Berg

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Hi, Mountain Zone. It's the afternoon of January 13th. Afternoon is a little relative here, with the sun up all of the time, but we stay pretty much on a "normal schedule." Pretty much always the same here, except when the sun does occasionally go behind a ridge and it gets extremely cold. It is important to remember how cold it is in Antarctica. We keep a thermometer in the shade here and it is generally right around -12 Fahrenheit. It gets quite a lot colder than that if the sun leaves behind a ridge; it doesn't get much warmer than that.

Observing the snow here is something that continually fascinates me. I've spent a lot of time in snowy, glaciated places. Just this year, of course, besides living at Copper Mountain and working the snow there, I've climbed on Denali, and Alaska and in Greenland. It's hard to really understand, if you haven't seen this, how little of an effect the sun has on the snow here. Richard Hoover from NASA, who is over in the Theil mountains now, told me when I was out here, he said: 'Look for places where little pieces of rock have gotten under the snow, just enough to absorb enough solar radiation, increase the heat, and actually form melt water just below the snow.' Something we see all of the time elsewhere in the mountains of the world. And of course, what Hoover was thinking is: if you have that, if you have free water, and the rocks where there are minerals, you could have life. And he was really fascinated with this possibility down here. I saw some of that yesterday — sorry, Richard I didn't get any samples for you.

But this is a very stable environment, in terms of snow. I was thinking about that today, as I moved up and explored further up the valley. But wouldn't you know it, the mountains always make their statements. Just as I got way up in the head of this valley, I was climbing up over a giant debris cone, from snow that came down the icefall off the face of Bentley that we've been on the edge of yesterday, pretty fascinating I thought. But I thought to myself, unlike other icefalls areas that I've seen in the world, this probably rarely ever moves. It might be years between events. And a few moments later, well, right after that I was wondering if we could possibly climb up through this area to access a ridge to the summit of Anderson, which we'd like to do the first ascent of, and of course, a few moments later, a giant piece of ice broke off the serac high on this icefall. And I had a really spectacular, not really scary, view because I had, out of good instincts or just blind luck and probably just following an easier route, I moved all the way across the valley and was up pretty high — spectacular moment.

The voice of the mountains was speaking once again. Always a humbling experience, especially in this place, which was — I was quite sure and positive — a spot where no one had ever stood. These kinds of events go on with whatever regularity over the eons and I was privileged to witness it this afternoon.

— Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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