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]

Before setting out on December 11 we rigged up the Lower Glacier Depot,
three weekly Summit units of provisions, two cases of emergency b