thrown back the flaps of his bag at the end. His left hand was stretched over Wilson , his lifelong friend… near Scott was a lamp formed from a tin and some lamp wick. It had been used to burn the little methylated spirit which remained. I think that Scott had used it to help him to write up to the end. I feel sure that he had died last – and once I had thought that he would not go so far as some of the others. We never realized how strong that man was, mentally and physically, until now.”
Scott’s last words, written in his journal, were: “For God’s sake take care of our people.”
Above: Captain Scott and his men at the South Pole. They all died on the return journey. Scott is in the center of the photograph, his face blackened by frostbite.
Beyond the Backyard 