Giles Kershaw (BAS Pilot between 1974 to 1979) was killed in a flying accident on the Jones Ice Shelf in 1990. Giles was buried on Mount Kershaw – 1,180 metres (3,870 ft), named after Giles by the UK Antarctic Place Names Committee. It rises above above the Jones Ice Shelf (now Jones Sound), and the Kosiba Wall on the northeast end of Blailock Island.
Giles Kershaw – Pilot – BAS Air Unit Adelaide & Rothera
This extract is from Skip Novak’s Newsletter:
www.pelagic.co.uk › logbooks › scotshackexped › 100517_newsletter
(Skip is an old-time (and old) adventurer who has completed some admirable journeys, and his account of visiting Giles’ grave tells a good story):
“We steamed through the night, the next day, and by the following evening with no ice of consequence on the horizon we entered The Gullet: (see BAS Journey Reports below – )
– a narrow and spectacular passage between the Arrowsmith Peninsula of the mainland and Adelaide Island – the gateway that leads to Marguerite Bay.
On average, The Gullet is rarely open as both north and south entrances to the strait are wine bottle shaped which with help from wind and tide gather and concentrate vestiges of last years sea ice and brash forming plugs. Un bouchon is a more descriptive word in French that could be applied to a bottle, a traffic jam on the peripherique around Paris or – an ‘ice jam’ in The Gullet.
Compared to the compact nature of the terrain in the central Gerlache area, the landscape of Marguerite Bay is expansive, more Arctic geographically and the ambience is certainly austere and somewhat intimidating. There are few good places to shelter so we spent two nights lying to dodgy anchors, luckily in light winds while by day touring the immediate area around Pourquoi Pas Island.
This was a nostalgic visit for me as we rarely get this far south. In 1991 I spent a month in Marguerite Bay climbing, skiing and generally nosing around. At that time a feature called the Jones Ice Shelf which connected Blaiklock Island to the south side of the Arrowsmith Peninsula was used by bush pilots to land fuel for future forays south. I skied across it from the east to the west side and it was more or less flat as a pancake.
The previous year it was the scene of tragedy when the Antarctic’s foremost bush pilot legend and co-founder of the well known air logistics company Adventure Network International capsized an experimental gyrocopter above the Jones during a National Geographic film project. Giles Kershaw’s home made coffin was man hauled across the Jones and then hoisted up to a rock promontory on the side of a mountain that now bears his name. Either by design or fortune, above his perch is an outsized sill and dyke structure of black basalt that forms a natural cross in the rock face. Here he was buried under a rock cairn and left in unrivalled peace.
In 1991 I must have skied underneath Giles – we were in a snow storm and of course never saw the grave site. Then in 2001 I was asked to take Nancy Kershaw, Giles 79 year old Mom, to the grave on board the Pelagic. She had been trying to make this pilgrimage for over 10 years but could never land by air on the Jones for one reason or another. With Pelagic w e got her within a mile of the grave, but by then the Jones had down wasted and ablated into a labyrinth of ridges and melt pools and was too unsafe to cross by foot or ski. In 06/03/2005 Jerome Poncet’s Golden Fleece was the first vessel to transit what was now called Jones Sound. Global warming, by whatever mechanism you attribute it to, had completed its work.
This year it was ice free. It took some time to find the grave as there are similar sill and dyke structures on every buttress of the massif and we had no exact GPS position. We finally found it – the cross, with the vertical post still standing after 20 years just visible with the binos. Romolo, Chris, Swiss Chris and I made the scramble over steep and loose rock to the cairn, what must have been 80 meters above the water. A stainless steel plaque is affixed to the rock above the grave with the inscription Giles Kershaw – 1948 – 1990 – “Guardian of the Solitude.” And so he is, rarely visited. After sitting in silence for some time with a view ‘to die for’ Romolo and I left a carabiner and a climbing sling on the cross and with the others made a careful descent.
This story ends when while still south I contacted Giles wife Anne Kershaw who by chance would be in Ushuaia on our arrival, working with Robert Swan’s 2041 Project. If you read Robert’s recent book, Antarctic 2041 (recommended) you can appreciate this was a poignant get together in Giles memory.“
Steve Wormald Adelaide – Met, 1969, Stonington – GA – 1970, BC/GA – 1973, Rothera – Ops. Manager 1974-1977