26/12/2008
Every summer many Australians take to the beach and bustle themselves into busy caravan parks to get away from the city and enjoy the sun and surf. South west of Melbourne there is a particularly popular little beach side town called Ocean Grove, which is also well known as the Grove. I have been to the Grove a few times to visit friends, enjoy a bbq and listen to the cricket, as flies and mosquitoes swarmed. This time around though, my summer season has begun with a visit to a place a little less populated, a touch cooler and a place not supportive of insect or any life whatsoever. My summer has begun with a visit to the Grove Mountains, which is more affectionately referred to as the Groves.
Our Antarctic field training finished with a slogged out 14km walk back to Davis station, along a frozen fjord and over the lunar rock strewn landscape of the Vestfold Hills. We set out early as we had heard a whisper on the VHF that it was possible that we could be going into the field that day, and that if we missed this opportunity we wouldn’t get another chance until after Christmas. This turned out to be true and on arrival at station we were told to get our stuff together and be at the helipad ASAP. In the space of two hours we were flying back across the Vestfold Hills and up over the plateau in a helicopter. We arrived at the skiway and loaded most of our cargo into a C212 fixed-wing aircraft and took our seats for the two hour flight to the Groves. I say most of our cargo was packed, because several survey items were destroyed in a tragic helicopter sling load accident (they dropped our boxes from a great height and they died on impact). The incident is still under investigation.
The Groves would have to be one of my favourite places in the world. The sheer sense of isolation does it for me. The mountains are a scattered group of very striking mountain tops and nunataks, jutting out like icebergs in an ocean of ice, about 500km South of Davis station and the closest other life forms. I visited the Groves two years ago and returned this time to upgrade a remote GPS station we have operating in the area. The work is relatively simple techo stuff and simply involved lugging a lot of equipment up a mountain and plugging it all in. All the brain work was done in Canberra earlier in the year.
Three of us camped out in a thin valley of snow resting on the ice sheet at the base of one of the nunataks. There was a persistent wind which kept the polar pyramid tent flapping through the evening while we tried to shade our eyes from the 24 hour sunlight and sleep. We were fortunate to spend the summer solstice out in the field, although everyday is a long day down here when the sun does not set.
We completed the work with a day to spare and took the opportunity to have an explore. With boot chains on and ice axe in hand we soldiered off on the ice and skirted around the moraine field to get a closer look at the nearby mountain formations. The wind howled in our faces, at least the sliver of skin we had exposed, as we were kitted out in full windproof clothing with beanies and balaclavas a must. The wind blew snowdrift at us as we pushed on over rolling waves of ice and crept over small crevasse fields which had fractured around the exposed rock features. The walk was what I would call a real Antarctic experience and brought the efforts of early explorers to light. I am extremely fond of the Groves and fully appreciate the opportunity I have been given to visit this incredible place.
We were fortunate with the weather on site, with relatively warm weather of no cooler than negative ten and the wind although sometimes gusty never got too violent. We were collected after four nights by the C212 boys and flown back to station for Christmas. The "helicopter dropping our important survey equipment" incident continued to cause me headaches, and my patience has been pushed to the limits. The disruption to our work program I can handle as it is unavoidable now and we simply have to minimise the impact on our work. I have found myself more annoyed at the response of several key personnel and have had to look beyond my disappointment as a negative attitude is not healthy in a place like this. Nonetheless, I survived another Antarctic Christmas and couldn’t resist over indulging in the food. We continued working over the holiday in preparation for our next field trip, away from the masses and back into the deep field.
