So it happened that as I fell through into the crevasse the thought “so this is the end” blazed up in my mind, for it was to be expected that in the next moment the sledge would follow through, crash on my head and all go to the unseen bottom. But the unexpected happened and the sledge held, the deep snow acting as a brake.

—Douglas Mawson

New Year's Day, 1992. I had been in the field in Antarctica since 15 November, just over seven weeks. It seemed like only yesterday that we had been shoved out of the backside of a skiequipped Hercules on the Darwin Glacier, yet we had all gained a lot of confidence at Antarctic travel and mountain exploration. A little too much confidence can be a dangerous thing, though, and I was the least experienced member of the party.

I woke up for the 7:00 A.M. radio schedule and heard Brian say that snow had been falling most of the night and that conditions were not good for working. So I got up, put on a single-piece bunny suit and my Sorrell boots, and hesitantly crawled out into the chill morning to check out the weather. Back inside the tent a few minutes later I snuggled right down into the two layers of down sleeping bag, temporarily forgetting all about my plan to search for fossils, and slept deeply until about 11:00 A.M.Brian and I had a hearty breakfast of porridge, bacon, and toast. I enjoyed soaking up all the bacon fat with

the bread, and I think at the time my body craved for fats of any kind. I washed the food down with about three cups of tea and coffee. Brian then lay back inside his double sleeping bag and began reading a book. I felt restless. We were so close to those famous fossil sites that I just wanted to get out there and collect, no matter what.

After the recent ten-day period in the southern Boomerang Range of just biding time for the weather to clear I had clearly had enough of waiting. We seemed to be always waiting for something in Antarctica. Waiting for a recon flight. Waiting for a put-in flight. Waiting for a re-supply. Waiting for a letter or telegram from home. Waiting for bloody Godot. But waiting for good weather was the most common pastime when in a remote deep field situation. On average an expedition expects to lose about one day in four due to bad weather. We had spent nearly two months camping out in the depths of southern Victoria Land, and had covered a distance of nearly 500 kilometers in Alpine skidoos and Tamworth sledges. At this stage the expedition had only about a week to go before pick-up day when our cargo cult would save us; a great silver and orange C-130 Hercules would come for us.

The conversation I had with Brian that morning went something like this:

“It doesn't look too bad out there now, Brian,” I said casually. It had stopped snowing. I could see the outcrops of fossil-rich rocks only about 200 meters away, tempting me to come to them and partake of their earthly pleasures. I could just smell the fossils out there! My hand itched for my geology hammer.

“The snow's pretty thick out there now,” replied Brian. “I spoke with Margaret and Fraka and they've decided to stay inside for the day.”

“Would it be okay if I go out for a short walk and just check out that rocky outcrop nearest the camp?” I looked at Brian with wide puppy-like eyes as if to say “I've got plenty of experience now, nothing can happen to me.”

Brian poked his head out of the tent and had a good look around. He consented, but warned me to take care as the weather could turn bad again at a moment's notice. Bad weather in Antarctica

is not the same as, say, getting caught in the rain back home. It must always be taken seriously.

“Don't worry,” I said, “I'll be extra careful. If I'm not back by 6:00 P.M. at the latest, send out a search party.”

The last remark was not a joke.

After having poured the rest of the hot water left over from breakfast into my thermos with a packet of orange fruit drink added, I grabbed a large 250 g block of chocolate from the food box, a packet of army biscuits, and some small muesli bars and put them into my backpack. There was still some cheese, dry biscuits, and dried apples in my pack from lunch a few days ago, as food rarely spoils in the cold Antarctic climate. This meant that I had enough food and drink to tide me over in the extreme case of bad weather preventing me from getting back on time, forcing shelter for the night on the mountain. I then went over to Margaret and Fraka's tent and said a quick hello and told them I was “just going over for a quick squiz at the rocks and wouldn't be very long.” On reflection this did seem a bit similar to the last spoken words of Lawrence “Titus” Oates from Scott's expedition: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

I grabbed an ice pick off the sledge and tramped away from the camp towards the face of Portal Mountain. Almost immediately, after about twenty steps, when I had gone beyond the raised hummock on which we were camped, I noticed the snow getting noticeably deeper as I pushed forwards in snow up to my mid-thigh. I kept vigorously making my way through the snowdrift, and the effort of it actually made me sweat despite the extreme cold. I stopped and looked back. The camp appeared kind of unearthly from a short distance away— two tiny bright yellow pyramid tents, four wooden sledges, and two shining orange toboggans in a vast sea of white, dwarfed by the awesome, dark brown brooding mountains.

Away from camp one hears nothing but the eerie silence of the winds, the squeaking of fresh snow under foot, and an occasional loud cracking noise, like an explosion, the result of the subterranean grinding blue ice of the glacier as it moves. Nikki Gemmel expressed this beautifully in her novel, Shiver: “The ice feels like Waterford, smooth and diamond hard. And then to hear the wind funneling around it, to

hear the ice crack and pop and then be silent. Oh my sweetness! Just to listen to the nothingness, punctuated by the ice splintering. The ice is alive with sound, but you have to be still to hear it. ”

Well, it certainly has been snowing a lot here lately, I thought to myself. I was struggling to move in the waist deep snow. Nonetheless, I forged steadily forwards and was pleased to see the white and greenish-grey layers of ancient sandstone and shale getting closer. Who knows what treasures could have awaited me when I reached that outcrop? Perhaps some bizarre new species of fossil fish, or a new discovery that would pinpoint Antarctica as an ancient center of a new evolutionary explosion. Such ideas had already formed in my mind before I came to Antarctica and were quickly cementing as the real evidence we had found so far supported the theories.

I was then about 100 meters from camp. The snow was still quite deep and sounded very soft, almost hollow in places. I was dressed in my heavy-weather gear, a full one-piece bright yellow bunny suit, two layers of gloves, and Sorrell boots over two pairs of woolen socks. The struggle through the thick snow was very tiring. Often doing really simple things in the field in Antarctica can be exhausting thanks to the thick layers of clothing and the bitterly cold winds. The act of walking through this thick snow wearing my heaviest layers of clothing and carrying a fully laden backpack was just such a situation.

Suddenly my foot stepped right through the ground, and the other foot gave way also. I felt the horrible sensation of falling, with nothing below me, and instinctively thrashed around to suddenly break the fall as my large pack wedged itself deep in the snow. My feet wiggled in mid-air atop of a bottomless chasm. I frantically writhed sideways, rolling over to the right, snow and ice in my face and hair. Icy breath panting furiously! I was away from the crevasse. Safe. I got up and moved closer to the messed-up area of snow. A gaping dark blue hole with no visible bottom now existed where I had broken through.

My pulse was racing like Phar Lap,^* but I quickly recovered from the ordeal. In the ensuing minutes I didn't think straight, couldn't really let the emotional weight of the moment sink in. Instead, I had just

one thought, to get away from the crevasse and onto the safety of the nearby rocks. Crazy thoughts about life, death and my family at home raced through my mind. Perhaps I was desperately trying to dispel the whole incident from my mind, put it all behind me, as I dragged myself through the waist-deep snow as fast as I could move towards the rocks.

I walked well away from the line of possible crevasses that usually border rock faces. Carefully treading the ground with each step I was soon safely on the solid sandstone ledge. I sat there, catching my breath, panting clouds of foggy breath into the stagnant chilled air, and quietly reflected on the whole experience for a few minutes. Then I had a drink from my thermos and a comforting chunk of chocolate.

Shit, that was nearly it, I thought again. Almost my life over then and there. I thought longingly of my wife and three gorgeous kids back home, how for a brief moment I came close to never seeing them ever again. Then a wave of emotion hit me like a train out of a tunnel and I broke down. I cried. My tears fell onto the weather-scarred Devonian sandstones, seeped into the ancient pores, and froze on the spot. I suppose I must have lost it for about ten or fifteen minutes, before I started to look around me, take in the spectacular view and slowly start to regain my composure.

After I had pulled myself together there was only one thing to do — I had risked my life to get to these rocks so I was damn well going to have a look around for fossils. I pushed on. Besides, I thought to myself, up on the mountain I knew I'd be safe, well away from the hidden crevasses. I slowly ascended the steep rocky slopes of the mountain. Due to the continuous heavy snowfall of the last two weeks, which caused our hold-up in the Southern Boomerang Range, these rocky platforms were covered by a thick, precipitous build-up of snow. After a short climb up the frozen rocky face I found myself on a small, rubbly outcrop of dark rock. I immediately recognized these rocks as dolerite, the black volcanic rock. Yet over to my left, about fifty meters away, was a definite outcrop of layered sedimentary rock showing the characteristic bands of dark, fissile shale resting on a three-meter bluff of grey sandstone. I felt that if I could get there I was almost certainly going to find the famous fossil beds first examined by Gavin Young and Alex Ritchie 20 years ago.

There was only one problem. Between the outcrop and me was a thick snow bank, and this was very steeply inclined. I decided I'd better put on my crampons over my boots to grip the snow better, then tentatively stepped out onto the steep slope. By stepping down hard I actually made a stable foothold, and then used my ice axe to probe the next foothold. The snow was as deep as my chest in places, and it felt just a little scary not to be able to see what surface I was walking over. By plowing forwards, almost swimming though the deep drift, I was soon almost at the next outcrop.

Just then I inadvertently noticed a few small pieces of snow bouncing off the ground next to me, whizzing past at frantic speed. I turned and looked up the steep slope above and saw a wall of snow bearing down at me. Instinctively I turned my back to the avalanche and covered my face. Shit! Someone's really got it in for me today, I thought. The falling snow hit me with such force that it knocked me forwards and I could feel the snow piling up rapidly all around my tumbling body. After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, as my mind was full of adrenaline and morbid thoughts, the falling snow ceased, leaving me buried up to my neck. It must have looked really funny —a little white-faced, scared-shitless head poking up out of a mound of dumped snow, halfway up a treacherous mountain. As the snow had fallen recently, and hadn't had time to compact, it was actually fairly easy to dig my way out and plough the extra few meters to reach the safety of the rocks.

I then had a good long rest, sitting on a ledge high above the vast Skelton Névé. I could see the Boomerang Range with crystal clarity about 60 kilometers to the south, and our little camp only a few hundred meters below. I didn't want to move from that spot. I felt scared and vulnerable. My emotions were all over the place, but I could do nothing, so I just sat frozen to that spot. How trivial is man's presence in Antarctica, I thought to myself, and eventually summoned up the courage to push on.

I gingerly climbed down the rocky slope and somehow managed to find a few scrappy fish fossils in the lowermost layers. As I carefully traced my footsteps back to camp, I took great care to skirt well around the gaping hole where I'd almost dropped into the crevasse.

Finally I reached our tent at about 4:00 P.M. I told Brian about my two close shaves with the crevasse and the avalanche and he poured me a large glass of whisky. I spent the rest of the day in my sleeping bags, reading a little and occasionally writing down notes in my field book. I was quite unnerved and couldn 't sleep easily. About 2:00 A.M., somehow, I drifted off to sleep.

The funny thing about that little foray onto the Portal on 1 January, which only took about three hours, was that the next day Brian carefully retraced my path, testing the ground with the crevasse probe to find a safe access route onto the rocks. He discovered that I had walked over seven crevasses, each with a thin snow bridge covering their almost bottomless chasms. By virtue of sheer good luck I had walked over all of them and only broken through one.

My experience of almost plummeting down a hidden crevasse recalls that of many of the Antarctic explorers, and some recent expeditioners. Admiral Richard Byrd's account of a similar experience sums it up nicely: “Then I had a horrible feeling of falling, and at the same time of being hurled sideways. Afterwards I could not remember hearing any sound. When my wits returned, I was sprawled out full length on the snow with one leg dangling over the side of an open crevasse. ” Later Byrd moves slowly away, and then checks out the crevasse, which is about a meter wide but very deep. He shines his torch down and says: “I could see no bottom.”

Just another day in the Great White South. Ever since that day, whenever I've heard the old Jethro Tull song “Skating away on the Thin Ice of a New Day,” I've thought of the Portal, and how on that day I skated away on the thin ice of a new year and, by a stroke of good luck, somehow survived to tell the tale.