)“Hi everybody ahhh just ahhh. finished doing 18 today and it was really quite an amazing day. Ahhh… Ray last night ahh.. got a some sort of food poisoning and ahhh was really really sick all night. He was out going to the toilet all night long and you can imagine how difficult that would be when you’re stuck getting out of a tent, in Antarctica, to go out to the toilet all night long and ahhh he was in a really bad state this morning and ahhh managed anyway to somehow suck it up and continue on with us. We did 18 nautical miles in complete whiteout conditions, ahhummm …with this…. with Ray basically not eating or drinking, which is quite incredible actually. So today that says a lot for that ahhh… that day in my mind his ability to just push himself is just truely astounding. Also I’d just like to say that we finally went beyond a road, and it’s an interesting thing that we’ve been kind of seeing in our visual periperhy for quite some time now, is that there is this cat track that ahhh… the people at ALE, they’re the outfitters that kind of run the operation here in Antartica, had pushed through all the way up to the Theil mountains. And the reason being that they needed to do sort of a cache depot for teams that need support as well as for fuel for the airplanes. Well this cat track could effectively be used by people if one was so inclined and would speed you up because it’s very much like a groomed trail; and we saw and ahhh the line went straight up 80 degrees like we wanted, but ahh… you know you only come to Antarctica once and and ahh.. we haven’t mentioned it yet because ahh…we just didn’t want to bring it up until we were done with this road, but we never touched it, and ahhh… we could see it in our visual periphery and we never skied on it and we never trekked on it and we just wanted to establish that as for the record just in case for the future. Ahh you got to do something right when you do it right, but now were past it 85, we see the Theil mountains to our west, and we’re psyched man we’re heading to the pole, we’ll talk again.”
(Anton) I think a little context is needed for this blog. I talked with Ray earlier about the road made by the snow cat. It appears that when investigating what the road was they saw tracks on the road, we don’t know who made them, but after 18 days of plowing through snowdrifts the team wanted to go on record that the tracks were not theirs.
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