Day 11 - Which way is up? 18 miles in whiteout conditions
The boys are exhausted today from probably their toughest day yet. Their spirits are still high, but they went through the wringer today.
(Audio) Day 11 - Ray
Ray: "Well, I'll tell you what, today I think I've seen it all. today we had absolute whiteout conditions. and umm. by whiteout I mean everything was absolutely white. You couldn't tell the sky from the ground and it was so hard to make our way around. I've seen some very very bad sandstorms, but I'll tell you what, to all the students that are following along and and tuning in to Dr. Affleck's educational errr resource material; I'll bet you he makes some sort of reference to these.... these whiteouts in Antarctica are something else, you can't imagine.. you can't even see your feet. finding our way across the antarctic landscape was almost impossible, but Richard had a compass set up where... it was almost like a tray in front of us, and we could see mmumn aahh Richard could see and I was able to trek, Kevin and I, and we were able to each take our turns reading the compass as it sat in front of us and so we were able to find our way, and it was really the only thing to look at that we could find our way. We were falling down, and all kinds of stuff as we made our way through the sastrugi, and sastrugi as you recall is the russian term used for snowdrift. So snowdrifts galore and yopu couldn't see a thing as you were making your way through, but we still got 18 nautical miles done, which is close to 33 kilometers. It was an awsome exciting experience and I just got off the phone with my wife Kathy, and was telling her about it too and she couldn't believe it so there you go, and she's from Newfoundland and they've seen lots of thick fog in St. Johns so ahhh never seen anything like it. Have a great day."
(Audio) Day 11 - Kevin
Kevin: " Today's white out was quite amazing and ahhh and in a way the coolest part was ahh I was actually listening to my ipod and ahh (cough) on the ipod I was listening in to a book called ahh "blindness" by Jose Saramago, quite a, quite a well known book, and ahh it's about people that actually go blind. though as they go blind, instead of going ink black blindness they go milky white blindness, and err it was exactly what we were seeing ourselves. Like we could see nothing but white, and err you loose... there's a sense of vertigo and we were very much... I kept on thinking to myself, the way I was using my poles was like a preying mantis with it's huge and err huge arms there probing ahead to see where drops had happened and like sort of sort of fall off things. Very tough day. But we still got our miles in and ahhh we're all pretty shattered and hopefully we'll have an easier day tomorrow, but there's another storm seemingly rolling in right now. I like to wish my my wife Vicky a happy birthday today, Happy Birthday sweetheart, Bye."
Tuesday December 16 2008 :: posted by Anton Stranc
