I have enough photos of the interior of the Cape Evans hut to fill twenty posts – there will probably be four – but to get a good idea of the context for the hut, let’s do a little exploring outside, first.
If you are standing facing the hut as in the photo above, the outward tip of Cape Evans is off to your right, and it attaches to the rest of Ross Island and the slopes of Mt Erebus to your left. That is the direction we’re going to go, because we want to climb the Ramp, that steep slope of volcanic scree which makes the border between the ice cap of the island and the exposed rock of Cape Evans.
Once you get away from the human area, Cape Evans looks more like the moon than anywhere you’ve been. There are odd-shaped porous igneous rocks strewn everywhere, and everything is filled in with volcanic grit, loose like sand. Every so often there’s a big rock that has been sculpted by the wind, volcanic forces, or both. These are often studded with rhomboid crystals of feldspar, making these rocks kenyte, so named because it was first identified on Mt Kenya, formerly a volcano like Erebus. It is a very rare form of rock, globally, but Cape Evans is full of it, and when the Terra Nova emptied her belly of Expedition wares, they took many tons of kenyte back to New Zealand as ballast.
Spot the skua. It’s watching. Always watching.
When Cape Evans was first explored on the Discovery Expedition, it was called the Skuary for all the nesting skuas. Like the pair at Hut Point, the skuas at Cape Evans did not yet have any eggs, but they had picked their spots and were hanging around in pairs watching me suspiciously. A few times, one flew low overhead, just to remind me who was in charge. I tried to spot their sites before I stumbled across them, which wasn’t easy to do as the birds are about the size and colour of the rocks, but the blast pattern of white droppings was usually a good sign. I made it all the way through the danger zone unscathed.
What had looked like a clear shot up a moderate but climbable slope turned out to be rather a tough climb, at least as much for the loose grit as the incline. I only got halfway up before getting much too hot to continue, but that was high enough to get a panorama which puts the hut, the cape, and the islands in context from the landward side.
A larger version of this image can be found here. The hut is that teeny tiny triangular thing at the far right end of the photo. I told you Inaccessible Island was big.
From up here I could see that a far more sensible way to climb the Ramp was to follow the ridgeline from Wind Vane Hill, and made a mental note to try it that way in future. (Spoiler: too many skuas.) I could also see some of the famous debris cones. These very regular conical hillocks mystified the explorers, who thought they must be some sort of volcanic feature, but on excavating one they found it was just a uniform pile of gravel. Eventually it was hypothesised that they had been great boulders that had weathered in place and simply fallen into the cone shape as they broke apart. I don’t know if this theory has been updated. I was surprised – I really shouldn’t have been – that they looked exactly like Wilson’s drawings of them.
Two debris cones can be seen near the top of the ridge. See also the skua nest sites in the foreground.
I hastened back to the hut, and on approaching it got to appreciate some of Cherry’s handiwork.
The House that Cherry Built, v.2
In preparation for the Winter Journey to Cape Crozier, Apsley Cherry-Garrard set about constructing a stone igloo, seeing as building materials at Cape Crozier were likely to involve stone and ice and not so much of the lovely sticky snow that is good for making the traditional sort of igloo. The structure you see here is, in fact, Igloo No. 2 – it was originally constructed near the Magnetic Hut, but when he tried to install a blubber stove, Simpson banished him from the environs as the soot was bound to mess up their atmospheric radiation readings. So he carried each of the stones resentfully down the beach to reconstruct it here. That was quite a long way:
The Magnetic Hut is where that blue square is, on the snowy slope. What you see there is a white casing (the blue is the shadow side) as the magnetic hut was (and is) insulated with asbestos.
Up Wind Vane Hill is another important view of Cape Evans. Of course, you get the view down to the hut and North Bay, which still looks pretty much exactly like the historical photos except, bizarrely, in colour:
What I really came up here to see, though, was the view in the other direction. Many years ago I wanted to do an illustration of someone watching from the top of Wind Vane Hill for anyone approaching from the south, but could find no photographs of that view. It’s a very important view as it’s a direct visual link with Hut Point, and once the telephone line had been severed, the only way to communicate. Well, now I was in a position to get that view for myself:
There’s that million-dollar view. Use it responsibly.
I’ve done my best to correct it in Photoshop, so perhaps you haven’t noticed that there’s a peculiar quality to the light in these last few photos. That’s because, the day I took these pictures, the sun was doing this:
Though it wasn’t planned as such, it would turn out to be my last visit to Cape Evans. I had a small inkling at the time that it might be, so tried my best to tie up all my loose ends while I had the chance. These effects were caused by the high-level moisture of an approaching storm, and that was the only time in my month on the ice that I saw such a display. It was bittersweet but much appreciated that it happened to be here, of all places.