The sastrugi field I had to cross on my first walk outside the station. What looks like gentle waves from a distance becomes treacherous terrain up close: sharp ridges, hidden grooves, and ice that breaks unpredictably under your boots. A half-mile walk across this, out of breath at 11,500 feet physiological altitude, with the wrong gloves.
I thought my first days at the South Pole would be monumental. I had imagined stepping onto the ice with some sense of arrival, of accomplishment, of having crossed into something profound. I expected something meaningful, something that felt commensurate with the extremity of where I had just landed.
Instead, I got Acute Mountain Sickness and a half-mile walk that nearly broke me.
This is what arrival at the South Pole actually felt like when your body hadn't figured out how to function yet.
The Headache
The headache started within an hour of stepping off the plane and didn't subside for three days. Not a normal headache, the worst hangover of your life. Constant, unrelenting pressure, as if someone was tightening a vice around your skull with every breath you took.
The South Pole sits at 9,301 feet above sea level, but the physiological altitude is closer to 11,500 feet due to the atmospheric pressure and the cold. Your body doesn't get enough oxygen, and your brain protests. Loudly.
Tylenol didn't touch it. Ibuprofen barely dulled the edge. Sleep didn't help because I couldn't sleep. Altitude messes with your breathing patterns. You wake up gasping every hour with your heart pounding, wondering if something is wrong.
Something was wrong. You were at the South Pole. Your body knew you shouldn't be there.
I spent those first nights lying in my bunk, head throbbing, staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the decisions that led me to this moment. None of them felt good.
They told you it takes three to five days for initial adjustment to the altitude, but full adaptation can take a month or more. They told you to avoid strenuous activity for the first 24 to 48 hours, yet nobody told me what "strenuous activity" meant at the South Pole.
As it turns out, it means walking.
The Walk
A few days after arrival, I had to make my first trek away from the station. It was only a half mile—a simple walk to the meteorological snow stake field to take the monthly accumulation measurements. Half a mile. Easy, right?
Wrong.
The terrain at the South Pole isn't flat. It is covered in sastrugi: wind-carved ridges and grooves in the snow that can reach several feet high. Sharp, rippling patterns that appear beautiful from a distance and treacherous up close. Your foot breaks through unexpectedly and your ankles twist. You stumble, catch yourself, and keep moving.
I was sweating and shivering at the same time, overheating from exertion inside my layers, yet freezing the moment I stopped moving. My breath came in ragged gasps. The thin air made every step feel like climbing a mountain.
I had grabbed the wrong pair of gloves. They weren't the thick insulated ones rated for extreme cold, but a lighter pair I thought would be fine for a short walk. They weren't fine.
Within ten minutes, the pain started. Not cold. Pain. Excruciating, burning pain as my fingers began to freeze. I repeatedly clenched my fists, trying to generate warmth. It didn't work. The pain got worse. I was completely out of breath, stumbling over sastrugi, fingers screaming, and my mind kept circling back to one thought: Fuck this.
Not poetic. Not profound. Just: Fuck this. What did I sign up for?
The View That Changed Everything
I stopped halfway through the walk, not because I wanted to appreciate the view but because I needed to catch my breath. That is when I looked around. Really looked. A 360-degree view of absolutely nothing.
I had been deployed to the Middle East years earlier. I had stood in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert and looked at infinite miles of sand stretching in every direction. I thought I understood emptiness.
I was wrong.
The air was different. The cold wasn't only the temperature. It was a physical presence, a weight pressing against you. The silence wasn't peaceful. It was oppressive and unnerving, the kind of quiet that makes your ears ring.
The view: white ice in every direction. No variation. No landmarks. No edges. Just flat, endless nothingness meeting the sky at a horizon that changed with the curvature of the Earth. It was heavy. Mentally heavy. It was a landscape that made you feel small in a way that isn't comforting.
I stood there, out of breath, fingers burning, head pounding, and thought: This is where I'll be for the next year. This is what I chose.
The weight of that realization was almost as crushing as the altitude.
What They Don't Tell You
Nobody tells you that arriving at the South Pole isn't dramatic or that your first meaningful experience won't be awe or wonder. It will be a half-mile walk that feels like a marathon because your body hasn't figured out how to function yet.
The cold isn't the hardest part. It's the altitude, the dryness, the headaches, the breathlessness, the way your fingers scream when you make one wrong choice about gloves. The landscape is beautiful and hostile at the same time. It doesn't care if you're struggling. It just sits there, indifferent, waiting to see if you will adapt.
They don't tell you that you might question your decision within the first few days, or that you will lie in your bunk at night, head pounding, wondering if you made a terrible mistake. But you can't leave. The planes keep flying during the summer season, four a day sometimes, but by mid-February, the last plane leaves and you are stuck for nine months. Even before that final flight, leaving would be quitting, and you didn't come to the South Pole to quit.
So you don't.
When It Started To Get Easier
It took about two weeks before I felt that I had my bearings. The headaches faded. My lungs adapted. I learned which gloves to wear and how to pace myself across sastrugi. I stopped waking up gasping every hour.
But more than the physical adjustment, it was mental. The South Pole is more mental than anything else. Your body adapts if you give it time. Your mind has to choose to stop fighting it.
There wasn't a specific moment when it shifted from "I made a mistake" to "I can do this." It was gradual—a slow realization that I was still there, still functional, and still moving forward.
By the end of the first month, the landscape didn't feel quite as oppressive. The silence didn't unsettle me as much. The cold became routine. But that first walk? That brutal, breathless, finger-burning half-mile trudge across uneven ice when my mind was screaming?
That is the moment I understood what I had actually signed up for.
It wasn't adventure or heroics. It wasn't a cinematic arrival at the bottom of the world. It was simply the slow, unglamorous work of convincing my body and mind that I was supposed to be there.
The Gap Between Expectation And Reality
I expected arrival at the South Pole to be monumental. It wasn't. It was painful, disorienting, and deeply humbling. My body protested. My mind questioned everything. My fingers screamed.
But I made it through that walk. And the next one. And the one after that.
Somewhere in those first two weeks of stumbling, gasping, and adjusting, I stopped expecting the South Pole to meet my expectations. It doesn't care. You either adapt, or you don't.
I did. Eventually.
But that first walk? That was the reality check I didn't know I needed.
South of Silence publishes in Summer 2026. Learn more about the book here or read more Reflections from the Ice on my website.
Thank you for being here, and for caring about this story. It matters more than you know.
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