Wind, glaciers and broken skidoos

We had a good journey the other day over to the east of Liverpool Land to deliver an equipment depot for West Lancashire Scouts who are coming in the summer. There were at least four sledge loads of kit to carry and the depot site was a long way up a glacier which had to be accessed from the east coast of Liverpool Land. We had to get across Liverpool Land and we used a valley called Kalkdal which cuts right across it. This was the first time we had used my glacier travel system for a long journey on a glacier and we took the opportunity to traverse a number of glacier systems, going up one glacier and coming down a different one back into Kalkdal.

 

It all seemed to work well apart from the descent down the last glacier, where Paul seemed to burn his brakes out down the steep hill.

 Recceing route up glacier snout

 Lunch stop before roping up

 

 Roping up skidoos for the glacier

 Laying depot

 Ready to leave depot to travel further up the glacier

 

 Decent back down into Kalkdal

View from rear skidoo. The black pipe over rope is to stop damage should you run over it.

A bit of a stop to operations in otherwise fine weather came when a strong wind sprang up covering everything in spindrift for a couple of days. Work outside was impossible, so we spend the day in the Weather Haven. The main problem however, was the amount of spindrift piling up against the door threatening to trap us inside. It was having to be dug out every 15mins, clearly a task that needed sorting. The solution was to cover the pit by the doorway with upturned sledges forming a little cave with a small entrance with a snow cute that you had to slide down to get in.

After the wind. - Sledge roof to stop door drifting up from spindrift.

  

Emerging from the tunnel

The other excitement was that one of the four skidoos completely blew up on the way to Leo's kit depot at Sydkap meaning we had to abandon it and carry a passenger for most of the journey. Once we had got rid of Leo's kit we picked it up on the way back and loaded in on to our special rescue sledge which worked well, towing it back to CNP at about 30kmph. Two skidoos down, three to go!

Lashing the broken skidoo onto the rescue sledge.