In addition to kayaking trips — and the standard trips ashore and Zodiac cruises — our tour offered mountaineering activities. For those with proper boots these could be quite adventurous, with crampons and the like, but they also organised some Claytons* mountaineering trips of a more gentle nature that could be conducted using our Muck boots with snowshoes.
Our afternoon trip involved a slightly precarious landing from the Zodiac onto the narrow shore and then up on to the icy slopes that we were going to climb (somewhere around S 64°55′ W 62°58′, south of and opposite Bryde Island). After donning our snowshoes, and grabbing an ice-axe each, we roped up and started making our way upwards in two groups of five.
There was a fair bit of mist around the upper slopes, and occasionally it would drift downwards. The weather was mild and the uphill required a little effort, especially having to kick in with the snowshoes to gain traction for the ascent, so the single layer of thermals and the light fleece top I was wearing was enough to keep me warm … although I did manage to keep fogging up my glasses.
We reached an altitude of 200m or so and stopped for a rest, but with the mist still around and this route new to our guides it was decided to head back down. The view of the bay, however, was a nice reward for the climb.
On our way back down we took careful looks over a lip of ice to the glacier below and into a small crevasse hidden in the otherwise seemingly safe surface.
The weather improved as we descended, giving us clearer views of where we’d been and where we hadn’t gone. It feels odd — almost vandalous (new word) — to have left the tracks there; snow and blown ice will soon obliterate the marks, I assume, although I wonder how long it will take.
Our return to the shoreline gave us a good view of where the glacier starts making its contribution to the local iceberg collection, and of the channel and the surrounding mountains.
* Claytons was a non-alcoholic whiskey taste-a-like that had the slogan “the drink you have when you are not having a drink”; its name passed into the Australian and New Zealand vernacular as an adjective to indicate that what you were getting was not quite the real McCoy (I am NOT doing a footnote for “the real McCoy”!)
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