I just finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which was supposed to last me the next few weeks here in Antarctica, given its 1,200-page heft. This isn’t meant to be a book blog, but I’ll say this before I get to my point: it was good!
At one point, the Count amazes a friend by traveling from Paris to the coast in a carriage over the course of a single night, with the fastest horses in France configured in a relay. This certainly dates the book in our jet-setting, race car-driving, spacecraft-launching world, but the need for speed is a theme in the novel, set in an era on the cusp of the first trains.
“I never knew till now the delight of speed.”
So, what does this book have to do with anything? Today, we set out on a big “road” trip from Ross Island, Antarctica, towards the South Pole, at a crisp speed of 5 miles per hour. We are towing all the fuel, tools, supplies, food, bunks, and safety equipment we need, and therefore, we are slowed by the immense weight of it all. Plus, there are crevasses, and in order to give ourselves enough time to react to one popping up on the radar, it’s 5 mph or slower, only!
Like in The Count of Monte Cristo, speed will be a theme of the next two months. This is the time it will take to go there and back again (optimistically), not at modern speeds, but at an early 19th-century saunter. We will cross under the shadow of Erebus, the southernmost active volcano in the world, traverse the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating glacier twice the size of the UK, and crawl up and over the Transantarctic Mountains to the East Antarctic Plateau, without ever touching anything but ice. We follow the path taken by early polar explorers, but we are here to find a new, more efficient route as well.
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It seems like everyone who goes to Antarctica starts a blog, and I am now guilty of that—but part of why I’m here is thanks to discovering Antarctica through other people’s words during the pandemic. I you want to learn about why we are going on this trip, who “we” even are, what it’s like being in the most remote place on Earth, and how cool Antarctica is, consider following these words, and I’ll promise to keep it concise (internet and time are luxuries out here).
This is the South Pole Overland Traverse, day one, team of six, 78° South, a couple miles in, with many more to go.
- Derek