The Patagonia Icecap

h. w. TILMAN

The Patagonia Icecap (Hielo Continental, as it is known in Chile) covers some 300 miles from Latitude 44 S to Latitude 51 S. In width it varies from 15 to 50 miles and in height from 6000 feet to 10,000 feet. The boundary between Argentina and Chile follows roughly the crest line. On the Argentine side there are estancias almost within sight of the several glaciers which descend from the icecap into the great lakes of Buenos Aires, Viedma, and Argentino; on the Chilean side, where the glaciers descend into deep fjords, there is nothing but tangled rain-forest, rock, and ice. What little exploration of the icecap has been done has been effected from the Argentine side. The Chilean, or Pacific, side is virtually untouched.

Just as it is proverbially difficult to blow and swallow at the same time, so is it to combine mountaineering with sailing. Except, perhaps, in these Chilean fjords where, it occurred to me, a man might step from his boat onto a glacier; and herein lay the germ of an idea which led me to attempt a double crossing of the icecap. Since 1914 a great many unsuccessful attempts have been made, and I believe the first success was recorded in January 1954 by an Argentine party led by Major Huerta; but of this crossing I have so far been unable to get any details. Of late years my loyalty has been divided between sea and mountains, and this attempt to have the best of both worlds was a little one-sided, for it meant a voyage of some 20,000 miles for the sake of traversing some 50 miles of ice. The boat used was a former Bristol Channel pilot-cutter built in 1906. The crew comprised W. A. Procter, a retired civil servant; Michael Grove, a young gunner officer who, with the enterprise expected of such, sacrificed a year’s pay in order to come; E. H. Marriott, a member of the Alpine Club, who came as one of the shore party; and J. Van Tromp, who at the last moment sold his farm and went to sea. The approach march, with which those who write about Himalayan ventures make so much play, I can only glance at briefly, for it would not interest readers of a mountaineering journal.

Sailing from Falmouth July 6, 1955, we touched at the Canaries and thence sailed direct to Montevideo, 4600 miles. On this long haul, which took 64 days, our water allowance was a half-gallon per day for each man, but after the doldrums, where we got more than enough rain-water, restrictions could be relaxed. We sailed from Montevideo October 15, having first sent down our topmast in the expectation (duly fulfilled) of rough weather in the South Atlantic. But Mischief is such an able seaboat that we never had cause for anxiety. We sighted the Cape Virgins light near the entrance to the Strait of Magellan at 2 A.M., November 5. With a westerly gale blowing we were obliged to stand off and on for two days until the weather moderated enough to allow entrance to the Strait. These historic waters, aglow with the magic of names like Famine Reach, Pelican Passage, Royal Road, Elizabeth Island, stir the imagination, but any hopeful illusion that the low coast is still wild and strange is soon dispelled by the sight of a frigorifico on one side and on the other by the great flames of natural gas from the oil wells on Tierra del Fuego. Halfway through the Strait is Punta Arenas (or Magallanes) which we reached November 9. It is remarkable chiefly for its strong climate—in summer it blows hard every day and in winter it freezes—and a nine- hole golf course. Here the Chilean naval authorities went out of their way to help us, and later in the channels we were twice supplied by naval ships.

Before leaving for Peel Inlet, the chosen fjord some 300 miles north, where I hoped to make a landing, I obtained the essential third member for the climbing party—a young Chilean climber, Jorge Quinteros, a beekeeper like Sir Edmund Hillary. Before leaving England I had arranged for a geologist to join us at Punta Arenas, but at the last moment he had had to take up a University post, and I could get no one else. A glaciologist would have been more to the point, but these are rarer birds even than the common geologist, who is not easily caught. However, through the British Embassy at Santiago my need had been made known in Chilean climbing circles, and Quinteros volunteered. He knew no English and I less Spanish; so we got on all the better, and he proved a very able climber.

West of Cape Froward, the most southerly point of the American continent, the coast becomes bolder and snow-capped mountains loom on either hand. More striking still is the worsening weather. Steady rain, squalls of snow and hail, and strong winds usually from ahead, were our portion. For navigating these narrow channels we relied on our auxiliary engine and carried extra petrol on deck to give it enough range. Soon after rounding Cape Froward we broke a valve spring. Under sail alone, tacking every half hour and making less than 20 miles a day, Peel Inlet looked a long way off. After a week of it our luck turned when a naval storeship steamed into Columbine Cove, where we had anchored for the night, to see if we wanted anything, and her chief engineer dug out from his stores a spring that served.

This sheltered waterway, which for several hundred miles threads the Patagonian archipelago, is used by most vessels plying between Argentina and Chile and is charted and lit. The scenery is usually described as grand but gloomy, for it is most often seen through driving rain. In the fjords which run inland off the main channel, which are neither charted nor lit, the gloom is often relieved by magnificent streams of ice, their gleaming whiteness shot with lovely tints of blue as they break and curl steeply to the dark water of the fjords. The glaciers discharge great quantities of ice. On quitting the Sarmiento Channel for Peel Inlet we remarked a solitary floe. Thirty miles on, at the southeast end of Peel, floes were so thick that we could not get the ship within two miles of the glacier where I had hoped to land. However, further north, in a branch called Calvo, by forcing poor Mischief through ice for a couple of miles we anchored a hundred yards from the snout of a glacier. From it masses of ice fell frequently with a horrible roar, and, as our cable rattled out, steamer ducks scuttled away, a penguin bobbed up, while from a nearby cave a sea lion bellowed in astonishment. Lying at anchor there for three days while the shore party reconnoitered, the ship was constantly menaced by drifting floes, some of them as big as a cottage with its garden thrown in.

The Calvo Glacier, as we named it, presented an icefall which proved as formidable as it looked. More than a fortnight was spent in finding and improving an intricate route, involving two complete crossings of the glacier (here about a mile wide), and in carrying our 400 pounds of stores to a camp clear of the séracs at about 2400 feet. Meantime Mischief sought out a safe anchorage with orders to return in January and to cruise off the glacier every Sunday to watch for our signals. Having landed December 16, I did not expect to return before January 29, but we might be stopped (as we nearly were), or some mishap might send us back sooner.

On the névé the going was straightforward, although the many crevasses which were not yet open had to be treated with the greatest caution. With a party of only two, which at one time seemed likely, the risk would not have been justified. At about 5000 feet the snow became hard. We had neither skis nor snowshoes. Either would have been useful, but I am pretty certain that long before we had got our loads through the intricacies of the icefall the skis would have been dumped in disgust.

On January 13, we pitched our eighth camp on what we called the Bismarck Saddle on the Chilean-Argentine frontier and the Pacific-Atlantic watershed at a height of about 7500 feet. Below lay the long, wrinkled Bismarck Glacier pushing its distant snout into the waters of Lake Argentino, behind us the wide, glistening snowfield, and on all sides unclimbed and for the most part unnamed peaks. Below the saddle the Bismarck Glacier appeared altogether too broken—all the glaciers, even when lying at an easy angle, are incredibly crevassed—but by a pass which we called the Calvo we got down to an arm of the Bismarck, crossed it high up, and finally camped on rock, thus reaching dry land, as it were, in the Argentine. Thence a hard six miles on glacier, moraine, and ultimately in forest brought us down to the lake shore close to the great tongue of blue pinnacled ice—a wall over a hundred feet high—emerging seemingly from the forest and projecting into the water for nearly a mile. Ice floes nestled against the wooded shore, the near presence of one such monster obliging me to cut my ceremonial bathe to mere seconds. The close proximity of ice and forest is strange. One walks through open forest of antarctic beech carpeted with yellow violets, while through the trees a few yards away looms this huge wall of ice. Uprooted trees mark the line of contact.

Apart from two blizzards the weather up to now had been better than expected, but on the return journey, owing to six days of high winds with driving snow, we had some anxious moments. Indeed, when stormbound below the Calvo Pass the idea was mooted of a retreat to the Argentine—three days back to the lake and 50 miles or more round it to the nearest estancia, and all on two pounds of biscuit! Naturally, on the way over we had made dumps of food for the return journey. It was essential—or we thought it was—to find these. Our first attempt to find the one we had left on top of the icecap—an important dump, for besides food it held all my exposed film—failed. We were going on without it when a slight lessening of the drift and improving visibility as the sun struggled to pierce the flying scud induced us to make another search, fortunately successful.

We bypassed the difficult lower part of the glacier by climbing above it and dropping down to Camp II through 2000 feet of tangled, matted forest. On the way up we had decided rightly against this route, for it would have been impossible to carry loads up. Coming down we had merely to fall and slither, and on January 28 we emerged, scratched and tattered, on the moraine close to our starting point. Next day we were picked up by the dinghy, which had to be pushed and rowed through four miles of ice floe in order to rejoin the ship. Mischief had been unable to get nearer, since in our absence she had been put aground, and during the struggle to get her off, a drifting floe had stripped a propeller blade.

Once more we had to navigate the channels under sail. After I had nearly put her aground again when she missed stays in a gale, I decided to cut the channels and get out into the ocean. We reached the Pacific by Concepción Channel in Latitude 51 S, where we met some heavy weather. But thereafter we made a good passage to Valparaiso, where we had the propeller repaired; thence, via the Panama Canal and Bermuda, to England, which we reached a year and a day after leaving it.