r/HighsoftheWorld • u/LouQuacious • Apr 24 '21
Heard Island - Big Ben - Mawson Peak 2,745 m (9,006 ft)
The forbidding upper reaches of the peak
A rare sunset photo of Heard
Penguins, seals and seabirds are the only animals that thrive on what Heard Island dishes out.
Rough seas guard against most attempts to go ashore
The first ship to sight the isle thought it to be a large iceberg
Fresh lava flows darken the peak
Rock, ice, snow, clouds and the sea...elemental forces at play on Heard.
The foreboding fortress that is Heard
Four of the only men to stand on top of Mawson Peak from 2000
1947 expedition
Glacier crossing
The crater that is thought occasionally contain a rare lava lake.
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u/gytherin 16h ago
ooOOoo very nice. Close to Kerguelen too, a place that's always fascinated me. I recently had a friend cackle at me for wanting to go to the Dry Valleys. Us Antarctic fans just like really wild places, it seems.
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u/LouQuacious 15h ago
Kerguelen is pretty fascinating too: https://www.reddit.com/r/HighsoftheWorld/s/RCvwZTPOLP
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u/gytherin 15h ago
It looks brilliant. I was always interested because it was a key piece in the big world jigsaw we had in the library at school. But it's more magnificent than I'd realised.
The cabbages have come into one of Patrick O'Brian's novels, I'm sure.
Also, kitties! Though I'm sure they'll be eradicated at some point, like on the New Zealand sub-Antarctic islands, which I visited this summer. I'm ambivalent about that: they're only trying to survive, just like the rest of us.
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u/LouQuacious Apr 24 '21 edited 1d ago
Big Ben and Mawson peak is located on one of the most inaccessible and harsh environments on the planet, Heard Island. A sub-antarctic volcano deep in the Indian ocean below the notorious roaring 40s, it is one of the least visited and hardest places to see (even with satellites) as clouds generally cover it around 360 days a year. Heard Island is a location I have been obsessed with for quite a while, I have read a couple books on expeditions there (Fourteen Men and The Sea and the Snow) and followed closely the recent DX and scientific expeditions to the island in 2016. Eruptions have been noted the last few years and one was even filmed in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-F5bdQeqIo There is evidence that Big Ben contains one of the few active lava lakes in the world.
First climbed in 1965 by a small Australian team, Big Ben is probably one of the toughest and most arduous treks there is in mountaineering. Last climbed in 2000, it is quite likely more humans have set foot on the surface of the moon than the peak of Mawson. After the 4-6 weeks of journeying across some of the wildest seas on the planet you end up in a supremely remote and foreboding land of ice and fire. The weather is your first challenge as it is nearly always below freezing or just above and hurricane force gales can whip up at any moment and do quite frequently. In Fourteen Men, in a little over a year on the island the men recorded, on average two hurricanes a week. So getting a weather window to climb Mawson is exceedingly rare. Then there is the matter of the treacherous glaciers that stand sentinel around the peak. "Crevasse hell" is how I would describe the approaches while looking at any potential climbing routes on satellite, not to mention the unstable slopes, seracs and abundant avalanches. Once these challenges have been met you are still looking at climbing onto an active volcano with all the incumbent dangers that entails; earthquakes, fumaroles, rock slides etc. All that coupled with the sheer remoteness make any expedition to Heard Island a daunting and dangerous one. Even landing a dinghy on the beach can spell disaster, some expeditions have traveled all the way there only to be unable to land at all.
Here's a trip report from Grahame Budd probably one of the most frequent visitors to Heard still alive, one of the few to have lived on the island for any length of time, and one of the first of maybe a dozen that have climbed the peak: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2015/04/heard-island-the-unchanging-magnificence/
And another report from the last team to climb it in 2000: http://www.cordell.org/HD/HD_documents/HE_Library/Mountaineering/Mawson_summit_log0001.pdf
Some more info on life there: https://www.antarctica.gov.au/antarctic-operations/stations/other-locations/heard-island/human-activities/
And on the heels of the recent trade war declared on these forlorn isles here's a story from Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/trump-tariffs-antarctic-islands-heard-mcdonald/