Yalour Islands and Port Lockroy, Antarctic Peninsula
No words are powerful enough to capture the essence of a day like today. It started like many others here on the Antarctic Peninsula. Daylight arrived barely hours after it had disappeared. Twilight and dawn linger, leaving little time for darkness to intervene. As with many days, gray clouds shrouded the mountaintops and sat upon the glaciers, but there was promise evident even then. Rays of brilliance seemed to bounce about the scene, highlighting islets or icebergs or distant pinnacles in a seemingly random fashion. Attentive observers soon realized that we were pacing. One moment the peninsula was on our port. The next it was on our starboard. And then we were at rest on the edge of a swath of scattered rocky islets named long ago by Jean Baptiste Charcot.
Dwarfed by icebergs and skirted with drifting floes, the Yalour Islands might have been construed to be devoid of life except for the telltale orange glow of Xanthoria lichens that thrive near colonial nesting birds. Closer inspections from Zodiacs revealed that the larger islets squirmed with nesting Adélie penguins and the odd gentoo or two. A sense of calm seemed to pervade, for courtship is nearly over and incubation underway, when one partner must sit tight while the other ventures forth to replenish exhausted fat stores. That is not to say the birds were listless, for they squirted from the water like watermelon seeds to land upright on ice floes here and there, posing perfectly as foreground for distant sculpted forms. Gray clouds were replaced by blue skies and scattered wispy white.
Penguins were not the only counter-shaded life to break the calm reflective surface of the sea. Conical heads and tall peaked dorsal fins rose and fell as a group of killer whales inspected the ice for seals. Red-coated Zodiac cruisers received the same intensive stares and a few of us discovered how a mouse might feel when sized up by a hungry feline. The ship seemed to warrant close scrutiny too as a female and teenager paced our movements and slipped under the bow only to disappear again into the ice continuing with their “shopping” excursion.
Snow covered mountains and clear blue skies were reflected between sparkling growlers as we retraced our steps northward through the Lemaire Channel and into the ice-choked harbor at Port Lockroy. Upon tiny Goudier Island the British post office bustled with sales. Warm sunshine enticed all to linger outside, simply watching the clouds form and dissipate around the stately peaks of Wiencke and Anvers Islands and the penguins come and go.
The day doesn’t end in the evening as the light lingers on and on. Golden alpen glow paints the walls of the Neumayer Channel and the edges of icebergs are sharpened with shadows. It is the time of reflective contemplation. How can one describe this place to one who has not seen the beauty for themselves?
