NOT FAST AND QUITE FURIOUS

Day four. Getting used to life on the glaciers already. It’s quite simple, really. Move on sun up, survive till sun down. Not a single worry in the world…
We had planned to move a further 30km south near a camp spot used by Borge Ousland and Thomas Ulrich in 2003. If good conditions held, we could pull it off in the 10 hours of daylight.

Until the afternoon we moved at a good pace, pulling the sled over flat ground and filled in crevasses. Enjoying the good weather and munching on chocolate while marveling at Cerro Torre and Fitzroy’s enormous west faces. Even from a distance of 12km they looked immense…

Once on the other side of Nunatak Whitte, however, we entered a large crevasse field with dubious snow bridges and huge areas of raw-ice moguls.
Maneuvering an 80-kilo sled through such terrain is a bit like walking an over-excited dog that keeps trying to break its leash. Combine that with countless crevasses and you’ll have yourselves a very interesting afternoon…
It wasn’t long before a couple of falls through snow bridges brought our fast progress down to an almost complete halt.

Come dusk, after hours of painfully slow work through the maze, we found a patch of ice, close to Nunatak Viedma, and flat enough to camp on.

Conditions were appalling. Quite worse than what we anticipated and very much outside our comfort zones. Going through our routine check up via sat phone, we received some more ominous news. A really big storm was about to hit, with hurricane force winds and more than a meter of fresh snow expected. Given the current state of the glaciers, this was going to turn them into a game of Russian roulette with a semi-automatic rifle…
I was furious! Reaching the Falla Reichert was out of the question. Our backup plan to travel south along the Upsala glacier was wildly unreasonable as well. We had only one good choice left – bail before it gets really bad. Objective danger is something one simply cannot argue with.
This was no longer an expedition. It was now a race against Mother Nature at her worst…

On the upside, our camp spot was absolutely epic, set against the 1600m unclimbed alpine faces of the Cordon Mariano Moreno…