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Having passed around the first bend they continued for two miles. While keeping close to the edge of the glacier they skirted around two drifted tributaries bordered with rocks from the cliffs above. Now with reduced surface snow, the crevasses were exposed and although the gradient had increased, with spikes, they had good footing and steady progress was made.  Soon, they approached a second bend, they had could see both up, and down the glacier. Priestley realized that the shape of the glacier, they were traversing was similar to that of the Australian Aborigine’s boomerang.  He later coined the name Boomerang Glacier. Priestley writes in his book that during this section of the glacier:

The view was magnificent, for the glacier was comparatively narrow, only a mile or two wide, and the cliffs were as usual steep and high, broken here and there only by steeply falling tributary ice-streams. The wall at the foot of which we were walking was of massive granite, a deep yellow in colour, and was bordered with steep screes of the same material, while to the south the darker colour of the rocks and their banded appearance suggested the occurrence of gneiss and schist.

Once around the second bend the view down towards the entrance to the glacier mouth became obscured by the side hills. The gradient again increased.  All three started to have trouble due to the steep ice and persistent wind blowing down the glacier. Priestley in his diaries mentions that neither Abbott, nor Browning was very good on slippery surfaces and both were having trouble on the bare ice.  However, in his book, he writes that all three of them were having trouble. The next mile was a series of undulations with wide crevasses onClimb-p4t their summits, fortunately most were bridged and were easily detected by marked depressions in the snow.  Several of the crevasses were twenty feet across and some of these only partly bridged. The going was becoming more difficult. Soon, the surface again became knee-deep snow with a crusted surface which broke through with each step. Two miles farther on, with the soft snow making progress extremely slow, Priestley realised there was no way they could get to the top of the glacier in one day. Here, the group decided to moved off the glacier and climb to the top of one of the adjacent peaks with the hope of seeing to the end of the glacier and over to the Mount Melbourne area.  Priestly writes: “ --we struck off up a steep slope leading to a scree of schist and gneiss blocks, and from that to a granite, from the top of which I hoped to be able to see some distance.[i]


[i] Raymond Edward Priestley, p. 206.

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