April 2013

by Brian Newham All eight remaining fuel scoots have been brought up to last night’s camp in pairs by double-head. We then started to move both cabooses further south but very quickly encountered difficult terrain with honeycombed ice. Progress has been very slow and with fading light we called an early stop for the day whilst we formed a strategy for tomorrow. Tomorrow we will recce the rout…

Tales from the Ops Team – by Tris Kaye Blue ice: mile-long sheets of exposed, frictionless, traction-less icy hell. I hate it. Every time I hear over the sat-phone that the team is approaching another patch of the stuff, my heart sinks and I hate it a little more. Besides crevasse fields, blue ice is probably the worst sort of terrain to stifle progress. In the persistent winds, cold enough to…

The Ice Team have had more than their fair share of blue ice on this expedition, and they are getting more and more used to coping with it – which is not the same as they like it! Here is a video Ian Prickett made some time ago which gives a good reminder of what blue ice is and how it hampers progress so severely. Watch out for those tracks spinning! &nbs…

Spencer at Work – by Brian Newham I have had to diagnose and repair a variety of different faults and failures on a variety of Cat machines. This would be expected of anyone with nearly ten years history with Finning, Caterpillar’s largest equipment retailer. Even though I have had a broad range of experience, a powertrain system overheat was completely new to me. Being in Antarctica, t…

Walking – by Ian Prickett…

For those of you who don’t know already, you can see all the latest images of The Coldest Journey – in fact all the images we have ever posted – on our Flickr feed. Just follow the GALLERY link on the home page or, to make life really easy, click…

Question Three: Why don’t the tools break in the cold temperatures? Do all the joints expand and contract at different rates as the temperatures fluctuate? (by Avril Hall-Evitts)   This is a major problem that we face here.  99% of the time if we have a problem it will be due to something outside failing or about to fail.  The cold makes even the simplest of things almost impossible to…

Home again – the Cats return after a long day on the ice – by Brian Newham…

Load relaying has continued although once we reached the blue ice area we lost traction and had to break the loads down further to six loads and also double-head on some sections (i.e. two Cats pulling each load). It has slowed progress considerably. Units 1 & 2 have been moved 13km further south and we are hoping that all the remaining fuel scoots will reach the same position by the time w…

Question Two: Once you get to the South Pole how much interaction will you have with the resident overwinterers at the station, and can they offer support? (by Will Dawson) It will be entirely down to the overwinterers at the South Pole station if they wish to invite us in.  During the summer months, the US base has a firm ‘no interaction’ policy with expedition teams due to the shear amount of…