Memoirs of a week in a snow cave

More than 50 years after Paul Milsom spent a week huddled in a snow cave on the fringes of the Northern Patagonian Icecap with four fellow mountaineers, their story of survival without food or overnight gear has been published in a book.

A Week in Patagonia describes the freezing temperature, the hunger, the exhaustion of trying to keep the snow cave’s entrance open and the sheer desperateness of their plight when they knew no-one would be looking for them.

Catching up in a café is symbolic for Paul because he has been obsessed with food ever since he spent that week with little more than a few Smarties.

Today, Paul and his wife, Linda, live a self-sufficient life at Woodstock in the Motueka Valley with a ‘snow cave’ cupboard stocked with provisions to ensure they never go hungry.

Back in 1972, he was just 24 and Linda was his new girlfriend who had no idea of his ordeal until she received a letter from him weeks later.

It took weeks for the young mountaineers that included Tom Clarkson, Geoff Spearpoint, Dave Bamford and Ian Thorne, to simply reach the mountains of Patagonia in Southern Chile.

When they finally set up a camp at the bushline, they decided to do a day trek up to the 3,078m peak of Cerro Hyades to have a look over the ice cap.

It was 15 January and the weather looked good for the day trip.

This was back in 1972, when there was no weather forecast and “no decent map” to guide them because it was so remote. The day started well and it seemed straight forward, so no-one felt the need for a rope. That was until a snow bridge collapsed under one of their team and he fell about 15m into the slot, landing on a ledge where he was briefly knocked out.

But they were young and tough and after retrieving him from the crevasse, they carried on up. However, as the summit neared, the weather quickly deteriorated and after attempting to retrace their steps down the mountain, they were forced to find a place to hunker down.

“This storm roared in, and we were just under this mushroom tip at the summit. Everything turned to custard, and you couldn’t see your hand,” Paul remembers.

“Whiteouts are quite freaky because you don’t know whether you’re going up or down.”

A crevasse enabled them to get out of the wind and the five cut blocks of ice to make a type of igloo within the crevasse to protect them from the storm.

All they had were duvet jackets that were not waterproof, the remnants of their lunch, a few lollies including those Smarties, and the hope the weather would clear quickly.

But it took a week for the weather to clear enough for them to try a descent and no-one knew where they were.

As the storm continued, they took turns to clear the entrance, but as the snow built up outside, they were forced to dig out a new entrance which ended up several metres in length by the end of the week.

At one point, they could not light a match and realised there was not enough oxygen in the snow cave.

Another night they woke gasping for breath and had to clear the tunnel.
At the same time, the roof of the cave was continuing to sink, and their shelter was becoming smaller, while above them, they knew the mushroom tip was gathering more snow.

“We had a mushroom above us, and we could have disappeared without a trace,” Paul concedes. “I would get the most uncontrollable shivering, and the cave was getting smaller as the roof was moving down.”

He began writing lists of food on paper they had, with three of them keeping a diary throughout their ordeal.

Food made it into his dreams as well, or it may have been hallucinations, he thinks.

“I remember trying to go out and do the two-hour weather check and suddenly found myself emerging from a manhole in Willis St in Wellington and there was a supermarket just over the road. So, I wandered over and got all this food!”

Another of his party was “talking absolute gibberish” as they huddled together in ever-decreasing confines of their snow cave until finally, the storm passed and they were able to make their way down the mountain.

For Paul and another of his mountaineering buddies, it was a painful descent with trench feet – swollen “like balloons” from the wet and cold of trying to keep the entrance tunnel open.

Back home, it would be nearly half a century before the team was reunited at Paul’s Woodstock property where they remembered their week in a snow cave.

It led to the book that includes excerpts from the diaries they wrote in their frozen shelter and reading it took Paul back to that snow cave.

“When I started to read the book, I started to shiver because it brought it all back.”
Copies of A Week in Patagonia, written and produced by Robbie Burton, are in both the Richmond Library and Te Noninga Kumu Motueka Library.