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Colbeck Compared to some other stations Mawson is lucky because in winter and spring there is thick and unbroken sea ice extending long distances to the east and west. To the west there are three major island groups that can be visited. Colbeck Archipelago is 100km west and the easiest to get to. About 90km further west are the Stillwell Hills and 150km beyond that are the Oygarden group, Edward the 8th gulf and Kloa Point. Colbeck is the most popular destination because it can be reached in about 6-7 hours of Quad or Hagg travel and doesn’t require special permission to visit. Trips beyond 150km from Mawson require permission from head office at Kingston so visiting the Stillwell Hills or the Oygarden group are not common and usually only occur once a year. Travelling more than 150km from Mawson also requires a lot of trip preparation and planning. Everything that is required from food, fuel, clothes, vehicle repairs and emergency spares has to be gathered and organised. Quite often the equipment exceeds that of a quad or a Hagglund so a trailer or sledge is required.
During September I went on a depot resupply trip to Kloa Point, 350km West of Mawson. The trip involved two fully loaded Hagglunds each towing two large sledges with fuel, tents and food for 8 people. The trip took 10 days, so we had to carry enough food and fuel for at least double that. We spent nights at Colbeck and the Stillwell Hills, some sleeping in tents and some in the huts. For the remaining days we slept in tents. Most of the time we spent travelling in the Hagglunds, with only a few rests every 4 hours or so. It was a difficult and at times painful trip because of the very rough sastrugi and rough snow surface. Sastrugi is wind blown snow or ice that makes travelling a very bumpy and slow process. Over the whole trip we averaged about 10 – 12 km/h. The weather was excellent on most days with clear blue skies and little wind. On some days we had a near white out and picking our way through the sastrugi required a lot of concentration. Our goal for the trip was to find and resupply the depots, or food caches between Mawson and Kloa Point. In previous years expeditions had also stopped at the Fold Island and Kloa Point Emperor penguin rookeries to make counts of the number of birds. I had assumed that we would do this also, but for some reason that I had still to work out I was specifically told not to try and find the Emperor rookeries. Not being allowed to visit the two Emperor Rookeries to count the penguins, as opposed to just taking photos of them, made me very angry that we had gone so far and achieved so little. The whole reason the depots were there in the first place is to support expeditions that go there to count the penguins. I likened the experience to flying from Australia to London in an old bi-plane, only to land at the airport terminal, look out the window for a few minutes, then turn around and go home. It took me quite awhile to get over my anger with the way that trip was run. There was one good point to the trip, and that was that I passed through the Colbeck Archipelago for the first time. The brief glimpse of Colbeck that I saw then made me promise myself that I had to return later in the year. The Colbeck Archipelago is located about 100km west of Mawson on the edge of the ice plateau, next to the Taylor Glacier. Located beside the Taylor glacier there is an Emperor penguin rookery that is quite unique. It is only one a few where the Emperors Nest on land rather than on sea ice. Colbeck consists of dozens of small islands within about 5 km of the coast. Dominating the islands is Chapmans Ridge on the edge of the plateau and it commands sweeping views over the islands west and east along the coast.
Riding a Quad over sastrugi in poor visibility is a very demanding and tiring task. One mistake that I made was to pack all our food in a trailer which had no suspension, and by the time we arrived at the hut all the bumping had caused the orange juice containers to split and spoil the bread and other cardboard covered food. Floating in the bottom of the fishbox was a puree of orange juice, chocolate, bread and cardboard! Luckily we were able to scrounge enough food from the mess for the rest of the trip and combine this with the ration pack that was in the hut. The Colbeck Hut is on a small island in the middle of the Archipelago and it was the base for our trips out each day. Rhonda wanted to identify and tag as many seal pups as she could in the few days that we had. We only had to ride a short distance to find at least 30 Weddell seal mothers and their pups. Tagging the seals required at least three people. One to persuade the mother to leave her pup (using the soft end of a broom), another to hold the pup still and the third to place the orange plastic tags in the left and right tail flippers. While this may sound a little unkind, it is necessary in the long term to understand the diet and distribution patterns of the Weddell seals. Exploring the hills and islands at Colbeck are one of the main attractions of visiting the area with walking around Chapman’s Ridge one thing at the top of the list. While I am not normally interested in the rocks, I found that the rocks in this area were especially interesting. The rock near Mawson is called Charnockite and is basically dry granite. It is usually solid and hard, but on Chapman’s ridge we came across some heavily weathered rock in a very chaotic honeycomb formation.
Scattered amongst the rocks at Colbeck is evidence of ancient visitors. The most striking are the whalebones on the rocky beach below Chapman’s ridge. In my travels I had seen the remains of smaller animals such as freeze dried seals, or penguins but this is the first time I saw a set of large bones. I had read in the hut logbook about these bones, but I had never found how old they were or what type of whale they belonged to but it is something I would really like to know.
There is also a very important historical significance to the Colbeck area at Cape Bruce. On 18 February 1931 Sir Douglas Mawson Leader of the British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions (BANZARE) landed there and raised the British flag and proclaimed British Sovereignty over what is now Australian Antarctic Territory. The copy of the proclamation paper left there by Mawson remained at Cape Bruce until 1971 when it was returned to the Australian Archives. We visited the cairn that was there and added our names to the visitors book as well as reading the copy of Mawson’s proclamation. I really admire Sir Douglas Mawson and his colleagues for their pioneering spirit and vision, so visiting Cape Bruce and Proclamation point was a very important moment for me in my time in Antarctica.
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