Skier tells of Ice journey

Press, 17 May 1989, Page 4

Skier tells of Ice journey

By TOM METCALFE While preparing for a 1200 km ski trek across Antarctica to the South Pole, Shirley Metz saw a United States Air Force map of the area that she and her 10 companions were to travel through.

“It was white,” she says. “It had never been mapped. Basically, it was ‘good luck, you guys.’ ” Ms Metz was one of nine skiers who travelled to the Pole late last year and early this year. Two other members of the expedition travelled on snowmobiles with tents and food, but all the way stayed out of sight behind the skiers. Ms Metz, an American, was in Christchurch this week on a speaking tour about the trip. The privately-funded expedition was the first in which Americans or women travelled to the Pole overland. The party, which also included people from Chile, Britain, Canada and Nepal, left its base camp in the Ellsworth Mountains on November 28 last year. Fifty days later, on January 18 — 77 years to the day after Robert Falcon Scott — the party arrived at the Pole. The timing was just lucky, Ms Metz said. “You

can’t plan a thing like that.”

The party travelled for eight or nine hours each day, in perpetual daylight. All except the last 120 km was spent “walking on skis,” rather than ski-ing, because they had to cross sastrugi — waves of snow formed by the wind, sometimes up to 4m high. The sastrugi made

travelling hard work. “The ice had never melted in millions of years. For the first 400 miles, putting our ski poles into the ground just shattered our elbows. It was like hitting rocks," Ms Metz said.

The skiers also faced winds of up to 60km/h — always headwinds blowing from the Pole.

At one point, the winds were so strong the party had to stop for four days until they subsided.

Ms Metz first went to Antarctica in January last year, on a cruise ship acting as a “floating university” teaching people about the continent.

"I was mesmerised by how special it was,” she said.

She decided then to join the ski-ing expedition to the Pole, a journey that only 13 had attempted before — the five men of Admundsen’s expedition, the five of Scott’s expedition, and three men on the “Footsteps of Scott" expedition about two years ago.