Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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BT – Claytons Mountaineering

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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* 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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