I woke with a shiver, eyes sticky, amazed I’d even slept. The wind had started a few hours ago, small and light. But now it was enormous, loud and relentless, like the awful white noise of an old telly.
As I lay still, mummified in a sleeping bag, the tent shivered and chattered uncontrollably, and I gently formed a plan in my mind. Ian Holdcroft, my tent buddy and Shackleton Challenges cofounder, seemed to read it. “You’re going outside, aren’t you?” I was, and quickly, before I was told not to.
Dressed, I peeled open the tent and emerged to find a land without vision; everything from yesterday had disappeared behind a bright, toothpaste-white shroud. I looked south, where mountains had been, to see faint black marks suspended in the sky, like charcoal etchings on paper. Clean and hard, the snow had the tight crunch of wet sugar.
With slow, heavy astronaut steps, I shuffled away from the camp, determined to find the mental space to be properly present in this moment; to relish the unalloyed joy of trying to stay upright in my first sub-zero, 65mph blizzard. Back at the tent, I found Holdcroft on a radio with our expedition leader, the Antarctic explorer Louis Rudd: the tone was unruffled, calm, but, clearly, conditions weren’t great, and this wasn’t the plan. Were we to wait out the wind? Or pack up as arranged and ski into the whiteout, a big blind abyss with no separation between snow and sky? It was the second day of our adventure, an abridged two-day versio.