Ben Weber's Day 56: 'steady progress'
"Hopefully, the difficulties of the last few days are behind me now," reports Strathspey's lone polar explorer Ben Weber.
"Today was good. Cold again at -29C, but I wouldn’t expect anything much warmer than that now up here on the plateau, though there was a bit of stiff headwind, with windchill down to -40C. Absolutely had to make sure that no skin was exposed to the air!"
From the start, the Carrbridge man could feel a difference in the snow.
It wa much more compact than it had been, though still containing patches of soft snow.
"I'm sure the soft snow over the last few days has not helped me at all, as you really do feel the difference, even when there is less than a centimetre."
His sled "just becomes reluctant to move on".
But the conditions have allowed him to move that little bit faster and more freely, without "Sledmund", named after Everest hero Edmund Hillary, feeling so heavy, with an average speed of around 2.4kph, up from 2.1 on day 55 and 1.9 the day before that.
"Doesn’t sound massive but it’s a big difference over the day!
"I just did 9.5 hours rather than 10-I didn’t sleep very well last night – maybe excited about being in the 89th degree – so took a little bit too long to get out of the sleeping bag this morning.
"But still, I managed just over 23km, some 12 nautical miles, and I was definitely happy with the progress. It means I am now a quarter of the way through the degree. Just 45 more nautical miles to go…!"
Visit Ben’s blog site to hear Ben’s audio diary from his overnight camp and donation links to Cancer Research UK
