Antarctica Blog

Airlift day again. The work has been so steady since our last flight that we decided to take advantage of today’s flight. Because business tends to drop off after the August 15th holiday (Ascension) the bulk of the load was non-perishables for next season. Since the field where we previously did our airlifts was recently closed to preserve wetlands, we are now doing the flights from a different field up the valley where a couple of other huts do their stage their loads from. Since we are now working more closely with the other huts I have been able to see how they are organized compared to us. I feel much better about our operation after seeing how other people run theirs (at least the re-supply aspect). I won’t go into detail about why I now feel this way but I can show you in this picture how nicely packed my helo-bag (the one on the left) is as compared to the one of our sister hut, Dalmazzi. Actually, they had to borrow ours because they didn’t have any. Helo-bags seem like kind of a strange thing to forget before an airlift.
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Finally feeling better. I have been struggling with this stomach virus/cold all week. We are bracing ourselves for another busy weekend. Thursday is filling up again already. Last Saturday went really smoothly. The overbooking worked itself out in the end when a party of 4 failed to show up leaving beds for the entire party of 5 who reserved late. An interesting note about this group is that they were our first party to Paraglide from the summit of the Jorasses. We had an individual take off from halfway down the route earlier in the season but this was the first guided group to go off the summit. Their guide has paraglided from the 7 highest summits of the world.
Amy and Eric left yesterday. We successfully convinced them to stay another day so we could actually have some fun together without the circus that ensues on weekends. Eric and I did some climbing around the hut and Amy and Luci laid in the sun. A couple of guides found out about the potato canon (canone di patate) so Eric and I had to give them a demonstration. I launched one so far that you couldn’t see the potato anymore. They hiked down from Boccalatte and across the valley to a friend’s hut for the night. The made it just before a huge thunderstorm hit. Today they were supposed to take the bus to Lake Como. They will be missed.
Since we have been so busy it looks like we are most likely going to be making another airlift next Wednesday. The Hutkeepers Association has worked out an arrangement with the regional government to help cover the cost of airlifts if we fly on certain days and fly out trash. Wednesday the 11th is that day and with the rising temperatures and increased volume of customers we have been flying though our supplies of drinks. Here is an entertaining picture of Luci entertaining.
Yesterday and today’s afternoon thunderstorms have been a god-sent. It has really started to dry out up here and the high temps have not been good for the conditions. Since rain frightens people away, it has given a little bit of a chance to recover our stamina before the next bout of weekend.

I know I have posted a lot of moonrise photos but they just seem to get better and better. Tomorrow, Saturday, is the full moon and there is a good chance that it will be a full house as well. The past week has been extremely busy and eventful for us. It all really started on Thursday when we had an unexpected near-full house. It is rare that we fill up mid-week. Friday was relatively calm with only two climbers sleeping and eating. We finished dinner early and I was struggling to keep Luci from going to bed at 7:30 when two climbers arrived unannounced from above. They had attempted the traverse from Rifugio Torino and were force to take an escape route when an afternoon thunderstorm closed in on them. We pretty quickly discovered that they were from the UK, Rob and Steward. In the course of conversation we discovered that Rob is a fellow Antarctican who works on the British base Rothera as a Field Instructor (F-Stop as we call it at McMurdo). But, for the upcoming season, he is going to be working on a joint-nation mapping project. The area they are mapping is a costal area called Pine Island, which is actually closer to the Partiot Hills than either McMurdo or Rothera but since mostly American equipment is going to be used the project is going to launch from McMurdo. This means that he is going to deploy from Christchurch, possibly on the same flight that Luci and I are on. After they arrive in MacTown the project will spend a month training before they go into the field to begin surveying. Given the strange coincidence we spent a good part of that night and most of the next day sharing Antarctica stories and telling Rob what to expect at McMurdo.
The eventful part of the week really began on Sunday when I hiked out to do the shopping for our airlift. The airlift was actually on Wednesday but I needed to go to Chamonix to pick up a couple of friends who are here visiting. Amy and Eric are currently traveling from Antarctica, where we met them, on a ‘Round-the-world ticket with 15 stops. They arrived in Paris last week from India to see the last stage of the Tour de France as it arrived in the city. Then they took a night train to Chamonix where I met them on Monday. Since their train arrived early in the morning, I needed to spend the night in Chamonix. So I called up our friends Rob and Steward who I had agreed to meet in Chamonix where Steward has a very small apartment on the 7th floor of one of the tallest buildings in the town. Steward told me that that they recently found a trap door onto the roof ant they were in the middle of a grilling session on the roof of Chamonix. He said, “If you walk to the station and look towards the city center, on the roof of the McDonalds building you will see three clowns with a barbecue. That’s us.”
So I spent the night with them on the top of the town and met Amy and Eric at the station on Monday morning. We spent Monday hiking around Rifugio Bonatti (another hut in the valley) and stayed there that night. On Tuesday the big shopping day started. Because we did a big re-supply flight of non-perishables last fall, we still have a big inventory so the shopping was relatively light; only one bag of 500kg. Having A&E to help was nice and they had fun distracting me (about half way through the shopping I found a 5 gallon bucket of mayonnaise in the shopping cart). I was happier than ever to have Roberto, the guy with the big truck, around to transport the supplies because we were 3 people crammed into a Fiat Punto convertible like so many clowns in a car.
Having just arrived from India, A&E had no sleeping bags or warn clothes and we were experiencing a light cold spell. Despite this fact we decided to camp in the valley so that we would be close to the heliport for the 10am airlift. They figured that if they slept with all their clothes on and wrapped themselves in whatever sheets they had they would be warm enough. We all froze. In the morning I was sick. Loading the helibag was torture but the airlift was successful. The three of us flew up together and I went to bed almost immediately for 24hrs straight. I am still only about 90% but well enough to work.
It is great having Amy and Eric around. It has been relatively busy so they have been helping us with the regular chores. There have been brief periods of calm in which we have been able to go for hike/climbs around the hut and in which Eric and I have been able to perfect potato launching
from my potato gun. Tonight is Saturday night and we are overbooked. We try to avoid this but today five people wouldn’t take no for an answer. As it stands we have 5 people sleeping on the floor. It is going to be crazy but at the moment there is calm.

The weekend was busy as expected here at Rifugio Boccalatte. Saturday brought us an interesting mix of local climbing heroes from both the French and Italian sides of the range. For a while we were over-booked and were offering places on the floor to sleep. It was hard to be certain what the weather was going to do and it kept us guessing until the last moment. A group of 4 canceled Saturday morning because of the uncertainty of the weather, which left our final dinner count at 21; 16 bound for the summit of the Grandes Jorasses and five planning to climb the Tour des Jorasses. The rain was intermittent up until 2am when the climbers usually wake to tackle the mountain. Upon exiting the hut, climbers encountered an eerie fog around the hut, which was too much for some who went back to bed. Much to the luck of all parties, the weather took a turn for the better making the climbing conditions better than they have been in years. In all, 14 summited on the Grandes Jorasses, 2 went back to bed, and the 5 found the Tour (a grade 6 rock climb) too wet to climb.

We have finally entered a more summer-like weather system; nice in the morning, rain and clouds in the afternoon. Today was particularly bad with thunderstorms and spells of downpours. It seems that the rain has excited some glacial activity and yesterday we woke to find a large ice-fall had broken off the Grandes Jorasses Glacier (the one behind the hut). A couple of very large compact-car-sized pieces slid 100m down the moraine and stopped in the middle of the hiking trail. Where the serac clove off the glacier you could very clearly see the stratification of years of ice accumulation.

Christophe Profit has made this his new summer home and staging point for his work as a guide. He was up again last night for the 4th time in a week and a half and is coming back tomorrow to climb the Tour. Much thanks to him, the business has been steady despite the uncertain weather and the fact that he has blazed the trail to the summit and is always successful in his attempts encourages our guests.

Finally the sun is shining. Yesterday a well-known Chamonix guide, Christophe Profit, along with two friends summited on via the Classic Route and said the conditions were great. They were the first in ten days to summit. Good news for us that someone of reputation in the climbing world was happy with the conditions and will be promoting the climbing on our mountain. With a good weather forecast through Sunday, the calls have already started coming in. If the weather holds out we might have a busy weekend for a change.

With the sun and fresh snow, the snowboarding has been great. Yesterday, I climbed up to about 3100m on the glacier and made a descent of about 300m. There are a series of big snowfields that are only connected now by some very thin cover, but I can descent almost all the way to the hut on them. It is melting fast and I probably won’t be able to make such a long run by the weekend. The snowfield above the hut still has a few weeks in it though. Today I went up and build a jump and took a couple of runs. By afternoon, the snow gets pretty slushy and it is more like surfing than snowboarding, but it is half July after all.

Today is a week of bad weather. Despite the cancellations on Saturday night we had two unexpected guests, a dentist and a veterinarian from the Bologna area. Needless to say they didn’t make it very far up the Grandes Jorasses and they were back in bed when we got up in the morning. It has been snowing lightly for three days. Last night the temperature dropped to almost -3°C (26.6°F). To convert from degrees Celsius to degrees Fahrenheit you follow the very simple formula: °C9/5+32=°F. I’ll let you use the new formula to figure out the daytime temp which has rarely gone above 3°C. Most of our thermometers are in Celsius. The only thermometer we have in °F is our meat thermometer, which I bought in the US because here in Italy they cost a fortune.
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Bad weather has forced us indoors for the past 5 days. Monday started OK and all of our 4th of July party made it out before the bad weather struck. Mid-morning we received a cell-phone call from a climbing party up at the Canzio Bivouac on the Rochfort ridge. Their intent was to climb the Jorasses Ridge to point Walker and descend to Boccalatte via the Normal ascent route: a common itinerary. But when they awoke to snow they realized that the worsening weather meant they needed to make an escape from the ridge. They called us for advice. The escape route from the ridge is sketchy but another party descended successfully a week before. It involves rappelling about 500m down a rock face of questionable quality and then traversing a heavily crevassed and seldom passed route across the glacier. They said they would weigh their options.

As the weather got worse a couple of climbers with a guide from Trentino, on the other side of the Alps, arrived to stay the night. They knew the weather was going to be bad but said they were going to come up anyway. A couple of hours later
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The 4th was great up here. It fell on the peak of the summer sporting season. There was the second stage of the tour de France, Wimbledon, French Formula 1 GP, Brazilian Moto GP, and the final game of the European Cup soccer championship between Greece and Portugal (Greece won)! We celebrated in form and to make it even more authentic I was not the only American. By chance another American showed up to solo the Jorasses (the mountain behind Rifugio Boccalatte). His name was Tracy; originally from Louisiana now resident of Holland. He comes often to the Alps to climb and chose the Grandes Jorasses for this trip. The climb is not particularly kind to soloist so he returned to the hut early and we spent the 4th climbing around the glacial tongue in an area I had never been to before. I got some pictures of the hut from a unique perspective. See if you can find it. It is very difficult if not impossible to get a picture of the front of the hut without a helicopter so the hut only shows up in the picture as the south wall with two solar panels on it.

Since we had no reservations we invited Tracey to stay for a 4th of July barbecue. Luci and I flew up a rack of ribs and we found some Heinz BBQ sauce to accompany it. We bought a color TV this year but we discovered that our old 5” B&W gets better reception so we watched the races it instead. We rarely have reservations on Sundays but there are always stragglers who arrive unannounced; usually on descent from a climb that originated at another hut down the Mt Blanc range or from France. People very often underestimate the length of time it takes to do these climbs and can show up any time of the night wanting refuge.

Last night there was a group of climbers who started climbing here early in the morning but returned late from their climb. One of their friends who finished ahead of them waited for them here most of the day and partook in the rib feed. I don’t have any pictures because ribs and photographic equipment don’t go well together. Just as we were elbow deep in BBQ sauce 3 Frenchman arrived from the Rochfort Traverse, hungry and wanting dinner, soon followed by the 2 awaited Italian climbers, tired and not so hungry but still wanting dinner. So, I put the last of the sausages on the grill and whipped up some mashed potatoes. After feeding all of them, the groups kept arriving. There was a pair of Slovaks who were just coming to the hut to sleep for the night, 2 Genovese Italians, 2 more French who also arrived from the Traverse and just stopped for a drink before continuing to the valley. Word was that there was another group of 3 French who might either arrive at night or the next morning (they arrived this morning at about 9).

Some people stuck around to watch the Greece v. Portugal game which finished 1-0; a huge surprise to soccer fans around the world.

We had our opening flight yesterday. We flew up two Helo bags worth of supplies; among which was a small grill. I set it up immediately and we hadd grilled sausages, zucchini, and red pepper. The 4th of July is just around the corner and this year it is not going to slip by unnoticed. All the shopping for the opening of the hut went very smoothly. We hiked up to the hut last weekend to put up gutters and get the water hooked up. We had a full house on Saturday and had to bring up the supplies on our back. On Monday we hiked out
and over to a friend’s hut for the night. On Tuesday we drove around to the various shops where we get supplies in Aosta. We are using a smaller car this year (a FIAT Punto) so we are not able to transport our own supplies to the Helo pad like we usually do. But we found out about this guy that takes care of ground transport for a small fee. It was cheaper than renting a truck to haul it all and was considerable less laborious than in previous years.
Yesterday we had beautiful weather for the flight. We flew up to the hut first so that we could unhook the sling-load. We had the rest of the day to ourselves unpacking and playing with all our new gadgets to keep us entertained for the summer. Last night’s moonrise was stupendous: almost full.

This is our last week in Milan. We have been here over a month and since my brother Jesse left it has been somewhat uneventful. I am ready to get up to the hut. We did our first round of shopping today; for kitchen supplies. We leave Milan for Valle d’Aosta for the summer on Thursday.
The failed canoeing mission Jesse and I embarked on drove me to try to find someone who rented real canoes. We found a company who rents them right on the banks of the Ticino and arranges pick-ups, too. This weekend, we managed to convince Luci’s parents to come with us down the river. Luci’s father wasn’t hard to convince as he is trying to accustom himself to life in a boat after he retires in the next couple of years. Her mother took a little more convincing but all in all it was surprisingly easy to get them in a boat (I am not sure if we’ll be able to get them back in, though). The day went really well and they caught on really quickly. It really is a beautiful river; not too deep, shallow in places but with round, smooth stones in the bottom. But, at the end of the day (and 40km) Ida and Renato were ready to stop. Unfortunately, there was nowhere convenient to stop and meet our pick-up so we had to keep paddling for another hour. I think this kind of soured them on the romance of the idea; which, to an Italian, is the most important part of the thing.
Today is the summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere which means it is the first day of summer; though, for our friends still in Antarctica it is the deepest day of the winter season. From what we have been hearing, there has been the worst storm of the past 30 years at McMurdo. You can read all about it in the mid-winter edition of The Antarctic Sun. Luci and I are both in the green to go back to McMurdo. We passed our medical and dental screening and are now offically Physically Qualified (PQed). As soon as we both got PQed Luci got another job offer; the Greenhouse Manager. As she was reluctant to back out of the contract with Supply she refused the offer, despite the fact that she really wanted the job. She got a reply back saying that the departments had already been in communication and she was free to decide with no consequence. She she took the greenhouse job. So now we are in the “green” again. This year we are even deploying from Portland, ME rather than Boston which should make things easier for whoever has to take us to the airport. The first flight of Mainbody is scheduled to leave Christchurch for McMurdo on the 5th of October this year. We just got our return tickets to the US from Italy for the 21st of september so hopefully we’ll have more than 48hrs there like we did last year.