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“I got violently<br />
yanked back<br />
towards a<br />
bottomless pit”<br />
Less than a kilometre from the Spectre, after a gruelling 17-day approach by kite, Houlding’s 160kg pulk broke through a snow bridge and fell deep into<br />
a crevasse. Thankfully, the knot in his leash caught in the lip of the hole, saving his life. Burgun descended into the icy depths to retrieve it<br />
Burgun and Sedon begin the 1,400km homeward journey after 30 days in the deep field<br />
Plateau, the wind strengthened as they<br />
descended. “We were already at 95 per<br />
cent capacity, in a massive storm, getting<br />
separated and into a serious predicament.<br />
We had to cut away the kites [which<br />
means partially detaching the kite to<br />
instantly lose power and regain control].”<br />
Before the journey, lacking detailed<br />
maps of the Antarctic terrain, Houlding<br />
had spent hours poring over Google Maps<br />
to plot a GPS route through heavily<br />
crevassed glacier fields. He could avoid<br />
the biggest ‘house-eating’ chasms by<br />
using ground-penetrating satellite<br />
imagery, but the Scott Glacier lay in their<br />
path, a chessboard of blue ice criss-crossed<br />
with hundreds of bottomless crevasses<br />
covered in unstable snow bridges. As they<br />
navigated the glacier, the team realised<br />
they’d strayed into its shattered heart<br />
and discovered how unstable the snow<br />
THE RED BULLETIN 61
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