- To the Rense readers of this weekly column... Each
week, you will be treated to specific adventures from around the world
by six continent world traveler Frosty Wooldridge. These unique and uncommon
stories stem from his bicycle travels, mountain climbing escapades, canoeing
trips, hut to hut mountain ski trips, backpacking, sports moments, Scuba,
animals encounters and much more. They will captivate, enthrall and entertain.
They will also give you a sense of adventure and inspire you to explore
the world on your own. Most stories only take five minutes to read but
will refresh you for the rest of your day. They will inspire in you a
sense of wonder with the natural world. You will laugh, cry, sigh, sweat
and experience life on the outer edge of high adventure.
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- CHAPTER 1
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- WHITE, COLD AND ETERNAL
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- "Great God, this is an awful place." --Robert
Falcon Scott, 1912
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- When I walked outside the barracks, a 120-mile per hour
Katabatic wind screamed above the rooftops. At 80 below zero Fahrenheit,
the chill index nearly doubled that mark. Every breath of air sucked tiny
ice crystals deep into my lungs. If I hadn't been wearing my extreme cold
weather gear and goggles, my skin would have turned to ice in seconds and
my eyeballs would have frozen in their sockets.
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- Around noon that day, a low pressure
center system moved over the ice. Following it, a raging, swirling windstorm
called a 'Herbie', raced in across the Ross Ice Shelf. South of McMurdo,
two mountain peaks protruding from the ice, stood out on the white horizon.
Named Black and White Islands, they became the starting point for what
was called, "Herbie Alley." In excess of 190 mile per hour winds
spawned between those two peaks. McMurdo Station represented the ten pins
at the end of the bowling alley. Those raging winds slammed their 'bowling
ball' fury into our tiny outpost for 8 hours.
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- While working upstairs in the Galley Building, where
everyone met for dining, I watched the sky grow progressively worse. First,
the 'Herbie' winds kicked up--blowing electrical wires wildly back and
forth between their poles. Flags rippled flat in the blizzard. The sky,
already overcast in its usual battleship gray, brightened as if someone
had washed the clouds with laundry detergent.
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- Following on the wind's heels-snow.
Not big flakes, but fine, misty crystal grains like powdered sugar, jetted
through the air horizontally with no intention of landing. If they did
touch down, it was like a jet fighter on the deck of an aircraft carrier--they
bounced once and headed back into the sky. Winds blowing 190 miles per
hour did not let anything that wasn't anchored stay on the ground.
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- At McMurdo Station, Antarctica, (77 degrees
51'S 166 degrees 40' E), three weather conditions existed: The calmest,
'Condition Three', meant fair weather, and working outside was allowed.
'Condition Two' meant the temperatures and winds were dangerous enough
that people must work in pairs for mutual safety and being outside was
discouraged. When 'Condition One' was called, everyone was confined to
the building where they were located. It was considered so dangerous--they
couldn't walk back to their barracks. Usually, the visibility was less
than 30 feet and temperatures dropped from 60 to 100 below zero Fahrenheit.
Once, it dropped 65 degrees in 12 minutes!
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- By two o'clock, I looked out the window
into white nothingness. Buildings only 50 feet away had vanished. Snow
crystals swirled in meaningless, rampaging blasts across the whiteness.
It was like looking into the face of a cloud, but I was inside the cloud
while standing on the ground.
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- A man walked into our office room, "We're
going to call a 'Condition One' in fifteen minutesyou're instructed to
relocate to your barracks, or you will be forced to remain here."
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- Several people in the room raced toward
their jackets. No one wanted to be caught in the office if the storm lasted
for two or more days. I picked up my parka and 'Bugs Bunny Boots' and
walked toward the end of the building. After pulling on my extreme cold
weather gear plus my goggles, I grabbed the door handle, similar to the
handles that locked down metal hatches on battleships, and twisted it open.
A blast of wind smashed the door against me. At that moment, the 'Herbie'
was no silent movie outside my window.
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- A howling, vicious, body slamming wind
demon-fully in my face--stalked me like a gunslinger itching for a fight.
Without warning, he shoved his pistol right up my left nostril screaming,
"I dare you to come outside."
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- My roommate Jack walked up behind me.
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- "This is some kind of nasty weather," he said.
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- We had a few choice words and lunged out the door. At
the bottom
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- of the steps, a 'blizzard guide rope' , with orange flags
attached every 20 feet, lay on the ground. It vanished 30 feet away in
the snow and wind. The blizzard guide ropes connected every building when
a storm approached. They were the single most important lifelines for
every person living at McMurdo and were the only sure means of making it
safely from one building to another.
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- We grabbed the line and headed toward
our barracks 300 feet away. Within seconds, we moved through a swirling
snow tunnel with no beginning and no end. The wind howled past us in gusts
because the buildings, which caused its erratic swirling, had broken it.
It was like being surrounded by four prizefighters hitting us from four
different sides. We kept taking 'punches' with no way to defend against
them. We reached hand over hand--grasping our lifeline until we made it
to a snowbank in front of our barracks. We dropped down over the snowbank
and climbed the steps.
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- The barracks door blew out of my hand
when I unlatched it. Inside the foyer, snow had blown through the cracks
in the door and had piled up a foot deep in places. We climbed the stairs
and walked down the hallway to our room. On the windows, elegant shapes,
the texture of cotton candy, designed themselves from snow being plastered
against the glass.
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- By 6:00 P.M., the winds abated so they
called us for dinner. We crossed the same 300-foot blizzard line to the
Galley. Hot food never tasted so good.
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- Back in my room after dinner, I thought
about the time one of my idols had climbed into a pine tree in Yosemite.
He wanted to feel what it was like to climb a tree and ride out a storm.
He lashed himself to the top of it and stayed up all night as it whipped
back and forth in the howling tempest. The wind blew and the rain fell.
Nature savagely pummeled him. He discovered what it was like to be a
tree. John Muir nearly died in the process from exposure. If he could
do it in a tree, I could do it in an Antarctic blizzard.
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- To 'taste' the power of the storm, I bundled into my
cold weather gear and headed outside. I grabbed a separate blizzard rope
at the back door of my barracks and headed into the storm. When the rope
played out, I pulled out 300-feet of my own parachute cord and looped it
onto the main rope. What I was about to do was strictly forbidden. But
I had to find out what that blizzard 'felt' like. From where the main
blizzard rope ended away from the building, I began releasing my own cord
until I couldn't see my barracks anymore. A whiteout engulfed me. I
couldn't see 20 feet. I walked in the direction I guessed was the edge
of the pack ice on McMurdo Sound.
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- Essentially, I was living on a fiord
at the bottom of the world. About 37 miles away from where I stood, Mount
Erebus (meaning 'The Gates of Hell') was a smoking volcano. Across the
Sound was the Royal Society Range of mountains topping out at 13,000 feet.
I couldn't see them through the aspirin purity of the blizzard.
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- Looking back along my steps, my barracks
had vanished in the swirling snows. At that moment, I stared into whiteness.
I turned back toward the pack ice of the Sound. More nothingness and
whiteness.
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- I stood in a white world. Cold tugged
at me through every frigid breath entering my lungs. My facemask froze
up with ice, but the goggles protected my eyes from the stinging wind.
Snow tried to cut through my garments and drift against my cheeks. It
tasted like an ice cube on my tongue. An unfriendly wind whipped past
me as if I was no more than a monument in a cemetery on a cold winter's
day. Around me, nothing living. No smells of any kind. Not a trace of
warmth. Nothing suggesting that where I was standing was meant for humanity.
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- Antarctica was meant for ice and snow--cold
winds and howling storms--glaciers and icebergs. To be there was abnormal.
As I stood knee deep in powdery snow, I realized Antarctica, for all its
beauty, could snuff me out in an hour and not even blink its benign, if
not cruel eyes, at my passing. I looked down at my cold weather garments.
I was coated in fine, powdered sugar snow, which made me look like a moving
Pillsbury Doughboy.
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- Whatever Muir found while riding out
the storm in that tree, I found nothing in that freezing blizzard. I felt
cold, even numb and saw little but what someone might see while staring
into a television when the station had gone off the air.
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- It was time to return to the warmth and
safety of the barracks. I grabbed the cord and headed back. For the life
of me, I couldn't imagine why Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Mawson
and Amundsen wanted to conquer the frozen continent of Antarctica in 1902.
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- Just before he died on his way back from
the South Pole, the great British polar explorer Scott lamented, "Great
God! This is an awful place."
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- Antarctica was white, cold and eternal.
It didn't care what Scott said a century ago.
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- There I stood motionless in a similar storm. I tried
to say something but words failed me. It was horrible, frigid and nothingness
everywhere. Then, I muttered, "Damn, this is incredible!" The
storm continued its fury.
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- Antarctica didn't care what I said, either.
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- Book -- An Extreme Encounter: Antarctica
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- By Frosty Wooldridge
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- For a copy - 1 888 280 7715
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