Ice Brain

I just finished reading Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry, at 24, was the youngest member of Robert Falcon Scott's second expedition to Antarctica. He was one of three men who sledged around Ross Island during the brutal black heart of winter to collect Emperor penguin eggs from Cape Crozier. For Science. It beggars words. After recovering for a handful of weeks in the hut at Cape Evans, Cherry then accompanied the Polar expedition as far as the top of Beardmore Glacier, where he and several others turned back in order to depot provisions for the return. Scott's crew reached the Pole in January to discover that Admunsen had beaten them to it.

"Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his face, however he turns, is always to the North. The moment Scott saw that Norwegian tent he knew that he had nothing to tell that was not already known.

"We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have suffered from too much. We were primarily a great scientific expedition, with the Pole as our bait for public support, though it was not more important than any other acre of the plateau."

All five Englishmen died on the way back, the last three pinned down by a blizzard eleven miles from a supply depot; Cherry was part of the team that found them the following spring. He eventually went home to endure lifelong PTSD and depression. I won't presume to say who was better off, he or his friends, but I want to offer my [very belated] respects to Cherry, because to my delight and surprise he wrote a really wonderful book. I knew about the existence of his account, of course, because no semi-literate soul can go to Antarctica and not encounter a few quotes from it. I looked it up at the library recently when I found myself wanting something Antarctic, but I was expecting a dry, historical, possibly rather preachy piece lauding sacrifice in the name of god and country, and it is nothing of the sort. It's marvelous. Full of marvels. Full of little anecdotes and precise descriptions that make me gaze into the middle distance and wonder if I...? Cherry has a real voice. He devotes a good deal of time to extolling the virtues of his lost comrades, demeaning his own part in the quest, but he did the hardest thing imaginable, in my opinion: he bore witness.

(I find now that Sara Wheeler, whose Terra Incognita I enjoyed so much, also wrote a biography called Cherry, which I'll have to look into.)

early Antarctic sleeping bag

It so happens that my new sleeping bag showed up in the mail just as I was reading the chapter about The Winter Journey. The three men had already been sledging in total darkness and unimaginable cold for three weeks. They'd acquired five penguin eggs by stumbling around treacherous pressure ridges in a mid-day twilight, then smashed two crossing a rock slide. Upon getting back to shelter, all hell broke loose, the tent and the roof of their shelter blew away in a blizzard, and they huddled in their sleeping bags in the lee of their broken stone hut, with their precious penguin eggs, hoping for the grace of god.

"Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.

We turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.

Face to face with real death one does not think of the things that torment the bad people of the tracts, and fill the good people with bliss. I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not care. I had no wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.

I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have with them: what glorious fun! It was a pity.

And I wanted peaches in syrup - badly. We had them at the hut...and we have been without sugar for a month. Yes - especially the syrup. 

Thus impiously I set out to die."

They lived, astonishingly, to recover their tent and break for Cape Evans. There stands a fine (if dramatic) demonstration of the importance of a good sleeping bag. At the end of a normally tiring day, it's a haven of warmth and restful oblivion. In the last extremity--the one you hope you will never encounter--it can save your life.

(The modern Antarctican equivalent of a sleeping bag, of course, is Big Red, the bright crimson duck-down expedition parka issued to each and every individual before departing New Zealand. That coat turned into a bit of a beast at times, possessing the sheer recalcitrance of any bulky inanimate object, but I admit I was never cold while wearing Big Red. I think we all developed a grumbling affection for it. And my comparison isn't an idle one. Sometimes I'd open the door to my dorm and find my roommate sitting on her bed, watching a bad 80s dance film on station TV, all snuggled into her Big Red zipped up to the eyeballs.

"You cold, Kristina?"

She'd grin. "'S cozy! Like wearing a sleeping bag.")

big red

All the PCT handbook and forum advice underscores the fact that there are many ways to cut costs on a thru-hike, but your sleeping bag should not be one of them. Cough up! A sleeping bag both lightweight and toasty warm doesn't come cheap. If you aren't warm enough, you won't sleep well, and when you're walking a marathon every day, the daily opportunity to rest and recharge takes on special importance. (And I need my sleep, full stop. I hear a chorus of heads nodding. The bears have nothing on me in this respect.) Plus, if you find yourself in hypothermic conditions, or a storm surprises you in the Sierra, you must be able to count on your sleeping bag to keep the furnace running.

big blue

They maintained good records, those early Antarcticans, so I can tell you that the explorers' sleeping bags were constructed of reindeer skins from Norway, and weighed 12 lbs apiece; most carried eiderdown bag-liners, too, which were 4 lbs each. My new goose-down sleeping bag, the Western Mountaineering Ultralite, weighs a mere 28 oz, extraordinarily light--made by the elves, you know!--and very warm, rated to 20F. I love it already. Extracting it from the stuff sack is like unloading a clown car, it puffs past all credibility, and with a compression strap it'll deflate to the size of a soccer ball. Most likely the single most expensive item on my shopping list (more than a KitchenAid, sigh), but as I say, this wasn't the place to cut corners, and I suspect that it will see many adventures.

"And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, 'What is the use?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers... And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."