JASON KNIGHT

After leaving Enterprise island, we came upon this truly mind bogglingly huge iceberg. I had no idea how to capture the scale of it...

Luckily we had the professionals with us (literally). And the drone does a phenomenal job of capturing the scale of an iceberg like this (with the boat as a tiny thing for perspective). So stay tuned for a future post where I'll link to all of their videos on Youtube once they've posted them.

The mini-mountain we would climb

Luckily it was time for hike number 4 (2nd in Antarctica and the first technically on the mainland)! The plan originally was to just go up to the first ridge line where the snow ends because there's a big colony of penguins up there.

But Chef led us up to the "crazy penguins" which live halfway up the mountain to the right. He suspects it's penguins who are just trying to show off for the ladies. But they are indeed crazy, because it's very steep up there!

But little did any of us know that we'd end up making it to the very top!

In the video below, we've reached the ridge line. One bit I didn't video/photograph was the uhhh.. harrowing ascent. You see, the snowy part of the climb had become really icy, so we had to use our snow axes to dig little toe holds for everyone to single file our way up.

Because we didn't have crampons (ice spikes for your shoes), it took a lot of gumption (yes, let's call it that) to keep going up, because if you were to slip, there's very little to arrest your slide/fall down until you get to the rocks along the shore.

But I'll come back to this icy hill again later, because it turned out to be less (and more?) dangerous than we thought.

Chin strap penguins

Yes, that's their name: "chin strap" penguins. It's really incredible seeing how far they climb up and down every day just to build some nests with their mates. I'd imagine it's to get out of range of seals? And maybe a show of fitness for mating.

Me and some penguins

Ice cave

Gotta watch out for hidden dungeon/trap doors like this one that you can't necessarily see. It was very reassuring to have experienced mountaineers/guides with us, otherwise I'd probably have died. Multiple times. Thank you!

Lichen city

As we set off for shore, Sasha told us to "try not to step on lichens" since some of them are hundreds of years old (but only a few inches in size). The slow growth rate is one of their adaptation strategies to survive in such an incredibly hostile environment.

I tried my best, but it got really really hard when the entire mountain was covered in these things and many of them (see the next picture) were crunchy, so everytime you missed one you'd hear a sickening "CRUNCH" under foot.

But at some point I had to balance safety for my own life vs those long lived brothers. See you in a few hundred years hopefully!

More lichen (I think?)

Reached the top!

We hadn't planned on it, but we did it anyways!

Coming back down

Trying to give a sense of how steep it was.

When we got to the ice sheet, we decided to practice using our ice axes for some self-arresting practice. This is a common and basic mountaineering skill to stop yourself when you start sliding down a hill and the only way to stop (before plunging to certain death) is to stab your ice axe into the ice pack to stop you.

Easier said than done, since the ice axe will try to rip your arms off as it bites into slip-and-slide 'O death.

The good news is that portions of the ice sheet were safer to slide down than we thought. The bad news is that I found some that were indeed as dangerous as we thought (and would have delivered me onto some rocks at uncomfortable amounts of speed without my ice axe).

Fun and useful!

Funny story about seals here

Here we found our anchorage spot a little ways away.

Bad news: we needed to stern tie (run a rope up around some rocks in addition to using our anchor) on a part of shoreline that had a fair number of seals hanging around on it.

Good news: we had some really long wooden poles for pushing off pieces of ice when they came close to the boat at slow speeds. And someone knew that I couldn't refrain from saying yes to any adventure on this trip:

"J-Dog, grab this pole and get in the dingy, you're on seal patrol."

You see, seals are pretty territorial animals, so they didn't like the fact that we were tying ropes around rocks near them. So I had to stare down these seals which make terrible grunting/barking noises as they raise themselves up as high as they can on their back haunches.

To try and dissuade them from charging, I tried banging the stick against nearby rocks. Fortunately that seemed enough to encourage it to saunter off backwards instead of defending its chunk of rocks.

Something like this:

I didn't get a chance to film any of this, because 95% of my brain cycles were running terror_loop() and ready to run. 'No problem' I thought to myself, "I'll just find videos of seals doing their terrifying things on the internet when I get home."

Well guess what? The only seal videos I can find are of cute seals doing stupidly cute things! So you'll just have to take my word for it that a full grown seal when it starts making bark/groan noises and huffing at you and baring its fangs is a pretty terrifying thing.

1000 year old ice

When in Antarctica, it's pretty easy to grab a chunk of the clear ice from the ocean, chip off a piece, wash off the salt water and then throw it into a cocktail.

"What's that?" you say. "How old has that ice been compressed inside of a glacier?"

Well because it's so clear, it was likely "glacial ice" which was subjected to incredible pressures underneath snowfall above it. So much so that the air bubbles were forced out or dissolved into the crystal structure.

This kind of ice (according to Gemini anyways) is hundreds to tens of thousands of years old. Perfect for a cocktail!