OHYAT: Adventures with Frostbite
Jun. 29th, 2011 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO YESTERDAY
Bill, Birdie, and Cherry rounded Hut Point and Cape Armitage and started across the southern coast of Ross Island. Between the Cape and the edge of the Barrier was two miles – it was the only stretch of 'good pulling' they would have for the whole trip. The rest of the time the surface was too rough, too soft, or too cold for the friction of the sledges to melt the snow, which resulted in the sledges having to be dragged through the snow as if it were sand.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY
Bill, Birdie, and Cherry rounded Hut Point and Cape Armitage and started across the southern coast of Ross Island. Between the Cape and the edge of the Barrier was two miles – it was the only stretch of 'good pulling' they would have for the whole trip. The rest of the time the surface was too rough, too soft, or too cold for the friction of the sledges to melt the snow, which resulted in the sledges having to be dragged through the snow as if it were sand.
We knew that the Barrier edge was in front of us and also that the break-up of the sea-ice had left the face of it as a low perpendicular cliff. We had therefore to find a place where the snow had formed a drift. This we came right up against and met quite suddenly a very keen wind flowing, as it always does, from the cold Barrier down to the comparatively warm sea-ice. The temperature was -47° F., and I was a fool to take my hands out of my mitts to haul on the ropes to bring the sledges up. I started away from the Barrier edge with all ten fingers frost-bitten. They did not really come back until we were in the tent for our night meal, and within a few hours there were two or three large blisters, up to an inch long, on all of them.– Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY
We [had camped] about half a mile in from the Barrier edge. The temperature was -56°. We had a baddish time, being very glad to get out of our shivering bags next morning (June 29). We began to suspect, as we knew only too well later, that the only good time of the twenty-four hours was breakfast, for then with reasonable luck we need not get into our sleeping-bags again for another seventeen hours.– ibid.
The temperature remained at -50° F. all day, and we felt the cold a good deal in our feet on the march, Cherry getting his big toes frost bitten and I my heel and the sole of one foot. A good many of Cherry's finger tips also went last night and are blistered this morning, but he takes them all as a matter of course and says nothing about them.– E.A. Wilson's journal
