Life Beyond the Beaker

  No not the marine mammal kind....the epic peak that I've been wanting to climb up since I got here! Orca is outside of the recreational travel area, so Malcy our station leader and I headed up to Orca on skidoos outside the flag line. It has been snowing heavily the past week so the snow is very powdery and thick so we dumped the skidoos and skied to the windscoop of Orca. As you can see below we were skiing with a line attached to us as there are a few crevasses around.     After dumping our skis we climbed down the windscoop with our ice axes, then we trundled up to the start of the climb to one of the ridges through knee high deep snow - good resistance training! In the photo above we started what turned into a 7 pitch climb. This type of climbing is called mixed climbing, where we where crampons on our boots and use ice axes (where possible) to climb up the routes with snow, ice and rock.   This was a fun part of the climb as the slabs...

I have just come back from my little camping retreat away from base. Everyone from base has two weeks off during the winter in Antarctica to get away from the base and have a little holiday away. Each person gets assigned their own field guide for that week. Our aims of the week (decided as soon as we heard we were going together) 1. Good food, 2. Photography, 3. Climbing and Boarding. This is the Pyramid tent that we slept in for the week, this photo was taken at the end of the week. You can see the snow built up around the tent. The skidoos and sledges were parked into wind and with a large gap between them to prevent drifting. Ali Rose and I set off early on Sunday to capture the good weather window of the day because the start of the week was looking high in winds and precipitation. We pitched the pyramid tent and arranged the rest of camp.  Once we pitched camp at Trident East, we headed to Trident, the big peak that was behind our camp. We did a snowy/ice climb u...

Here is a little reflection of the past few weeks of summer at Rothera and how we entered Winter in style. There have been lots of animals around the base keeping us entertained. Most people do not like fur seals as they move pretty fast, they are like a bear/dog that sounds like something out of another planet.  Adelie penguins are still dotted all around base, they are usually found in a large group near the waters edge.  I think this is the only place on earth where the shores are not littered with plastic or other waste...or is there microplastics hiding beneath the massive chunks of ice...I will let you know....! With the days getting shorter the lighting from the sunsets and sunrise have been incredible. I actually left my dinner one night to take this photo as this lenticular cloud lit up spectacularly above Reptile ridge. The moon reflecting around some bergs. March was so so busy. We waved off the Shackleton that had all of the summers on it; so ...