Glaciers

By 8am we were all at the airport loading a huge pile of supplies into a sling net for the helicopter to take up to the Annette Plateau. I went up with the first flight with the job of pointing out our chosen drilling location to our pilot Brendan. Unfortunately the GPS co-ordinates were wrong (!) so I had to make a best guess using the footprints of the radar traverses which were still visible. After landing and unloading the net, the heli flew away leaving me with the mountains, the glacier, the sun and the silence – for a short time at least. I started to sort out the gear and soon two planes landed beside me, with the rest of the team and more gear on board. After we had unloaded, a short walk around the area showed that my judgement of the drill location was about 80 metres out so we had to drag the gear pile to the correct position.   The day was spent putting up the drill shelter and digging a snow pit under it’s protective cover. We also put up the tents and organised the equipment to start drilling the next day. It was a beautiful clear night when we turned in, with a bracing minus 12 degrees C discouraging prolonged stargazing….

 Today I jumped into a helicopter with Lawrence Kees and Alice Doughty from Victoria University Wellington. We flew up to the Annette Plateau to do some further radar work. I took the opportunity to test the snow conditions for securing tents and see if there were any possible snow caving sites nearby as a back-up. I dug a snow pit about two metres deep and then used my avalanche probe to feel deeper down. It was mainly soft snow with a few slightly denser layers. At about 4 metres deep I could feel the hard ice of the last summer surface. This means that in order to secure our tents against very strong winds we will have to use lots of ‘deadmen’ – large sacks filled with snow and buried to act as anchors. Tent pegs – even snow stakes would be no good in these conditions. This Photo shows Lawrence and Alice setting of to traverse up and down to complete the radar survey, I took a walk around the edge of the glacier to see if there were any suitable sites for snow caving. I was looking for steep angled snow slopes of drifted snow at least 2.5 – 3m deep. By probing around I found a good spot that was within about 2 – 300 metres of our intended drill location. This was great – it was a reassuring safety back up for our accommodation on the mountain. The helicopter returned to collect us at about 1 o’clock. It was carrying a sling load off ice core boxes. Uwe had obviously decided that the weather forecast was good enough to go ahead with the drilling from tomorrow. The short flight back to the airport gave us a spectacular view of Mount Cook seen up the Hooker Valley. When I got back to the Lodge, the team told me about the improved weather forecast for the next week. Action Stations for tomorrow! Paul left as planned to go back home to the US, leaving five of us: Yulan, Xinsheng Dan, Uwe and myself to make up the drill team. If all goes according to plan, we will be up on the Annette Plateau for several days and I will tell you how we get on when we are back down in civilisation again.

Today the weather was an improvement over the last few days. There was a cold southerly at first after which the skies cleared. We went for a walk up the Hooker Valley, past the Mueller Lake, and up to the Hooker Glacier lake. The mountains on all sides are spectacular, with Mount Cook dominating the view in the background. At the Hooker Glacier lake we could see the terminal face of the glacier. You can see curved rock layers in the ice where it is breaking off into the lake. There are quite a few of these proglacial lakes in the area, and all of them are expanding rapidly these days. The water undercuts the ice face until large pieces break off and float away as icebergs. The remaining ice below water level then becomes buoyant and breaks off in huge chunks which then pop up to the surface from below. Check out here to see a video we took of this happening back in February! On the way back to the car park, we saw a couple of huge avalanches crashing down the East Face of Mount Sefton. These were the biggest avalanches I have ever seen, and must have involved thousands of tonnes of ice coming of the vertical ice cliffs. I even managed to capture one of the avalanches on video:

 Today we finally drove over to Mount Cook village. Lawrence Kees The large living area of our base at the New Zealand Alpine Club’s Unwin lodge was soon covered with STUFF. The white boxes are for storing ice cores to keep them frozen as they get transported down from the mountain and into a freezer or freezer truck. They are very useful for storage of gear and food that has to be taken up as you can see in the pic. (photo 4) A few sundry items in the gear list include: Flood lamps A generator for the electric drill and emergency backup generator Hand warmers, Radios and satellite phones, Snow shovels, snow stakes, ice axes, harnesses and ropes, 5 Tents (including spares) , sleeping bags, sleeping mats, Bamboo flags for marking routes in blizzards And lots and lots of food The weather forecast for tomorrow looks possible for flying, Lawrence, Paul and myself are all set to get going early with the radar and enough gear to stay put if we get stuck in bad weather. – a basic and highly possible situation with the unstable conditions of recent weeks

Today we flew up to the Annette Plateau in a Pilatus Porter ski plane. We had a big pile of gear – boxes of Radar parts, ice axes, crampons, snow shoes, food and emergency tents, sleeping gear and food. The weather was sunny and still – having expected bitter cold, we had come a bit overdressed and had to peel off a few layers to cool down. We planned our radar survey to cross the glacier in three parallel lines 250 metres apart, with another line down the centre at 90 degrees. We roped up on two ropes, just in case there were any snow covered crevasses ready to swallow one of us up, although as glaciers go the area looked very safe, with no visible cracks onthe surface at all.  This photo shows Lawrence and Matt pulling the high frequesncy (500 MHz) Radar between them. Here Lawrence and Brian are getting ready to use the lower frequency 25 MHz radar. It has a 13 metre long antenna which is pulled along the ground. Both systems worked very well and showed that the ice thickness was a maximum of 150 metres. In the final picture you can see our tracks as we passed over on the return flight to the airport. It was a successful days work! Although we still have four other sites to survey, the weather forecast is very bad for the next week or so. We have decided to curtail this visit to the mountains and return again when the weather clears up. I hope it will be soon!