[Half Moon Bay, Livingston Island. 62 deg. 36 min. South; 60 deg. 30 min. West] Our expedition diverted northward after one of our members fell into a hidden crevasse as he was ascending a steep bowl above Port Lecroix on nearby Amberes Island. He was injured, but rescued.

“I had just finished traversing a steep ridge. We were about to rope up. All of a sudden I realized I was standing on an ice bridge,” recalls John. “I went through before I knew it. My crampon caught on a edge of the crevasse sand snapped my leg.” 

“We got the call near 12:30 p.m. and had him on the ship by 4:30 p.m.,” recounts guide, Tal Fletcher. “He’d fallen at least 35 feet.” DelMonte’s injuries suggested a possible broken tib/fib.

Our ship, Clipper Adventurer, dropped John Del Monte, from Rochester, New York, and his wife, Elaine, off at the Chilean research station on King George Island. From there they will be evacuated to Chile in a C-130 and then home to the States. King George Island (62 deg. 02 min. South; 58 deg. 21 min. West) is the home of a host of permanently- occupied, research stations from about ten countries of the world. 

Livingston Island
Once the Del Montes were safely ashore, our ship angled south across the Mar De La Flota strait, past Hannah’s Point to Livingston Island.


At the head of the bay looms a vast glacier whose glistening ice cliffs extend for miles. In the evening sun, against high white walls, chinstrap penguins flip about in their rookeries even allowing a few scattered gentoos and macaronis into their colony. For three days in a row the weather has not just been cooperating, it’s been a delicate lace of warm velvet and calm, dark-hue sea in a warming climate that has everyone aboard spellbound. In five weeks, on December 21, this area will experience its longest day of the year.
 

“In my thirty trips to Antarctica I believe I’ve only witnessed four, maybe five days of this type of wonderful weather,” admitted Mariano, the Clipper’s historian and one of the ship’s expedition guides.

Livingston Island is the second largest of the South Shetland Islands and is dominated by an icy interior with peaks up to 6,000 feet. The area has a complicated shape, with six major peninsulas stretching for 45 miles from east to west. Although the island was the base of many sealing expeditions in the early 1820s, it still was a treacherous place. In 1819 the Spanish ship San Telmo foundered with the loss of 644 lives, the greatest loss of life in the history of the Antarctica continent. We will anchor here and the ship will be base camp for tomorrow’s ski attempts on an array of virgin and untamed bowls and ridge lines.

Here's the description of the island from Wikipedia: 
Apart from the extensive Byers Peninsula (61 km²) forming the west extremity of Livingston, the ice-free part of the island includes certain coastal areas at Cape Shirreff, Siddons Point, Hannah Point, Williams Point, Hurd Peninsula and Rozhen Peninsula, as well as slopes in the mountain ranges, and ridges and heights in eastern Livingston that are too precipitous to keep snow.

The principal mountain formations include Tangra Mountains (30 km long, with Mt Friesland rising to 1700 m), Bowles Ridge (6.5 km, elevation 822 m), Vidin Heights (8 km, 604 m), Burdick Ridge (773 m), Melnik Ridge (696 m) and Pliska Ridge (667 m).

The coastline of the island is irregular, with the more significant indentations of South Bay, False Bay, Moon Bay, Hero, Barclay, New Plymouth, Osogovo and Walker, and the peninsulas of Hurd (extension 10 km), Rozhen (9 km), Burgas (10,5 km), Varna (12 km), Ioannes Paulus II (12.8 km) and Byers (15 km). 

The local variety of the Antarctic Peninsula weather is particularly changeable, windy, humid and sunless. Says Australian mountaineer Damien Gildea: ‘Livingston got just about the worst weather in the world’. Whiteouts are common, and blizzards can occur at any time of the year. Temperatures are rather constant, rarely exceeding 3°C in summer or falling below –11°C in winter, with wind chill temperatures up to 5-10°C lower."

See the portfolio of pictures below taken by Keoki Flagg, an expedition member. — Fro


Editor’s Note: This report is one in a series written for Tahoetopia by Tahoe resident and writer, Robert Frohlich. “Fro” is a member of the IceAxe expedition and a regular contributor to Tahoetopia.


The picture at the very top of this story is one taken by NASA of the Antarctic continent. The satellite-type image is from Google Earth. The other images (below) are by (and copyrighted by) Keoki Flagg, also a member of the expedition.

For feature stories in this exclusive series, click Antarctica. Also watch Tahoe TV’s Get Out! Reno-Tahoe on cable. The cable channel numbers are North Lake Tahoe: 14; Truckee/W Shore: 11; South Lake Tahoe: 18; Reno: 3; and Carson: 15.

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