The ponies had dragged twenty-four weekly units of food for four men to some five miles from the bottom of the glacier, but we were late.  For some days we had been eating the Summit ration, that is the food which should not have been touched until the Glacier Depot had been laid, and we were still a day’s run from the place where this was to be done:  it was of course the result of the blizzard which no one could have expected in December, usually one of the two most settled months.  Still more serious was the deep snow which lay like down upon the surface, and into which we sank commonly to our knees, our sledges digging themselves in until the crosspieces were ploughing through the drift.  Shackleton had fine weather, and found blue ice in the bottom reaches of the glacier, and Scott lamented what was unquestionably bad luck.

It was noon of December 10 before we had made the readjustments necessary for man-hauling.  We left here pony meat for man and dog food, three ten-foot sledges, one twelve-foot sledge, and a good many oddments of clothing and pony gear.  We started with three four-man teams, each pulling for these first few miles about 500 lbs., as follows:  (I) Scott, Wilson, Oates, Seaman Evans:  (II) Lieut.  Evans, Atkinson, Wright, Lashly:  (III) Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, Crean, Keohane.  The team numbered (II) had been man-hauling together some days, and two members of it, Lieut.  Evans and Lashly, had already been man-hauling since the breakdown of the second motor at Corner Camp; it was certainly not so fit as the other two.  In addition to these three sledges the two dog-teams, which had been doing splendid work, were carrying 600 lbs. of our weight as well as the provisions for the Lower Glacier Depot, weighing 200 lbs.  It began to look as if Amundsen had chosen the right form of transport.

The Gateway is a gap in the mountains, a side door, as it were, to the great tumbled glacier.  By lunch we were on the top of the divide, but it took six hours of the hardest hauling to cover the mile which formed the rise.  As long as possible we stuck to ski, but we reached a point at which we could not move the sledges on ski:  once we had taken them off we were up to our knees, and the sledges were ploughing the snow which would not support them.  But our gear was drying in the bright sunshine, our bags were spread out at every opportunity, and the great jagged cliffs of red granite were welcome to the eyes after 425 statute miles of snow.  The Gateway is filled by a giant snowdrift which has been formed between Mount Hope on our left and the mainland on our right.  From Shackleton’s book we gathered that the Beardmore was a very bad glacier indeed.  Once on the top of the divide we lunched, and we descended in the evening, camping at midnight on the edge of the glacier, which we found, as we had feared, covered with soft snow which was so deep as to give no indication whatever of the hard ice which Shackleton found here.  “We camped in considerable drift and a blizzard wind, which is still blowing, and I hope will go on, for every hour it is sweeping away inches of this soft powdery snow into which we have been sinking all day."[221]