Updates from our Antarctica Off the Beaten Track
Antarctica off the Beaten Track - Nov.8, 2011-Nov.20.2011
This trip is available onboard November 8 - 20, 2012 - call for details
Exploring we will go...
Preparing for departure from Ushuaia was both exciting, and exhilerating. Here we are at the southern tip of South America, Ushuaia, ready to travel across the Drake Passage due south for the Antarctic Peninsula. Looking from the ship's railing with glittering sun at our back we embraced this new adventure as we sailed through the Beagle Channel.
Excerpts taken from an overview by Benjamin Shook - Creative Travel Writer and Journalist onboard Akademik Ioffe with One Ocean Expeditions
Images contributed by Gabe Rogel, Daisy Gilardini, and Rob Stimpson
10 NOVEMBER 2011 - 2200 hrs
The ship has been well underway all day. It was beautiful to wake up this morning at about five am to the whole massive piece of steel swaying and pitching through the westerly swell. We are now way into the Drake Passage. I have never been in a sea like this: the water is intensely blue, with an almost glacial-silt hue, a two-four meter swell coming at the boat from what seems like directly west, full abeam. I am happy that I have the patch for sea sickness, though I'm not sure that I would have the propensity to be sea sick... it feels like a nice insurance anyway. I have heard of several other passengers getting unquiet tummies, and it makes sense, walking down the hallways, seeing people take the plumb line through gravity while the floor and ceiling of ship go to 30 degrees off level. Sometimes shouldering the wall or quickly grabbing a hand rail.
Dinner tonight was the best so far: Sea Bream. It was one of the most sumptuous fish tasting experiences I've had... prepared in a yellow curry sauce. The meat is pretty white in color and firm... very flavorful.
We had a meeting with the folks interested in the back country ski experience; there are six of us, including the two guides. We met down in the presentation room with Sean and Paul (the two guides) and went through glacier travel techniques, the knots and methods for moving in rope teams, crevasse rescue, etc. It's an awesome feeling to be in the belly of a ship, training for the mountains, knowing that you are destined for Antarctica.
11 NOVEMBER, 2011 2330 hrs
We spent a little more than two days in the Drake Passage. According to some seasoned staff members, crew, and passengers that have done this trip before, we had a very easy crossing. I relished the feeling of releasing the land behind us to the north and wandering out into the open Southern Ocean: the great pitching rocking of a ship like this is, in many ways, comforting, perhaps tied to travel in the womb, or perhaps the first year of life when one is often transported by a parent, or a vehicle. For more than 24 hours the ship took a 2-3 meter wave full abeam, in a very periodic motion, rolling back and forthto perhaps eighteen degrees. (As I write this this evening, the vessel is entering another pressure system--the barometer has been dropping steadily for the whole day--it's snowing hard outside and the ship is going into another system of waves, this time taking them more straight ahead.)
I busied myself in the cabin getting the ski gear ready, dressing appropriately and double checking boots, bindings, harness, glacier travel gear, etc. Then I cruised around the ship, watching, observing the preparations of other folks. There was definitely a palpable air of excitement, for many this was the first time to set foot in this southerly place. All the staff has radios and they crackled all over, some guys already outin the water, others in gear rooms, still others up on higher decks communicating with the Russian crew about the logistics of the afternoon. I loved watching the crane operator lift the stalwart looking zodiacs off the third deck aft, with the operator, and lowering him into the water, radio quacking and sea kayaks strung over the rails of the boat.
The shore was pebbly and nice, easy to land the zodiac on. We unloaded all of the gear a few hundred yards from where the majority of the passengers landed, near the island's main penguin rookery. It felt funny and new to strap skins and skis on at the beach and aim up the mountain with the lapping Southern Ocean right there. I turned around, looked out over ice-burgs, penguins porpoising in the water near by and then looked up at a nicely glaciated peak rising up aboveus. It felt great to skin uphill for a while, sweat, listen to my own breath and anticipate the first ski turns in Antarctica!
Our crew of five made it up to the peak, probably about 1,100 vertical feet, relatively quickly. Because it was the first day for everyone, we took a lower angle and a more conservative run down... but we could see that the possibility for some great big mountain terrain was abundant. Overall ski was about two hours. Back to the ship and dinner was underway.
We ate early because the Ioffe was going to do a cruising tour of Deception Island. Lamb for dinner. Jeeze. I feel a little guilty about this... for the quality of the food is not in proportion to my energy expenditure for the day... but that's coming. Besides, now is not time to entertain feelings of guilt.
12 NOVEMBER, 2011 - 2200 hrs
Boris (Expedition Leader) came on the PA system (whose sound comes kind of romantically through old steel bell-style speakers all over the ship) early this morning to announce that we'd be leaving for Mikkelsen Harbor, on Trinity Island, earlier than usual, therefore breakfast was early as well. (Breakfast was yummy.) Because the weather was so bad (pea soup fog and snowing), the morning excursion was bound to be a penguin visit, rather than any skiing or kayaking. Nearly everyone went ashore... we cycled almost completely around the island and were dropped off on the south side beach, the whole facing slope full of penguins, calling to us and each other. This rookery is about 2,000 birds strong and at this time, early-mid spring, they are in optimal health and in the beginning of their breeding ritual. The weather came in fast and within an hour, thirty knot winds were blowing sideways snow at us a
s well as glacial fall ice from the whole harbor... the area where we had left the zodiacs completely filled in with ice and became a game of zodiac-ice tetris. It was humbling to feel how quickly the weather can change around here and what expert preparedness looks like. The guides in neoprene waiters were able to wade out to the boats and sort them out and then navigate aroun
d to the other side of the island, along with all the gear. It turned into a pretty cold, Antarctic situation, but everyone was prepared to the nines and stuck it out for about three hours, Steve and Paula counting penguin nests (Oceanities), many people doing intensive penguin photography and others walking comprehensively all over the island terrain, visiting all of the penguins.
There were three species of penguins visible in one location there, mostly we saw Gentoo penguins, but there was also one Adelie and one Chinstrap fellow who, according to Simon Boyes (the ornithologist on the voyage), probably got stuck in a feeding pattern with the Gentoo and then went home with them, potentially only several miles from a Chinstrap colony. It was interesting to see the Gentoo guys all going through their mating ceremonies and the smaller (very cute) Chinstrap penguin waddling around a bit forlornly, looking for his mate.
We came back to the ship just as lunch was ready. Perfect timing, after being out in the cold for three hours. I was starving, along with everyone else I think. Burgers. After lunch I sat down with Simon, to ask him some questions about his experience as an ornithologist, and about his experience in the Antarctic and with One Ocean... here's what he said:
I wondered if Simon could share a particularly poignant bird story. (I noticed about forty five minutes into our talk that he had really gotten quite relaxed on the bench under the portal windows in his cabin and was stretching his leg up the closet cabinet next to the desk in a very youthful adroit way.) He answered that his work is about illuminating the behaviors of birds to clients (such as the One Ocean guests), and getting people excited about bird wildlife, such that those people become active in conservation groups or activist groups.
As for a poignant bird story... he said that the way adult King Penguins (who are monogamous) foster and feed their young is touching, in that they make sure that their penguin chick has enough excess fat reserves before it fledges, "so that the chick can use that fat while learning the art of being a penguin," learning how to fish and live as it first enters the sea. So as they feed it and see it off, the King Penguin parents have fed their offspring so much that, at the time of fledging, it is twice the volume of their own individual bodies.
13 NOVEMBER, 2011- LATE
We woke up at five this morning in Orne Harbor to about four inches of snow covering the ship, still snowing lightly with a heavy Antarctic marine layer making it difficult to see. I went out on the stern deck and shoveled snow off the zodiacs we would use to deliver gear and skiers to shore. It felt good to warm up my body with that exercise I normally associate with Christmas time in eastern Washington. After preparing the gear I went inside and had coffee, eggs and bacon and looked out the windows with Sean and Paul at Spigot Peak, which was eclipsing the terrain we hoped to access there. Spigot Peak itself is a foreboding 2,000+ foot peak with no apparent way up but waterfall ice, verglass, thin granite dihedrals, and broken ice falls. I estimated it as an A6 and WI15 in difficulty. Many of these routes that we can scope from the deck of the ship are absolutely staggering in beauty, ferocious in difficulty, taunting in proximity, and standoffish in actual feasibility, like an exquisite French woman for me, a small American man, sitting in a street café in St. Germain.
We navigated around north side of Spigot Peak in the zodiac and found a suitable beach landing. Once again we skinned the skis with penguins coming up to us curiously with their flippers opened up to us in a welcoming gesture that seems to say, "Come on over. Want a hug?" The wind was blowing at about 30-35 knots and it continued to snow. All communication was done in a calm yell. We went up the glacier a couple of hundred feet and then did a transceiver test, in which one of the guides hides his unit as though he's been in an avalanche and we, one at a time (re-hiding the transceiver each time), find the down unit. We all found the "buried" individuals.
The visibility was so poor that we could not make any significant plans to ascend a peak or anything very far from our immediate vicinity. So we continued up the glacier to a natural ridge area, and split into two groups. We continued up the ridge to a slightly higher angle spot and then could not proceed any further. Gabe and I walked around this natural contour in the ridge that opened up to the other direction (east) where the ship was parked in the channel and the wind was howling so hard it was impossible to breathe and scary to sit there without a good grip on the granite wall behind us, for fear of being blown away. The amazing thing about this natural saddle, bridging the two sides of the mountain, is that there were about 20 chinstraps making nests there, in what seemed to me extremely precarious little nooks in the ridge. This place is probably about 700 feet in elevation; that would mark our highest point for the day, still a good ski down, but not from anywhere higher than the highest penguins.
We came back to a fantastic lunch on board the Ioffe. I had a pork sandwich and a super good salad of shaved beats, carrots, and a tapenade with bacon and onions. During lunch the ship began to move, and ended up sailing about 20 nautical miles to the north again, to Wilhelmena Bay.
The weather did not begin to clear until about four or five pm... and as soon as there was a clearing, all the zodiacs dropped and almost every last person on the ship got out onto the now glassy water and went for an early evening cruise in between large ice burgs and up to glacial calving from the land's immense Leonardo Glacier. We cruised out with Boris, the expedition leader for this trip, and cased a beautiful ice burg with a natural bridge in the middle of it. Gabe and I had talked earlier with Mark Scriver, who is a master kayak guide and had mentioned that he'd brought along an inflatable stand up paddle board. So we were looking at this ice burg thinking how fun it would be to paddle the big board near to this bridge in the middle of the building sized piece of ice floating there in Wilhelmena Bay. Aaron crackled over the radio as we were discussing this with Boris, asking if anyone would care for a hot chocolate with Baileys? Boris got some coordinates on his whereabouts and we motored over there. He was sitting with Rose, one of the ship's bar tenders near a large expanse of brash ice, using the ice to keep his zodiac in position. He poured all of us spiked hot chocolates and we sat there and looked south, towards a chain of mountains near Spigot Peak and told him about the difficulty we'd had trying to ski there... now very far away as the Irish cream hot chocolate drink seemed to sooth not only our modest skiing frustrations, but every other problem on earth.
14 NOVEMBER, 2011 - 2400 hrs
Even though we'd been able to work some of the cobwebs out with the dip last night--and were no longer totally ravenous for a longer physical excursion, it was really spectacular to wake up this morning in the Gerlache straight, just on the tip of the Errera Channel, under clear skies and rugged fluting towering spilling glaciers in angular growth right out of the sea. There are literally tens of thousands of unclimbed, un-skied peaks all over this place. In all directions. Titans of ice, snow fields forcing down granite thousands of feet below, convexing over lower angles with crevasse fissures everywhere, bergschrunds where the high angles change to larger glacial blankets, then blue ice and fins of granite and snow, just barely able to remain snow on high angle, leading up to cornices, some hundreds of feet thick... and in a few rare areas, there is a couloir or ramp where you might be able to ski without dying. And this is in one angle of view. Turn on the bow of the ship and this is what you see in every other of the 364 degrees.
The guides had been up at 5 a.m. to scope out possible landing areas and potential ski lines for us. They kept in mind that there were varying skills in the group and found a good place that had steep options and more reasonable routes down winding through filled crevasses. After a beautiful breakfast of home made granola, yogurt, eggs, bacon and a croissant, we left in the zodiac, loaded with skis, backup rescue gear and the six of us along with the driver. The landing was about four miles away, on Rongé island. Chad--a kayak guide--who delivered us over to the start site, had to navigate a mile or so swath of brash, which we pushed aside from the bow of the zodiac, the 60 horse outboard throatily eating through the smaller bits of ice. Once out on open water again, he let it out, the cool air coming off the sea chilling my face and neck.
Our landing was in another penguin rookery... about 1,000 of the little synanthropic creatures waddling around, making mating calls, looking at us curiously and cautiously examining the other creatures laying on the icy shore: a couple of very large Crabeater seals, with really silver skins, laid out and apparently asleep, with what seemed to be absolutely not one care in the world.
The six of us skinned up the low angle glacier rising out of the Errera Channel... going up towards a natural saddled fork between several different peaks that we could examine from up above. Every time we stopped to look around, this window of weather seemed to have cleared even more, revealing terrain that requires a library to explain, vertical detail and texture of rock, ice, and snow that takes millenia to memorize, just for one small frame of view... and this place seems to open up infinitely within your eyes, an unbounded insane mountain environment at the southernmost extreme of the planet: over-stimulating and treacherous... an endless dental pattern of calm icy deaths, a kaleidoscope of repeating blue crevasses to hold you prisoner forever in time just as you are now, frozen forever, stealing only your soul, flowing up and down equally; up: the wicked Antarctic jet stream and thin ozone, down: the super cooled salty sea with World Trade Centers of ice floating along in a wind driven current, slowly crashing into each other, in a sea reflecting themselves, the mountains, and rock, an hourglass of mirrors, dizzying to look at, lethal to stop for too long to comprehend. So we kept walking.
15 NOVEMBER, 2011 - LATE
We had a four-thirty am wakeup again this morning and arose to another beautiful clear morning, just a scrim of cloud cover way up in the sky.
The ship had an agenda for the day, both with kayakers and photographers--and we were in a more secluded ice-heavy area--so Aaron was anxious to get us out to the drop area. It was a gorgeous drive through the ice and ended up taking much longer than we had expected to find any area to land the Hurricane. There was a good layer of grease ice on the sea and the boat sent little chards of fresh broken ice skittering over the grease layer, creating a bouncing static effect.
I think everyone was a little exhausted from the long day yesterday, so we were slow moving up the glacier, but found a nice pace after a while and reached about 1,000 feet above sea level by around nine am.
The pitch changed and we started skinning upwards, crossing over snow bridges and passing crevasses that were serious enough to require our group to rope up. It's a pretty cool feeling, traveling with a team on skis through labyrinths of eerily blue crevasses connected by rope, knowing your safe in this beautiful and inhuman zone, connected by a life line. The high passing weather continued to move in from the south... I imagined it ripping over the South Pole at high velocity and then continuing on 800 miles northwest, slowing down as it hit the ocean and came upon us, at the Peninsula. The weather got soupy enough that we decided to call a large tooth of ice--about ¾ the way up this mountain--our high spot. It was a mellow climb up and we were all happy enough with the previous days of skiing that this was a perfect place to turn around. We sat there and had a picnic of pastries the chefs had prepared for us and Sean demonstrated his eating prowess by consuming three
of the bear claw items at once. The ski down was lovely, floating back over the pillowy ice bridges and carving turns through soft wind blown snow.
Sean communicated with Aaron to come get us a little earlier than we had thought... and since the ship had moved through the dense ice pack back around to our side of the bay, we were back on board by about 12:30 pm. We got back on board with perfect timing: an amazing spread of lunch items awaited us on the stern deck, everyone out there drinking warm mulled wine and enjoying the calm weather outside. The chefs had prepared an amazing barbecue of Argentine steaks, sausages, chicken, wild caught south Pacific tuna, incredible chimichura sauce, salads, and grilled vegetables. Since breakfast had been small, I ate heartily. The jagged mountains and building sized ice burgs floating by made for another totally surreal afternoon, sitting outside at white table cloths, five star food, music, and the scenery of Antarctica.
I organized gear, wrote some in my journal, and then went out for a peaceful afternoon zodiac tour of ice burgs with Chad. He had a beautiful impromptu lecture about ice. I hadn't properly noticed all of the details in the various species of ice burgs one finds in these protected areas of the peninsula. He talked about how normal ice burgs are only showing about one eighth their mass above the water line... some of these, the size of large commercial buildings (of course out in the open water there are some as big as countries), built immense images in my mind of the underwater ballast going on with the floating giants. We also started to notice ice burgs that had become fast, grounded on the sea bottom and now showing an old waterline, an easy indication of where it used to be floating, now raised up out of the water, like a sunburn where clothing had been pulled too high, not protecting. Some were very old, carrying loads of sediment, dirt and gravel... we found one that Chad estimated was 300 years old, with tons of markings of having been fast many times, and several different times of land contact where sediment was stored in different ways. (He was pretty excited about that on.) The sculptural quality of the ice is much more stirring than cloud shapes... I saw the figures of seals, penguins, a storm trooper, Jerry Garcia, a skier, and a Bombardier snow machine in the ice we passed. Chad said, "all ice burgs are a portrait of where they've been. Look at the texture of the surface where it broke off; somewhere that same texture is mirrored, the place this one has traveled from, maybe three hundred miles away, this thing has been out to sea, beaten by weather, knocked around by bigger pieces of ice, used by penguins and seals for safe haven from orca whales or napped upon, slowly diminished... finally ending up here."
I realized that Antarctica is an ice museum, a character with a perfectly preserved past--though constantly in transition--it keeps track of itself by freezing everything, storing it in a billion pieces of ice. Being here is like touring through 1,000 l'Oeuvres... looking at all the artifacts Napoleon sacked from all parts of Europe and Africa, except that the brutality of this museum is the museum itself... it is inhospitable to any curator, and much more relentless than Napoleon.
16 NOVEMBER, LATE
It was overcast when we woke up this morning, but standing outside on the stern deck with my cup of coffee I could see that the only peak visible beneath a thick gauze of cloud cover had some serious and beautiful couloirs on it. I could not see the access to get there, nor was I sure than anyone would be up to ski one of those lines...
We were at Damoy Pt. on Winkie Island... the landing was direct and no problem. As we readied to head up onto the glacier, Gabe and I kept gesturing up to the area I'd seen from the stern, telling Sean it looked like it really needed skiing--but our group was too large at that point. We skinned around the back side of that peak, up onto a beautiful saddle shaped glacier that leads around to Mt. Luigi and the seven sisters (I guess Luigi's), a kind of alligator jaw of smaller peaks off to the south. (Sean had been here before, about six years ago, and summited Luigi.)
There is more to be said here.
snow blindness, sunburn, navigate near mt luigi on winkie island, general area damoy point, beautiful place for kite skiing... team work... being guided, steep couloir.
An epic day overall.
17 NOVEMBER, 2011 - 1800 hrs
There was a bustling getting-ready feeling on the ship this morning: today was the last day to make a landing before going back into the Drake Passage. Plans were in place to stop by the South Shetland Islands for one last walk through a penguin rookery, last visit for the scientists as well as photographers. We were also heading out into open water between the peninsula and island.
I am so glad that I went ashore with the others because this area, even though it's only about one hundred miles from the peninsula, has had a significant amount more melting and the penguins here are a few weeks further along in their breeding cycle. I spent the first hour ashore just watching Chinstraps' behavior in a huge colony close to where we landed. There were about 500 penguins in the area and many other colonies close by, both Chinstrap and Gentoo. I watched one particular guy who was close to me, going around to other nests (all nests are made of piles of pebbles) and stealing others' nesting material and then bringing it back to his mate's nest, who was sitting there on the egg. (I am not sure which one was male and which female... I know the male's often sit on the eggs at first; I asked Simon and he said it was hard to tell.) Every time this guy, let's call him Harold, brought back a pebble, he and his partner would do a kind of cute beak kiss... a kind of gesture like, "yes, honey, everything is going to be alright." I noticed that their nest was significantly bigger than those from whom he was taking pebbles. Harold went back to one nest over and over, where a female I think, was keeping an egg warm and every time he stole a pebble she tried to stop him in a kind of hissing motion, which he would cleverly avoid and pick up a little stone in so doing. When that nest got old, he went on to others. I thought to myself, jeeze, some of these penguins must actually go out and find pebbles and build their own nests... I think that is the kind of penguin I would want to be. When Simon came around, I had been watching this incredible theft go on for almost an hour and I was laughing; Simon came up alongside of me and asked what I was laughing about. I showed him what Harold was doing and asked if it was common and he said, "Oh, yes. You see that all the time. You see also a clear distinction between the workers and the takers."
With all of the grace I can summon, I hope that I can serve God's green world here as a worker rather than a taker. It's a tough world out there, though... the penguins attest to that.
