Saturday, 6 January 1912

Scott

"Obstacles arising," Scott wrote, "last night we got amongst sastrugi -- they increased in height this morning and now we are in the midst of a sea of fish-hook waves well remembered from our Northern experience. We took off our ski after the first 1 1/2 hours and pulled on foot. It is terribly heavy in places, and, to add to our trouble, every sastrugus is covered with a beard of sharp, branching crystals. We have covered 6 1/2 miles, but we cannot keep up our average if this sort of surface continues." [1]

Temperatures were around -22°, with a minimum of -25.8 (-32.11 C) in the morning.

Later, he wrote that night, there was a "fearfully hard pull again, and when we had marched about an hour we discovered that a sleeping-bag had fallen off the sledge. We had to go back and carry it on. It cost us over an hour and disorganised our party. We have only covered 10 1/2 miles (geo.) and it's been about the hardest pull we've had. We think of leaving our ski here, mainly because of risk of breakage."


Amundsen

The matches found at Mount Betty in 1929. [2]

Just before midnight, the Norwegians reached their depot under Mount Betty ("-11° 85°9'," Bjaaland noted [3]) . With 35 days' food for men and dogs, and depots all along the way back to Framheim, Amundsen wrote, "[we are] really living among the fleshpots of Egypt. It's just a matter now of eating as much as possible to lighten our sledges as quickly as possible." [4]

Amundsen sent Wisting and Helmer Hanssen up to Mount Betty to build a cairn to mark their presence. They left a message, a 17-litre tin of paraffin, and twenty boxes of matches. (This cairn was found by Admiral Byrd's expedition in 1929.)

One dog, Fridtjof, collapsed and was shot, leaving the party to set off for Framheim with twelve dogs as originally calculated.


Notes:

[1] R.F. Scott, diary, 6 January, 1912, quoted by Roland Huntford in Race for the South Pole : the expedition diaries of Scott and Amundsen (London : Continuum, c2010), p.227.
[2] Source unknown.
[3] Olav Bjaaland, diary, 7 January, 1912, quoted by Roland Huntford in Race for the South Pole : the expedition diaries of Scott and Amundsen (London : Continuum, c2010), p.229.
[4] Roald Amundsen, diary, 7 January, 1912, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.505.