Trip Reports

Antarctic Voyager - 6 to 21 Dec '11

Antarctic Voyager
Trip Report

Written by Leader Mungo Ross, January 2012

It’s a month already since the Antarctic trip, been home for Christmas and Hogmanay and to ease into a New Year, with time to reflect and consider the highs and lows of 2011; fitting that it is exactly 100 years since the highs and lows of the history of the exploration of the South Pole. We were able to celebrate Amundsen’s success of arriving there on the 14th of December 1910 by putting foot on the same continent and today, the 18th of January exactly a century later can only guess at the disappointment of Scott and his men to discover that they had been beaten to their goal. We are constantly being told, even sold, the idea of “living your dream”, “striving for ideals”, “going way beyond your limitations” and what more obvious way than walking to the Pole, climbing Everest, or flying to the moon; Jagged Globe doesn’t do that last one – yet!, but does provide the opportunity to realise dreams and explore our sense of adventure in the mountains of the world – including Antarctica.

What Scott and Amundsen would make of the modern tourist industry in their chosen environment (like Hillary in the Khumbu) is anyone’s guess; if they had hung around for 50 years they could have flown to the pole! But their stories would not read with the same gripping tension and would not have inspired generations of adventurers in their wake. It is impossible for us to even imagine the hardship and suffering of those early explorers, stepping ashore as we do off a comfortable cruise ship dressed in gore-tex, but we still share, and have to deal with the emotions associated with expeditioning. Having committed the time, money, training and preparation to a particular trip, we then have to manage our response to whatever happens – good or bad, success or failure, highs or lows.

This last “Antarctic Voyager” offered all of that. To travel to Tierra del Fuego, cross the Drake Passage, spend a few days exploring the Antarctic Peninsula with the opportunity to attempt even modest peaks all in only two weeks from home: whales, penguins, icebergs, wandering albatross – everyone’s seen Frozen Planet, and it really IS like that! So to be disappointed that there was too much fresh snow hiding the crevasses and unstable on steeper slopes to deny the climbing group much scope for Alpine mountaineering, limiting us to a few roped excursions to summits of outlying islands, seems little to be down about in the context of Scott a hundred years ago. But this is now and that was then, and we still can not control the outcome, only our reactions. If you want to see and experience the Antarctic with the potential opportunity for some very exciting exploratory mountaineering (still plenty of unclimbed peaks and not many footprints in the snow) – here is the means. It might not offer the epic proportion of Amundsen’s high or Scott’s low, like all adventure travel it certainly carries no guarantee of summits, but does guarantee the opportunity to explore your own sense of adventure in one of the most beautiful places on this planet.

Mungo Ross, Leader« | Next report »

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