It has been a fulfilling and fascinating day, physically and otherwise. Welcome anytime, but especially after the curtailments of yesterday’s socked-in weather. Due to conditions -- blowing snow and low visibility -- I scrubbed my scheduled flights to the Pole both yesterday and today (not so obvious in brilliant sunshine). The weather folks were telling me that the Transantarctic mountains were obscured, which would have meant a wasted flight.

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Instead, my day was spent learning some mountaineering appropriate to my interest in crevasses (wide cracks in snow or ice). At 0900 I reported to the Science Support building to meet Susan Detweiler, my personal guide and instructor for the day. After being issued a pack, harness, crampons, and various other gear, I climbed into the passenger side of a Pisten Bully-- a small tracked vehicle incongruously steered with a wheel -- and we are off. A half-hour later we are parked in front of Silver City Ice Falls (think of waterfalls made of ice), our classroom.

Susan starts me off easy. Simple things like proper walking across and up slopes, ice-axe handling, changing direction on the steep and slippery without getting off balance. We then move on to self-arrest techniques. These are important, since if I were to lose my balance and start sliding downslope, my survival would depend on slowing and stopping before I accelerate to the point of tumbling head over heels. (At which point you have lost control and survival is just a matter of luck.)

Then glissading: This is just descending a snow slope by sliding on your booneyhine, what your mother told you not to do because you would wear out your new snow pants. But give it a French name, put an ice axe in your hand, and voila, it is mountaineering! It is too bad the rest of life wasn’t so transmutable. One nice part of this glissading is that it takes us back to the bottom, where our packs, lunch snacks, and a rest await.

This also gives us a bit of time for conversation, and I learn that Susan is from Bethesda Md., but left for the Colorado mountains as soon as she got her degree in environmental studies. As an alpine guide, she has worked in many countries all over the world. It seems that in some circumstances, women guides are preferred to men, and that there are a lot of them. I would not have expected this, but I find it pleasing that sometimes merit gets its due. I admire her ability to have built a life around what is important to her: being outside, and working with a variety of people in differing ways. That sense of taking responsibility for one’s own fulfillment is rare indeed, and is always good to see.

Break time over, she teaches me the proper way to harness up and rope up, and we head back onto the slope, this time with packs, to the top of the falls, about 250 feet above the ice shelf. We head cautiously to the lip of...what? I can’t see over it enough to determine height, slope, anything else. After setting pickets (two-foot lengths of aluminum T-bar) into the snow as anchors, I am rigged for rappelling. It has been 33 years since I indulged in this activity, so I pay close attention to what Susan says to me.

I walk backwards down the steep snow slope towards the abyss. This is a touch unsettling: there is something profoundly unnatural to the human animal about walking backwards towards danger. When I get to where my feet are just on the lip and my head is over it so I can see down, I realize that this is not a slope or even a wall I can walk down, but a dramatic overhang. Instead of releasing more line through my rappeller and putting any more strain on the anchors, on which my life depends, I slide my feet down and let myself drop.

As I swing back and forth, about 25 feet above the slope below and about six feet from the wall, I am quite comfortable in the harness. I am grateful that I am not prone to fear of heights, since this affords me the peace of mind to admire the brilliantly sunlit beauty of the sloping, partially filled-in crevasse whose lip I have just gone over, the building-sized blocks of ice lower down, the ice shelves stretching to the southern horizon, and the majestic Mt. Erebus, gently venting, overlooking it all.

Before I let myself down and go back to learning how to fit prussicks -- small lines used both as stop brakes on the main line, and for climbing a line -- and other things I will need to know to enter crevasses, I briefly reflect how fortunate I am to be here. Perhaps my real fortune is that, like Susan, I have been able mold some portions of my life in response to the calls from deep within.

Tomorrow: Village life; Icestock, the music festival