Between Christmas and New Years, the creative and adventurous team at Davis Station conducted, simultaneously, a whopping six expeditions. Staying in various huts, melons, apples and ‘caravan parks’ scattered around the Vestfold Hills. All human powered!
When your backyard is 512 square kilometres of rock, lakes and beautiful half frozen fjords, the hiking possibilities are endless.
The Vestfold hills are not for the faint hearted. It may look like a relatively tame playground at times, but hidden behind that hill is another hill and another hill, and another rock and another lake and soon you are questioning if you already walked past that rock 30 minutes ago, or if that dyke looks suspiciously like that other dyke on that rock behind that hill we saw at lunch?
Some parties were out in the wilderness for five days, clocking kilometres like you wouldn’t believe, trudging in knee (sometimes thigh) deep snow, scaling 300ft un-named peaks, backtracking after coming across raging torrents of water rushing off the plateau, finding almost no signs of life out in the desolate Mars-like landscape (apart from the odd piece of quad bike).
Fuelled by dehy (dehydrated meals), charcuterie boards, eye fillet steak and croissants the size of your torso, these expeditioners visited glaciers and explored the edge of the plateau. Some went back to their ‘chip packet’ of a night, sleeping in the wild beneath a blazing sun.
Collectively the six parties (25 humans) ran up over 1565km! But we couldn’t have done it without an incredibly skilled comms person at the helm giving us daily weather updates and getting all our party names mixed up, and of course the rest of our Davis family holding the fort down on station.
For anyone up for a Davis summer, stick your head in a map and make your own adventure.
Kat Vaughan - FTO
