The silence was deep with breath like sleep

As our sledge runner slid on the snow

And the fate-full fall of our fur clad feet

Struck mute like a silent blow

On a questioning “hush” as the settling crust

Shrank shivering over the floe;

And the sledge in its track sent a whisper back

Which was lost in a white fog-bow.

—From “Barrier Silence” by E. Wilson, 1911

Edward Wilson's poem beautifully portrays the feel of sledging, although I must point out that he wrote it with particular reference to their more rigorous routine of man-hauling the sledges. The next part of our trip involved a full day's sledging, and I recall the memory of this day with vivid clarity whenever I read Wilson's poem.

We were attempting to become the first team to cross the Cook Mountains from the Darwin Glacier to the Mulock Glacier. In actual fact, we were not the first field party to visit the northern part of the Cook Mountains. New Zealanders Harry Ayres and Roy Carlyon visited this region from the Polar Plateau side during Christmas 1957. After climbing Mt. Ayres they crossed Festive Plateau eastwards (so named because they were there at Christmas) and set up a survey point near Mt. Longhurst, which unfortunately couldn't be used because of cloud cover. Ayres and Carlyon had an epic trip. Ayre's dog team fell into a crevasse and it was a real struggle to get the dogs and the sledge out, yet surprisingly only one dog was killed. Ayres went right to the bottom of the crevasse to retrieve the Christmas pudding his wife had made!

Covering 50 kilometers by sledging up a glacier route where no one has ever been before is a good day's work in anyone's books, so we were very pleased at the end of that long day. The weather remained mercifully clear with only a little wind. We made our camp on blue ice in fine weather at the end of about nine hours' traveling. My mind has a clear mental picture of the little yellow pyramid tents as colorful specks on a vast ocean of shining blue ice in the shadow of Mt. Hughes, a snapshot image viewed from climbing up a nearby rocky peak. It was the only time on the whole journey that we ventured close to the open polar plateau, where no mountains stood between the South Pole and us.

We packed up camp next morning in 1°F and headed down towards the Darwin Glacier, taking a very wide course around the protruding Tentacle Ridge to avoid a large crevasse field which was clearly marked on the map. Our course then followed straight up the middle of the Darwin Glacier towards it origin, then turned northwards up into the narrower McCleary Glacier. By about 6:00 P.M. we were traveling parallel with the mountain range to our right and with the open flat expanse of the polar plateau on our left.

We moved camp only about fifteen kilometers that day as the skua flies, but in order to get safely around the southern Cook Mountains we had to take an enormous detour. The Darwin Glacier was hard, jagged blue ice with no snow cover for most of the journey. After the first half of the McCleary Glacier the surface rises steeply from an elevation of 1000 meters near the southern end of the mountains to 1600 meters at the place we finally camped. My line drawn on the map shows us heading straight for a very large crevasse field, but we avoided it by coming in close to the mountains to camp that night in the shelter of two jutting ridges. These are unnamed twin peaks on the map, 1940 meters and 1970 meters high, respectively.

This was the easy part of the McCleary, a very straightforward day of traveling with no sledge overturns or any hidden dangers. The following day would be more challenging as the glacier rose up from our camp at 1600 meters to the Festive Plateau at 2200 meters, with a wide circle of large crevasse fields and ice falls all around it.

Margaret cooked a chicken for dinner that night and this was followed by another communal reading from At the Mountains of Mad-

ness. It seemed that everyone was enjoying the act of reading aloud to the rest of the group, using much theatrical license to accentuate the mysterious and unknown elements of the story.

The next morning heralded another epic day's traveling. Fine clear weather prevailed with little to no wind, making an ideal day for traveling, even though it was much colder at −6°F. I remembered from the recon and put-in flights that from the air the McCleary Glacier had some large crevasse fields, but somehow we managed to work out a narrow sledging route around these. Strangely enough when you are on the ground it's not quite the same, as a lot of luck and careful navigation is needed or you can easily find yourself surrounded by crevasses, or down one. As our destination that day was a potential new fossil site, situated a long way from our camp, there was no point stopping somewhere near the end. We were committed to go the whole distance so as not to have to waste another day packing up camp to move just a short distance further on. Setting up and packing camp could cost us almost half a day, so we had every reason to keep pushing onwards while the weather was good. This set a cracking pace for what proved to be a very long day of sledging.

We started off after packing up camp around 10:00 A.M., heading straight up the middle of the river of ice. At the head of the glacier we could see the ice rising up dramatically where ice falls appeared around us at different places. These are spectacular sights of glistening, rippled ice cascading like a frozen waterfall over a sharp drop.

The slope at the top of the glacier was fairly steep. The leading Skidoo didn't have enough gusto to pull up its two fully laden sledges, so we decided to take each sledge up one at a time. The skidoos still couldn't manage the load. Brian suggested we rope each of the four sledges to both skidoos and pull them up in tandem. This demanded much concentration as the two skidoos had to pull evenly and smoothly at the same speed, but it worked, so we eventually ended up with all four sledges at the top of the glacier, the edge of Festive Plateau.

We had a stunning view from there that words cannot fully describe. There was quite a distance to cover across the vast expanse of the mighty Mulock Glacier and, far away in the ethereal distance, soar-

ing up through hanging clouds and coiling mist, were the black-banded mountains of the Warren Ranges. They were about 50 kilometers away yet they looked so gigantic and mystical; something you'd imagine would exist only in Valhalla. Beyond these lofty peaks we could see the omnipresent and almost eternal white expanse of the polar plateau with its windy snowdrifts fading off into the hazy grey-white horizon.

Jet-black doleritic rock forming most of the Warren Ranges was lightly draped by snow, the hardness and darkness of the ancient rock in stark contrast with the softness and whiteness of the newly fallen snow. These rocks, formed by molten hot lavas squeezed at great depths in ancient times, were forcibly extruded between the layered sandstones of the Beacon Supergroup sometime during the age of dinosaurs. The formation of these rocks to me represented the antithesis to everything that the white snow symbolized—new, soft and cold. The sheer scale of everything in view was unimaginable—a giant river of ice more than 50 kilometers wide, jagged mountains of black and white towering up 2.6 kilometers, and the vast, white oblivion of the almost never-ending polar plateau beyond.

To gaze upon such grand sights of nature can be almost a mystical experience. It made me ponder in awe at the forces of the Earth and the billions of years of evolution that had eventually led us, mere frail humans, to this forsaken continent. It made me proud to be a scientist, someone who can appreciate such a spectacular view for what it was, a natural sculpture forged through millions of years of the earth's dynamic processes, without feeling any desire to question the philosophical basis for its existence.

We had lunch in view of the Warren Ranges on the edge of Festive Plateau. No detailed geological investigations were ever carried out in these mountains around us. Up ahead in the distance we could see bands of colored siltstones, the layers that often contain fossils. The next part of our journey would take us down from the high Festive Plateau to a place called Fault Bluff, about another fifteen kilometers away. The next leg of the journey involved a long even slope with ice falls surrounding it.

Descending slowly, we managed to take each of the four sledges

down the slope one at a time by heavy use of their sledge brakes. The brakes are pieces of wood with metal teeth that grip the ice when you step down on them. However, if the slopes get too steep even the weight of a human standing on the brake may not be enough to slow the sledge down. In these cases one has to go very carefully so as not to let the sledge get out of control. As this slope became steeper the sledges then became more difficult to control. At one point we accidentally overturned a sledge and a trickle of brown liquid oozed out of the sledge onto the white snow. I bent over and smelt the brown mess. One of our precious bottles of Kahlua had bit the dust.

A short time later Brian suddenly threw his hand in the air and shouted for all of us to halt and not move an inch! He yelled out that there were large crevasses all around us. We stood there, silently gazing at the snow-covered ground, wondering what the hell we should do next to get out of this predicament. Brian took control. He asked me to rope up to him, suggesting that we walk down the slope ahead to pace out a safe route for the sledges. After harnessing ourselves together with long ropes, Brian grabbed the two-long-long crevasse probe from the sledge and carefully began walking about twenty meters in front of me, prodding the ground with the probe as he advanced slowly forwards. I held tightly to the rope in case he fell, ready to anchor him to the ground with my ice pick. As I walked down the ice slope I took care to step in his footprints.

After marking a safe path down the ice slope, we retraced our steps back to the sledges and then slowly drove down, lowering the sledges in front of the skidoos one at a time until we were all safely at the bottom. It was around 6:00 P.M. by then yet our destination, Fault Bluff, still loomed a long way up ahead in the distance. Fortune smiled down upon us, though, as from here it was an easy drive, the skidoos pulling both sledges along at a fast pace over the flat powdery snow.

We reached Fault Bluff, a dark angular mountain with faulted dolerite rock, around 10:00 P.M. that night. After quickly setting up camp a short distance away from the rocky outcrops, one of us immediately began making dinner. It was close to midnight by the time we ate, and although dog-tired we were exulted by the success of the last two days and chatted cheerily over dinner.

We had successfully pioneered a route up the McCleary Glacier and had arrived at a completely new patch of mountains bursting with potential for new fossil discoveries. We all slept deeply that night, and I dreamed once more of finding ancient fishes, the last known inhabitants of this desolated part of the world.