27 July 1985
News overnight: glaciologists were stranded unfit for their arduous journey up the medial moraine, and the weather was wet.
Breakfast was later than usual due to meteorological conditions and their effect on the cold, wet, tired constitution, but at least by 11 (!) surveyors were surveying and levelling and as for the others......
What is cold, wet, boring , miserable and a jolly silly thing to do in the rain? Maybe wandering around in braided channels, sticking pegs into arbitrary positions and looking at them through thin slits and drawing wet lines on plastic paper might hint at the answer.
Plane table surveying!
You do the above about 10 times between each 2 control points (if you have enough flags!) until you have just about enough dots to join up constructing an approximate sketch (if it’s cold, wet, raining ......) and accurate diagram if you have the time, patience, weather and inclination (see map of India).
Indian clinometer (used to find points) actually called an alidade.
You bung it on a calibrated sheet with
(i) Base line
(ii) Control points
(iii) Lots of pegs
Tomorrow we should finish off (if we haven’t been sent up the glacier!) and all for the sake of an ‘A’ level geography project; yet no doubt, and ‘A’ level geography project par excellence!
And Bob’s your uncle?
Corned beef hash (i.e. corned beef and baked beans) for dinner. Yum! Then a ‘pat’ of semolina and a ‘cup’ of chocolate custard. Even yummier!
The gamblers (John, Liz and myself) were out after dinner, getting down to a raucous game of pontoon (the others, not leaders, were TRYING to sleep) which really separated the men from the boys. John and Liz were swept right off the table with a confident clean sweep.
Breakfast was later than usual due to meteorological conditions and their effect on the cold, wet, tired constitution, but at least by 11 (!) surveyors were surveying and levelling and as for the others......
What is cold, wet, boring , miserable and a jolly silly thing to do in the rain? Maybe wandering around in braided channels, sticking pegs into arbitrary positions and looking at them through thin slits and drawing wet lines on plastic paper might hint at the answer.Plane table surveying!
You do the above about 10 times between each 2 control points (if you have enough flags!) until you have just about enough dots to join up constructing an approximate sketch (if it’s cold, wet, raining ......) and accurate diagram if you have the time, patience, weather and inclination (see map of India).
Indian clinometer (used to find points) actually called an alidade.
You bung it on a calibrated sheet with
(i) Base line
(ii) Control points
(iii) Lots of pegs
Tomorrow we should finish off (if we haven’t been sent up the glacier!) and all for the sake of an ‘A’ level geography project; yet no doubt, and ‘A’ level geography project par excellence!
And Bob’s your uncle?
Corned beef hash (i.e. corned beef and baked beans) for dinner. Yum! Then a ‘pat’ of semolina and a ‘cup’ of chocolate custard. Even yummier!
The gamblers (John, Liz and myself) were out after dinner, getting down to a raucous game of pontoon (the others, not leaders, were TRYING to sleep) which really separated the men from the boys. John and Liz were swept right off the table with a confident clean sweep.
10:00am
Liz, John and myself were off to the river to go surveying with alidade (home-made cos surveyors had run off with the other ones) and Abney Levels. Woody was up on the ice, though only by a near miss was he not surveying! The others are on the terraces. It is not YET raining.
4:30pm
It is still not raining.
Having completed the empirical content of the surveying i.e. plotting the plan, John has gone to complete the sketching whilst Liz and I take welcome relief behind the basalt columns.
The day has been yet uneventful (although a VW combi full of reindeer shooting Icelanders has just driven across our horizon). 3:30pm heralded the arrival of Ian Galbraith and Ray Ward – carefully un-timed to miss a drowning session by John and Liz of each other.
The water had fallen since yesterday and has subsequently risen, but since we forgot to record the previous level, today’s measurement will be a little superfluous (although an ‘estimate’ has been proposed). Not much good eh! Now time for Abney levelling. Fun God wot.
10:30pm
Andrew N has just discovered that his boots won’t fit crampons i.e. another member must go and relieve the starving meteorology and glaciologists by lugging huge amounts of food up the glacier.
After a lengthy conscience pricking session by Ian on the lack of sexual discrimination apparently present on the expedition Mairi and I dashed to base camp to fit our crampons, and finally made our way back home at 11:30pm, thoughts full of the day ahead.
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