I found an old video of my hike in Antarctica up Patriot Hills. It's interesting to see how stark the environment is! 

It takes a while to settle back into “normal” life again after having been on expedition mode for six months. A lot of friends have been anxiously waiting to see the pictures and video I took during the past half year, wanting to know what was it like to live or travel in those places. Thanks to my dear friend Jing Mu, who spent all her precious free time to work on this project, here they come …

The first posts include Ice Marathon 2007 and our flight to Antarctica. We are planning to post a new video clip about every other week.

Vinson is called mini Denali by a lot of people. They share very similar landscape and scenery:

You may think it’s cloud out there, but no, it’s just glacier.

 First, we made a single carry trip from base camp to low camp by carrying a back pack and pulling a sled behind us:

Between low camp and high camp, we make a double carry to climb a steep slope along 1200m of fixed rope. By “double carry”, we climb this route twice to carry half of our load up each time, because the slope was too steep to pull a sled.

Summit day was a long day. I finally got good luck with weather with climbing on this trip, but it was a painful day for me because I was having a stomach cramp and diarrhea whole day, maybe from the insufficiently-hydrated dry-freeze food the night before. Nonetheless, I was very excited to make it even in such a weak condition:

Starting Point: South 89: 02.038, West 94:27.811,


Ending Point: South 90:00.000


Distance: 107 km


Date: Jan 3 - Jan 9, 2008, 7 days’ hard work.


I underestimated the workload of last degree ski before the trip. I never imagined the sled would be so big.We started the trip with the sled weighing 50-60 kilos, and it looks even bigger than me. Though Antarctica is generally a big flat plain, it’s full of “sastrugi’, the snow drift. Though they may not be so high most of time, they are enough to hold up my sled from time to time. In addition to the snow drift, the journey is a gentle uphill all the way.

This trip is as much a mental game as a physical game. The big white plain, nothing else. You need a lot of patience to get through each “boring” day:

My skis point to due south

The average temperature for the trip is around -25 C, even with bright sunshine and blue sky. A light wind of 5-10 kts would bring significant wind chill effect. That makes cool picture though:

The last day was the hardest day. A constant head wind of 15-20 kts brought the wind chill to -40C:

We could see the destination from 7 miles away. What seemed so close was still many hours away. South Pole Station on the horizon 3-4 miles away. It was the goal that kept me going even though I was very exhausted already:

I finally pulled into South Pole!

I bet no one expected such a modern structure at South Pole!

Heard from Lei today. She’s in Antarctica and having a blast. She and the others stayed up all night watching the Antarctica marathon. Nineteen people ran it, and one woman ran 100k… in 22 hours.

They’ve been stuck there as they need another flight to the mountain base and weather has been pretty warm and a little cloudy. She’s thinking that tomorrow they may be able to make it.

Lei reports that the Antarctica food is great and the life there is excellent. Unlimited food and drinks, a nice toilet, and many interesting people to share them with. She even has a mattress for a bed! She’s been walking around in only 1 layer with her down jacket, so she’s quite comfortable. It’s truly a five star experience.

Her next update should be in a few days from the base of Mt. Vinson.