Everyday Things at the Bottom of the World: Part Three

 

The one item of clothing that I was most glad I decided to fit into my personal kitbag for Antarctica this season was a pair of cycling bib shorts. At first glance a strange choice, perhaps. Antarctica is not a place you typically associate with going for a bike ride. In fact, in previous years I have reluctantly all but given up any ideas of cycling when at Rothera. I’ve reverted to running, or at least tried to – those comical first weeks of the legs trying to remember how to run again after a summer in the Lake District attached to a bicycle. Each year I have all good intentions of trying to keep up some cycling fitness, but there are only so many times you can bear to sit on the Watt Bike in a windowless, sweaty gym and do a virtual cycle up Box Hill (even if there is a poster of Mont Ventoux on the wall). I find exercising indoors to be largely soulless. I’d always much rather be out in the elements. In fact, my favourite conditions for runway running at Rothera are the snowy and incredibly windy days. It’s the most immersed in the landscape I feel when I’m down there. It can all seem a little too far out of reach on a perfectly calm, blue-sky day. But when the wind blows, it feels as if the continent itself reaches into the depths of your soul – and you experience the full wonder of life flowing through your veins. Although, I must admit, that if I were to go cycling in similar conditions it would feel utterly miserable and deeply cold. My hands and feet, while able to stay toasty warm when running, become like blocks of ice in no time at all on the bike. Which is why, despite there being a selection of hardtail mountain bikes and fat bikes available for recreation on station, I have largely avoided it in the past (save for a couple of laps of the runway in good weather).

Snowy runway running 

Something had changed though. My love of cycling has become almost insatiable over the past few years. I no longer consider myself a runner or even a footballer. And my big dream of this season was to cycle around the flagline on a fat bike. The flagline is a 13km loop on a snowy expanse up above station. The flags indicate the area in which it is safe to travel – outside of the flags lie crevasses, yawning, ice blue beneath a thick covering of snow. A few years ago, I got the opportunity to explore a crevasse on a rec trip. My imagination had not conceived just how vast and scary they are – I was at genuine risk of pooping my pants when I stepped back and abseiled over the edge.

Abseiling down a crevasse 

But, despite the hazards that lurk just beyond, the flagline is a place of wonderful escapism, safety, and solace. It is a chance to step away and to float above the busyness and intensity of station life for a while. Even just making it to the top of the ramp and looking back down on the clutter of buildings and human activity puts an interesting perspective on it all. You can suddenly see the entirety of your world from the outside, and you marvel at how that which so often seems everything now just features as a small part of your vision as you take in the vastness of the sea and the mountains that surround. From the top of the ramp, you travel along a corridor of flags known as the Traverse. To your left is the rocky and dragon like outcrops of Reptile Ridge, and to your right the snow drops away to ice cliffs and the sea below. I had run along here many times before, and had sometimes gone on Nordic Skis, but I had never taken a bike.

The Rothera Traverse 

After a while the corridor of flags opens out and you reach the start of the loop known as the flagline. If I were setting out to attempt the full loop, I would always go in an anti-clockwise direction. There is no rule about the direction of travel around the flagline, only the habits we develop and then impose upon ourselves as the most unbreakable of rules.

Out on the Flagline. Between heaven and earth. 

The early season brought with it the tail end of winter storms, and it was a while before the conditions were anywhere near safe or favourable enough to head round the flagline on a bike. From a safety point of view, you needed to have, at the very minimum, a six-flag bubble of visibility – you must be able to see three flags in front of you, and three flags behind. There was also a wind speed limit to going up the ramp and beyond. In terms of favourable conditions for cycling – you wanted the snow to be as firm as possible, and the best time to go would usually be early morning after a night where the temperatures had remained below zero. You also hoped that a skidoo might have recently headed up the hill so as to compact the snow. As the summer progressed and the daytime temperatures rose above freezing, sometimes to as much as five degrees, the snow would become slushy and practically unrideable. On one such occasion I found myself running and slipping along the Traverse whilst pushing my bike until sense overcame my stubbornness and I gave it up as a bad idea. I needed to be patient, and I also needed to be committed to getting up early enough to make the most of the best conditions. This was not always possible depending on which shift pattern I was working – quite often my working day would start at 7.00am. However, if I happened to be working the nightshift week, it put me in the perfect position to go out on the bike. Not only was I finishing work by about 06.30am, I had also been up all night and been able to monitor the overnight temperature and wind conditions. This became a bit of an obsession, and an obsession which was then picked up by my friend Dan who started joining me on these biking adventures. Initially though, and occasionally after that, I would go alone.

Early morning round the flags on a dingle day

On these solo jaunts I would sometimes listen to music or play a pre-downloaded episode of Never Strays Far (my favourite cycling Podcast). But more often than not I would simply listen to the world around me – listen to the sounds of that frozen land. Once you were along the Traverse and out of sight of station you found that you also left the noise of that place far behind. The constant hum of the generators, the bleeping of reversing vehicles, and the chatter over the hand-held radios. Instead, your ears would be full of the sound of your own breathing, and of your heart beating with the effort of making forward progress in the snow. And there was the almost squeaking sound of the bike tyres as they slowly turned in this crystalline land – tyres which would virtually be deflated to flat on days when the snow was soft, or for going fast on the downhills. And there was the involuntary whooping as you sped along on pristine snow with the mountains of the West Antarctic Peninsula stretched out before you, and the vast and sparkling sea. And then there were the sounds beyond – beyond our human presence there. And even on the calmest of days there was never nothing - our ears would attempt to interpret the divine silence which occasionally graced this most remote of lands. Perhaps it was the wind from many hundred of miles away, reaching us now only as an echo, softened by a hundred snowy peaks. Or maybe it was the ocean far below, a small iceberg teetering slightly in an otherwise millpond bay. Many and varied are the emotions of those who spend any length of time in Antarctica – there is camaraderie and there is loneliness, there is unbridled joy and there are moments of despair, there is resilience and there is the crumbling of the spirit, there is the feeling of permanence and there is the awareness that all things – good and bad – shall eventually pass. And yet, there was no thought or no word what we ourselves did not bring here – our fears and our doubts, our hopes and our dreams were our very own. We gave this land its mystery and we found that this land neither gives nor cares. And perhaps this is why we were all drawn here in the first place – to a world where we can feel the fullness of our humanity with both its insignificance and its strength. To stand in that incredible wilderness and feel so small, and yet to have overcome everything we thought to be impossible by simply standing there at all.

The most remote of lands 

As much as I loved the contemplative state of mind that solitude brings, I equally enjoyed the many times that I went around the flagline with Dan. His enthusiasm and love of cycling matched my own – we spent one morning drinking coffee and recounting every puncture we’d ever had. Another morning, we had a long, and frankly fascinating conversation about curtains – this was not a friendship built on cycling alone. Dan is one of those people with infectious good humour – even on the days when the conditions were so bad that much of our progress was in a falling off sideways direction, I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed so much on a bike (and cycling is one of my favourite things in the world). Perhaps we actually laughed the most on those days. On a particularly soft downhill section, Dan declared that he needed a mud guard fitted to the bike to stop the snow from going down his bum crack. Dan did not bring cycling bib shorts to Antarctica.

Dan and I.
(Photo credit: P. Shroff) 

The return to station from Skiway Col (the highest point on the true flagline) was always such a thrill. Even if the snow conditions were slightly sub-optimal you could still get up a good amount of speed if you were prepared to go for it – brain off, brakes off was the mantra. And I actually found that this was also the best way of staying upright. After getting back to station after one such ride, Dan said to me, “you have a specific smile for when you’re going fast on a bike. It’s different to your other smiles – I’ve never seen it before.” I don’t find it easy to adequately express just how much joy riding a bike brings to me, and it made me happy to know that this was not simply something I felt, but also something which could be seen. And for it to be seen meant that I was sharing this experience with someone – and it has undoubtedly been one of the greatest delights of this Rothera season, going on lots of bike rides with my friend. And every ride we went on felt different – the weather would be different, and we would talk of different things. One day we stopped and made snow angels, another time we went to say hello to Vicky (the deputy chief pilot) who was up at the Skiway in VPF-BB, one of our Twin Otter planes.

Red bike. Red plane.
(Photo Credit: D. Price)

I would however repeatedly tell Dan that cycling back along the Traverse was just like cycling on the Cinder Track with a road bike. The Cinder Track runs along the Cumbrian Coast between Seascale and Sellafield. It is mostly gravel, but there are these occasional sections of deep sand – blown by the west wind onto the cycle path. It was a route I sometimes took with my good friends Ali and Ian (who are largely responsible for kick-starting my cycling obsession). In order to get through the sand traps on a road bike you simply had to go for it, and hope that you had enough speed and enough nerve to get you through. And that was the similarity to the Traverse at Rothera – unless the snow was really firm there was very little chance of getting going again if you lost momentum or slid to a stop. I loved getting into that headspace – of being so focussed and feeling confident. Every time we arrived back onto the ramp, I would invariably mention the Cinder Track, even though I knew that I had told Dan about it every time before. I even created a twinned Strava Segment in its honour – The Cinder Track of the South.

Ian riding the Cinder Track

My last weekend on Station brought with it a fresh dump of snow. This was not what you wanted for cycling, and so I had all but put the idea of it out of my mind. However, it was my last weekend, and Dan was coming off the night shift week, so his sleep pattern was still all over the place. I woke up on the Sunday morning to find that I had a string of WhatsApp messages from him that started at 04.00am: The temperatures were good; a skidoo had been up there yesterday evening; Barry had headed out for a run and seemed to be moving well along the Traverse; the temperatures were still good; I’ve drunk five cups of coffee now and eaten three slices of toast; I’ve been reading an essay about Chile, Argentina, colonialism, imperialism, and Antarctica – it has more than 10 references, and I can tell you all about it if we go for a bike ride; okay you’re coming or okay please stop messaging me about cycling; wahey! And that was the dialogue which provided the backdrop to the last ride of the season. I was very tired, and I had reached the point where I was ready to leave, and yet when it came to it, when all thoughts had turned northwards, I could not resist the call of the sublime. The conditions were terrible though, and we very quickly gave up the idea of cycling the full flagline. The snow lay untouched there, and I don’t think I made it even two metres before the bottom half of the wheels had completely disappeared from view. But we did make it to the Caboose (a basic, container-like shelter with a stove, and a seating area covered in sheepskins) – by following the tracks left by a skidoo from the previous evening. We had fun trying to take a timed photo of ourselves with our bikes outside the Caboose. We both had the same strange thought that it had similarities to the iconic photo of Christopher McCandless in front of the ‘Magic Bus’ from Into the Wild – in so far at least as it was the presence of humans and a metallic, inanimate object in a landscape that perhaps neither had any place in being. But there we were, and it was not without thought, and it was not a reckless, hell-bent desire to feel like we had conquered something or some land. It was ultimately an incredibly humbling experience to be there, and while it was undeniably one of immense personal gain, it was also a chance and an opportunity to be involved in a line of work that may well contribute an awful amount of good and worth to our beautiful planet, our only home, and one that we have been far too careless about for far too long.

Dan and I at the Caboose

And of course, the only intentions and motivations we can speak of and lay claim to are our own, and so I have been speaking here of my own, and of my own thoughts and experiences of living and working at Rothera. It was easy to get so absorbed in the busyness of work here that you forgot to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, to remember why we were there, to remember all the science projects that the Station was enabling and supporting. And even being the smallest of cogs in this process, life here gave you an incredible sense of purpose and a sense of worth because you saw that however small the cog, they all matter, and we all make a difference in the end. And it wasn’t just this. There was something much more. These free-time adventures on the bike gave not only a healthy perspective on work - they also gave me an important perspective on life as a whole. It was a reminder to do the things that make you smile differently, and to spend time with good friends in whose company you could laugh or cry just as easily. We do not get forever. And having an urgency for life is not the same as leading a reckless life. We do not exist in isolation, and the preciousness of life belongs to all. And there are as many different lives as there are as many different humans – and so it was, in my own way, I had reached the end of another Antarctic summer with a full heart and a head full of new dreams for what lay beyond.

Chilling out on the ramp after the last ride of the season.
(Photo credit: W. Thursfield)