We awake to a absolutely stunning day - beautiful clear weather, with the big peaks wearing cloud caps. Everybody stumbles out of the tents at dawn to take sunrise shots, then we eat another big breakfast and pack up to continue the slog up the Clemenceau glacier up onto the icefield (Shackleton Glacier).
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| Sunrise on the east face of Mt. Clemenceau. | Crevasses on the Clemenceau glacier, below Duplicate Mountain. |
Since the weather is so good, we decide to stop at the high point on the glacier, set up camp early and climb Apex mountain in the afternoon. Apex sits at the top of two major glaciers; the Shackleton and Apex. By the time we get to the top of the glacier, the sun is beating down on us and the temperature feels like we're in the tropics. We dump the packs, set up camp, take snow baths, and collapse in the sun. Because the hot sun has made the snow very soft, we delay the ascent of Apex until evening, and nap the afternoon away.
By mid-afternoon the clouds are starting to build, which seems to be the weather pattern in this area; clear and sunny weather at the beginning of the day only lasts until mid-afternoon, when moisture rising out of the valleys slowly forms thick clouds which then often take a full day to clear.
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Normand heading out for a walk from Camp 3, on the top of the Clemenceau / Shackleton Glacier. The thing that looks like an unfinished igloo are walls that shelter our designated outhouse. When camping on a glacier, it's pretty important to have shelter from the wind when you drop your pants!! Normally you build snow walls around the crapper, kitchen, and around each tent. We didn't in this case because the snow was not deep enough to make ALL those walls, so we just made the most important ones. |
Around 9:00 we're sitting around having dinner and large clear-sky patches in the otherwise heavy cloud cover are passing by. A sign of better weather tomorrow? Or just sucker holes? In one of them, we see an incredibly bright satellite heading nearly due south. It's the International Space Station! Watching that beautiful point of light fly overhead takes us, for a moment, from the world of snow and ice that has been our home for the last few days, and back to civilization and the world of science and technology. And then it's gone, and we're still on the glacier. Tomorrow we're walking out, and it's going to take us all day to cover the same distance that the station covers in a second or two.
©2002 Front Range Publishing