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Glacial History in Antarctica

Leslie,

Happy New Year!

I am really enjoying your posts and I hope you are making memories to last a lifetime. The most valuable advice given to me before my PolarTREC experience was to "take time for myself". I hope that you take time to "breath-in" and completely enjoy the experience.

My question for you and the team regards the historic role the Beardmore Glacier played in the early exploration of the continent. Do you and the other residents at the field camp ever discuss or think about walking in the footsteps of Scott and Shackelton? For all of the effort you put into traveling to the camp by helicopter, did you contemplate what it must have been like to cover the same distance by dogsled or "man-hauling" sledges? Are there historic remains of these early explorers at the Beardmore?

take care, play in the snow and make memories,

Jeff

Sun, 01/30/2011 - 13:43

Lesley Urasky

Jeff, 
I took those pieces of advice as well.  I did remember to take time for myself, especially on Christmas and New Year's days.
 
The team and I did spend a lot of time discussing those earlier expeditions and the importance of the Beardmore Glacier.  John Stone is quite enthralled with the stories and recounts of those early explorers.  We often talked about how exciting it would be to find the route to the South Pole and, as we flew over the glacier, looked at and discussed the difficulties of man-hauling sledges across it.  Some of the crevasses were enormous looking from the helicopter; I can't imaging how discouraging it must have been to come upon some of those while man-hauling and know you'd spend so much time and energy trying to get around it.
 
The chance to hike to the summit of Mt. Hope was one of the most amazing experiences of my lifetime.  To stand in the exact location that Shackleton and him men stood gave me chills.  I spent most of my time on the summit trying to imaging the excitement of discovering The Gateway and the Beardmore Glacier and feeling that it would help achieve the goal of reaching the South Pole.  John Stone had a black and white copy of the image taken by Shackleton's group looking up the Beardmore Glacier from the summit of Mt. Hope.  John spent quite a bit of time searching for the exact location the photo was taken from, and once he found it, he set up his tripod and took a modern day photo of the same scene.
 
Also, while camped on Mt. Hope, we hiked down the confluence of the Beardmore Glacier and the Ross Ice Shelf.  While on the hike, we joked about how it would be neat if we could find Socks (one of the ponies Shackleton took that wandered away from camp and fell down a crevasse).  We wondered if we'd be as famous as those who found the whiskey Shackleton brought down and left underneath his hut.
 
As far as I know, there are no remains of either Shackleton's or Scott's expeditions on the Beardmore.  Some of the paleontologists who were at CTAM as the same time we were were actually doing fieldwork near where Scott found fossils on his return from the South Pole.