People always ask when they see this picture, “Is that you out there?” To which I always reply, “No, that’s me behind the camera.” Were it not for a crooked back, I would have been out there with Phil Colbert, and would have missed the shot. Sometimes things work out the way they are supposed to. This peak, named The Tusk by a New Zealand geological party that had traversed the area in the early 1960’s, is a 600-foot horn of pure marble that juts up at the edge of Liv Glacier close to where it enters the Ross Ice Shelf. Overridden by a much thicker Liv Glacier at a time in the past when the ice shelf was grounded and backed into the mountains to higher elevations, the profile of the peak is vertical to overhung in the upstream direction, but tapers smoothly at a consistent angle of about 30 degrees downstream. The peak is basically a walk-up from the north. When I first became aware of this beautiful hunk of rock was in December 1970 during my first trip to the Ice. Directly to the north of The Tusk is a shoulder and high ridgeline called Mt. Henson, which had been mapped by the New Zealand party, as having a contact between marble and schist. I had been there is December, 1970, on my first trip to the Ice, landed by a helicopter at the foot of the mountain. My partner and I had climbed to the summit of the ridge and measured and collected the stratigraphic section of the marble and metavolcanic rocks along the ridgecrest. When we were finished, we high-tailed it off the ridge, dropped the samples by our survival gear, and started hiking straight toward The Tusk with time we thought to climb and collect it. Much to our chagrin, the helicopter came a couple of hours early and we did not even make it to the foot of The Tusk. Four years later, on my second trip to the Ice, I was working in the Duncan Mountains, directly across Liv Glacier from Mt. Henson and The Tusk. The Kiwis had also mapped a contact between schist and volcanic rocks in the Duncan Mountains. As with the contact at Mt. Henson, they had interpreted it as being conformable, meaning that one group of layered sedimentary (or volcanic) rocks follows on top of another, their beds parallel. In the course of our mapping, we had decided that the contact in the Duncan Mountains was in fact a fault, a break in rocks along which there had been movement or displacement. It now occurred to us that the contact at Mt. Henson might also be a fault, and since I had not given it more than a passing glance in 1970, we decided to cross the mouth of Liv Glacier and check it out. We followed the Kiwi route which skirted a huge and obvious crevasse field on its north side, then locked into a deep furrow up the middle of the glacier that was smooth with snow, but flanked by heavily crevassed ridges on either side. After following this south for a couple of miles, we cut straight across the Liv again. In the furrow we crossed lots of crevasses that were a couple of feet wide and very deep, but because of their width we were able to drive across them comfortably given the length of our snowmobile. But on the far side of the furrow, we encountered wider and increasingly subtler crevasses, and so were forced to probe for a couple of miles. When we finally made it to the far side we sledded to the north of Mt. Henson to have a look at the structure and then drove back into the reentrant to the south of Mt.Henson were we camped. The next day, December 27, we climbed to the top of the ridge and examined the contact close up. It was highly sheared and deformed, and although the layering on either side of the boundary was parallel, the degree of deformation right at the contact led us to interpret it also as a fault. When I awoke the next day, my 28th birthday, my lower back was spasmed so badly that I couldn’t stand. I lay in my sleeping bag all day with only slight improvement to my pain. The next day I could at least walk and sit on a snowmobile, so we drove over to The Tusk and climbed it. Each step was painful to me, but the incline was so smooth and gentle that I was able to gut it out to the top. When we reached the summit, the bulbous end of The Tusk beckoned immediately to the south. Phil said he was going out to see what the view was like from there. I declined. On the steepest part to the right of the sharp edge leading to the tip, Phil used his hands to scramble along, but otherwise he frictioned his way along on two feet. When he got to where he was going, he stood for about five minutes contemplating the scene then turned and came back. I shot a single photo, as was my practice at the time, of what I perceived to be the best frame of the shot, and that was that. We made it down, more painfully than I had ascended, and drove the snowmobile back to the Duncan Mountains following our footprints and snowmobile tracks to the spot where we had started this side trip across Liv Glacier. In hindsight we had hung it out more on this traverse than any other in my Antarctic career.

Gallery – Intrusive Patterns 2.0 (TAM) 1.0

This week's galley is more patterns of intrusive rocks.

December 14, 1911, 100 years ago this week, the Norwegian party led by Roald Amundsen arrived at the South Pole. Their apprehension that the British team had beaten them to their goal evaporated like breath in the cold air. Here at Earth’s still turning with the sun inscribing a perfect circle in the sky, Roald Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting posed, heads bare, before their nation’s flag. Olav Bjaaland, operating the camera, missed out on the heros’ shot. Meanwhile, the British party, led by Robert Falcon Scott, was toiling its way on the lower Beardmore Glacier, still more than a month out from the end point of their march. On December 9, two miles short of The Gateway, they had shot their five ponies. The next day the 12 men (combined polar and support parties) man-hauled through the pass that Shackleton had discovered three years before in his own, failed bid for the Pole. Where the mighty, outlet glaciers of the Transantarctic Mountains enter the Ross Ice Shelf, they tear great chasms of crevasses. Such features had stopped Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson in 1902 from reaching land at the mouths of both Byrd Glacier and Nimrod Glacier. However, at the mouth of Beardmore Glacier the land head on the north side is an isolated mountain (Mt. Hope) with a narrow passage of smooth ice between it and the main portion of the mountains. On December 13, the day before the Norwegians reached the Pole, Scott had written that the day was “most damnably dismal,” and that he had had trouble sleeping because of indigestion and his soggy condition. On the 14th, conditions improved as deep, soft snow gave way to harder snow and easier pulling, but the race had already been lost. (The following figures are from "The Roof at the Bottom of the World.")

Gallery – Transantarctic Mountiains (TAM) 1.0

This week's gallery features four photos of the Transantarctic Mountains that were to appear in an App that never materialized..

Although McMurdo nightlife can be pretty wild on a Saturday night, wildlife in the general area thereabouts may be found any day of the week. For this week’s post I showcase some of my wildlife photos, except for the mummified seal, all taken within 20 miles of McMurdo Station. Three birds and two mammals are about all of the air-breathing, macrobiota that frequent McMurdo Sound. Adelie penguins are the quintessential, tuxedoed avians. The closest rookery to McMurdo Station is at Cape Royds, a little more than twenty miles to the north. I have had numerous opportunities to visit it early in the season when the sea ice in the sound is still solid. It is also common that individual penguins or small groups will come waddling past the station, obviously not quite on track for either open water or the rookery. The closest Emperor penguin rookery to McMurdo is located at Cape Crozier, about 50 miles around Ross Island at its eastern end. It was to this point that Apsley Cherry-Gerrard and his mates took their Worst Journey in the World. I have crossed paths only a few times with these most-stately representatives of their clan. The ubiquitous skua is the scavenger of the southern realm. During the summer these powerful birds feed on penguin eggs and chicks. In bygone days, when open dumping was practiced in front of McMurdo Station, the skua population burgeoned, putting extra pressure on the Adelie rookeries around Ross Island. It’s slim pickins around McMurdo these days with every bit of waste, including foodstuffs, finding itself into some specific bin for retrograding and recycling. I have had skuas visit my camps more than 500 miles from open water. Sometimes they would accept some salami, sometimes not. Sometimes they would hang around for a day or two, then always move on, whither I have always wondered? Weddell seals are quite common around McMurdo, lounging on the sea ice close to shore where tidal cracks give access to the surface. Practically their whole lives Weddell seals live in the water; mating takes place there. But birth and nursing of the new-borns takes place on the ice, out there in the open air, exposed to the surface elements, but safe from the predators beneath the ice. Orcas or Killer whales stalk the ice edge and leads of the seasonal ice of McMurdo Sound, hunting for penguins or seals. During the 1982-83 field season, I was working in the Dry Valleys. The Navy helo pilots liked to try to spot whales along the leads when they were flying across the sound, and who was I to say that I was in such a hurry to get to the rocks that they couldn’t stop for a closer look?

Gallery – Sastrugi 3.0

In keeping with the post above, this week's gallery revisits sastrugi with an avian theme.

The Roof at the Bottom of the World has been reviewed by The New York Times. The review of my new book by Robert R. Harris is below or the original review is available online at NYTimes.com. For ice and death fans there’s also THE ROOF AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD: Discovering the Transantarctic Mountains (Yale University, $29.95) by Edmund Stump, a geologist with much firsthand experience and a professor of exploration at Arizona State University. Stump clearly and ably recounts the history of Antarctic exploration from James Clark Ross in the 1840s through the 1950s. (Fair warning, though: there’s lots of geologizing.) Best, he includes very fine topographic maps, color photographs (many his own) and satellite images. And most helpful for anyone ever confused about just where and how the explorers made their way, Stump has superimposed the actual routes they took on many of the ­images.

You’ve had a hard day in the field climbing mountains, collecting rocks. You're chilled to the core and your joints are aching. What’s for supper!? Come in, sit down, while I fire up the Coleman stove and start to make water by melting blocks of snow in the 10-quart pot. While you’re waiting, have a drink. There’s nothing better at the end of a day in the field than a stiff glass of whiskey poured over flakes of half-million-year-old ice. Beer and wine invariably freeze in the field, but spirits are just the thing to warm up the belly and numb the aching joints. Once the snow begins to melt you might also want to have a cuppa tea or bouillon to rehydrate while I prepare the meal. The Berg Field Center at McMurdo Station offers a wonderful range of food options for remote field parties, including canned, boxed, dehydrated, and frozen. Except for dried onion flakes for flavoring and powdered potatoes, I eschew dehydrated foods. Canned foods are a nuisance for having to extract the frozen contents, and then for having to carry the empty cans back to McMurdo for disposal (recycling.) When you are on the Frozen Continent, what better victuals than frozen ones? To start with meat, the choices include beef, pork, lamb, burger, and a variety of seafood. Chicken is also an option, but if it comes in a big block of frozen pieces, it can take an hour with a hammer and chisel just to free them from the block, and then there are bones to carry around with the garbage for the rest of the season. It is best if the meat is boneless and in steaks. I usually start it thawing in the cast-iron frying pan, then chunk it and make some sort of stew or gravy. For this, I always take a canister of flour into the field. Tonight let’s have a curry! Next, I always serve a big pot of carbs, either powdered potatoes with lots of butter, pasta of various sorts, or rice. Pasta wastes water, so I tend not to prepare it as often. For the curry, rice is the obvious choice. The range of frozen vegetables available at McMurdo is everything that you would find in the freezer section of your local supermarket. Tonight let’s add lima beans to the curry. Now that is a feast! For variations on the sauce theme, I like to take along a variety of herbs and spices, including paprika, cayenne, celery and garlic salt. Beef and chicken bouillon cubes are good for what they add. Once you’ve chowed down on dinner and cleaned the pots and dishes with a little hot water, wiped dry with a paper towel, nothing feels better than crawling into your sack and drifting off to sleep, as the caloric load spreads through your tired body. We seldom have desserts after a work day. However, during storms when there is time to kill, that’s when we pull out the Coleman oven and bake cakes and stir up some flapjacks on the skillet. We have the complete range of frozen fruits to choose from in McMurdo. Strawberries, peaches, razzleberries, it’s your choice. For breakfast we usually have steak and mashed potatoes or porridge. These days sirloin steaks are the primary beef option, but in my early years the steaks were complete tenderloins lifted out of the back of the cow. They came in cases, product of New Zealand. We would saw them to the desired thickness with an ice saw and then fry them in the skillet. Because the steak thaws as it cooks, it is not possible to have nice seared meat with a pink, juicy center. One way that we found to somewhat get around this was to cut the steaks the night before and then hang them in a plastic bag at the top of the Scott tent where they would thaw by morning. Lunches when we are out doing field work are snack foods such as candy bars, energy bars, gorp, jerky, and/or cookies. Some folks like to carry a thermos of hot brew, either bullion or soup or tea, but I prefer not to carry the weight of a thermos bottle when climbing, so if I do take one into the field, I generally leave it on the snowmobile. Finally, I will end this post with one of my favorite field recipes, Stump’s Seafood Newberg. The seafood could be lobster, scallops, and/or freeze-dried shrimp. The flesh of freeze-dried shrimp is an amazing substance, in that it reconstitutes perfectly in about five minutes after adding water. The sauce is made from powdered cheese, the sort that comes in Kraft macaroni and cheese boxes, but in Antarctica comes in a #10 can. Mix it with a little powdered milk and water and lots of butter (I cook exclusively with butter in the field, no oils or shortening.) Add a couple tablespoons of whiskey for flavor, stir it all together, and serve over rice or noodles. Voila!

Gallery – McMurdo Cloud Effects

McMurdo Sation, at the end of Hut Point Peninsula, faces the Transantarctic Mountains across McMurdo Sound. When weather blows through, the cloud effects can be spectacular. Each of this week's gallery images were shot from various points around the end of Hut Point Peninsula looking toward Mt. Discovery, the conical volcanic peak, and Black Island, the dark, low bluffs to the left.

100 years ago this week Roald Amundsen and his boys hit the Transantarctic Mountains. They had always expected them to be there, extending from Beardmore Glacier, 200 miles to the north, where Shackleton had forged his route to the polar plateau in 1908, and where Scott this season would be pressing his men as well. Of course, the old idea of the Transantarctic Mountains petering out somewhere in the south was bantered about in Amundsen’s camp. Why not a straight shot from the ice shelf onto the plateau? But there was no doubt on November 8, when the first thin line of relief materialized at the horizon. As the party drew closer, the mountains took form, great blocky massifs set back from low, sinuous foothills. On Novermber 16 the party had left the level of the ice shelf and was camped on the rising undulation of the foothills. To the right was a smooth glacier that rose steadily to the south, but it appeared to head at the bottom of a gigantic massif, Mt. Fridtjof Nansen, as Amundsen named it., so that way was out. To the southeast the horizon dropped between Mt. Fridtjof Nansen and a bold peak to the left (east), Mt. Don Pedro Christophersen. Perhaps there would be passage there. After dinner Amundsen and two of the others skied up into a col in the nearby range, deciding to head directly south over the ridge system at a reasonable spot. On the way back to camp Amundsen and Bjaaland skied over to a tiny nunatak (island of rock surrounded by snow) making the only bedrock landfall of the entire Antarctic portion of the expedition. On November 17 the party covered 11 1/2 miles, rose 2,000 feet, and camped “on a little glacier among crevasses.” After dinner Wisting and Hanssen went in one direction and Bjaaland in another to scout a trail over the ridge crest. The next morning, November 18, Amundsen chose the lower pass. As the party came out onto the crest of the ridge, the full faces of both Fridtjof Nansen and Don Pedro Christophersen presented themselves. Between the massifs was a pass with a short, steep glacier that cascaded down two ice falls separating terraces. Amundsen recounts, “we could follow a little connected line among the many crevasses; we saw that we could go a long way.” The party descended and then, hell bent on a southern heading, Amundsen chose to drive back up the next ridge rather than letting the party down onto the Axel Heiberg Glacier. By evening they had worked their way across the glacier and followed a deep, snow-filled furrow, and were camped beneath the shadowed face of Don Pedro Christopherson. Bjaaland and Hanssen skied up to the first icefall to scout a route, reporting back that they had found what appeared to be a way through. November 19, As always on the more demanding ascents, Bjaaland was the forerunner, scouting the trail and leading the climb. The dogs double-teamed the sledges up the steep icefall, and the party managed to cobble a trail out of safe ground and solid bridges. Before midday they had reached the first terrace. The second icefall loomed ahead with “nothing but crevasse after crevasse, so huge and ugly” that this step was impassable. However, to the left, the terrace seemed to rise gently toward Mount Don Pedro Christophersen and to merge into its snowy lower slope. The men headed in that direction but soon found themselves in a cul-de-sac of open chasms, so they camped. While the dogs were being fed and bedded, Amundsen led a reconnaissance sortie to the base of an ice ridge above the camp. The men returned to camp for dinner and then went out again to see what lay beyond the ridge. By keeping in close under Mount Don Pedro Christophersen, they found the passage over the ice ridge to be smooth, except for a few large, open crevasses that were easily avoided. Before long they were sure that they had passed the chaotic part of the glacier and that only one final ice rise stood between them and the plateau. With confidence that they would be on the plateau the following day, the three men skied back to camp. As they came out on a rise and looked down at their tent, Amundsen reflected on the scene: “Great blocks of ice scattered promiscuously about gave the impression that here Nature was too powerful for us. Here no progress was to be thought of. “It was not without a certain satisfaction that we stood there and contemplated the scene. The little dark speck down there—our tent—in the midst of this chaos, gave us a feeling of strength and power. We knew in our hearts that the ground would have to be ugly indeed if we were not to maneuver our way across it and find a place for that little home of ours.” On the morning of November 20, the weather was still and clear. The pull up to the next terrace was strenuous, but the dogs managed to do it with single teams. As the party rounded Mount Ole Engelstad, the plateau opened before. It was now time to turn south again. Directly ahead was a snowy ridge that projected to the west from Mount Don Pedro Christophersen. As they ran up onto it, the surface changed from the soft snow that had been with them since reaching the mountains to hard, sharp-edged sastrugi (windblown patterns in snow.) When the gratified party camped that night at 8:00 p.m., they were at 10,920 feet, having covered 19¼ miles and risen 5,750 feet. They had crossed the entirety of the Transantarctic Mountains in only four days. (Adapted from The Roof at the Bottom of the World.)

Gallery – Crevasses 2.0

This week's gallery of crevasse fields was shot during the 2010-11 field season with my new digital camera, a Canon EOS Rebel T2i with 18-200 zoom lens. The first three are from Beardmore Glacier and vicinity, the fourth image is from the steep country to the north of Mt. MArkham.