Final days: the mountains are in sight, as is the chaos…

11 June: How lovely it is! Ah, how lovely it is when you can just slide over the flat, especially with these beautiful mountains before us.

11 June: How lovely it is! Ah, how lovely it is when you can just slide over the flat, especially with these beautiful mountains before us.

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  • 11 June: Landscapes of the final days: The mountains are now slowly appearing on the horizon. But before reaching them, what a terrain!
  • 11 June:
  • 11 June: Always these blocks! There are still these blasted blocks at the bottom of the old leads and, often, the ice breaks up after the first passage of the sledge; the person behind then has to first balance the sledge before climbing over it.
  • 11 June: We're getting lost among the ice: Looking for the 'beast'!!!
  • 11 June: Passage of a small-scale compression zone: Passage of a small-scale ridge with water just behind it. We've crossed more than 50 like this today.
  • 11 June:
  • 11 June: We have to get over this block: A delicate operation because we have to get over this floating block in order to cross this little lead. It's the only way to get to the ice sheet on the other side of the lead and to benefit from a few hundred met
  • 11 June: How lovely it is! Ah, how lovely it is when you can just slide over the flat, especially with these beautiful mountains before us.
  • 11 June: First views of the coast And here is the scene of our play today, with the mountains before us.
  • 11 June: We're docking... Let's dock!
  • 11 June: The boss with his cap: Here's the boss wearing his legendary cap. This is what I wear when it's hot and there's little wind.
  • 11 June: Wrong direction: Absolutely! They don't always go in the right direction, these horrible little beasts!
  • 12 June: Beginning of the day: To start the day, water and little leads as usual. The atmosphere is fine and everything will be OK even though we're in total fog. We can't and won't see the mountains.
  • 12 June: A bird flies by... A snow petrel that has come to see who these intruders are and, furthermore, yesterday we saw a seal too.
  • 12 June: Serious business starts up again. It's only the beginning of the last hours of the day. Fortunately, this is old ice and everything is still quite stable, and the blocks at the bottom of the leads hold most of the time, which will save us preciou
  • 12 June: Come on, let's go into the attack ! This is the great area of friction between the
  • 12 June: In the morning: do I need to comment?
  • 12 June: Pulling and pulling again, sometimes to get across some 4-metre high walls. Up to 2 metres high, we each pull on our own but, beyond, we have to work together... And there's obviously no time for taking photographs.
  • 12 June: Sometimes we fall into holes up to our shoulders. It appears that we still have some 6 to 8 km like this tomorrow... The unevenness goes from 1.5m to 6 or 7m high in certain places. And everything is covered with a thick layer of snow that hides
  • 12 June: Four 10-minute breaks in 11 hours of walking. One compression after another. And so on and so forth. Don't forget that we only take four 10-minute breaks in 11 hours of walking: so it's a really hard slog. But we know that there'll be an end.
  • 12 June: Another holiday resort... Another place. Here we're spoiled with choices except concerning the path to take. As there isn't a single one, I go in every direction because I can't see the mountains. Then, I climb up on a mound every 200m to be as e
  • 12 June: These things are tall and completely phantasmagorical. If I didn't know where I was, I'd be afraid of this imaginary world.
  • 12 June: At last, the evening arrives... It's here that we're going to stop this evening and set up camp. We've got to eat and sleep a little.

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The Coldest Journey (Sir Ranulph Fiennes & Team)

Antarctic 2012-2013 - ongoing

25.10.2012

Sir Ranulph Fiennes is back in the Antarctic for a world first. He will lead a team of explorers to conquer…

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