Blazing Ice (17 page)

Delaney had stuck with us through tough days on the trail this year, and more recently through the edgy days of waiting. He'd worked brilliantly with us the year before when we forged the Shear Zone crossing. When he started his snowmobile, I hailed him. Allan turned around.

We who stayed stood outside the living module, saluting Allan with slow, rhythmic clapping.

“Thanks, fellas,” he said.

Three days later, out of the north, a pair of bright headlights bobbing independently in the washed-out distance defined our horizon. Within ten minutes, two snowmobiles roared into camp, shut down, and two tired faces looked up.

“Norbert Yankielun, welcome,” I greeted the tall, clean-shaven, bald-headed man I'd met at CRREL HQ a year ago. He looked haggard and ready to stop.

“Allen, thank you,” I turned to O'Bannon, as Russ and John Penney eagerly took custody of the spare parts. “We're still on a night shift cycle here. We'll get you some food. You guys take twenty-four. When you're rested we'll try it again.”

A raging blizzard had socked in McMurdo. Allen told me my boss's boss in McMurdo was disturbed that I launched the snowmobile expedition in the first place. “It didn't bother us,” Allen explained. “We waited at the Shear Zone until the weather let us go in.”

“Yep, that was the plan,” I concurred. “We knew our capabilities. We let Mac-Ops know we were coming. That's all we needed to do. And now you're back. Take your rest, pardner.”

While Russ and John completed
Quadzilla
's repairs, Allen and Norbert adjusted their sleep cycles. Then, fully seven days
after
we arrived at SOUTH, we were ready to roll again.

Following a new towing plan, James and
Quadzilla
hitched to the living and energy modules. The rest of the sled fleet apportioned among other tractors, Stretch and the D8R hitched to four fuel tank sleds in line. That should have been an easy pull. But when the tank sleds dug into a bear trap flanking a dornik and pulled down the D8, we stared, dumbfounded. Stretch, James,
Russ, John Penney, and I grimly dismounted our tractors. After some time and more reconfiguring, we all got back on our feet and made camp two hundred yards farther south from where we had camped for seven days.

“Well … that didn't work,” I muttered to the wastelands.

Norbert had been observing all this. He asked me, “Has it been like that?”

“Yes.”

Norbert heaved a sigh, apprehensive for his future with us.

We cannot have been an easy group for Norbert to walk into. Our hopes for the season faded daily. The terrain whipped us. “Existing technology only” whipped us. We were beat up.

But Norbert made the best of it. He'd brought an amateur radio set with him, keeping us in touch with world news. He won our best cook contest. And one evening, he lectured us on synthetic aperture radar, the sort satellites used. The white metal door at one end of our galley became his whiteboard. Norbert covered it with multicolored-diagrams worthy of a New York graffiti artist.

But after the experience with the D8R and the dornik, I threw in the towel. We had to change what we were doing. We'd depot some loads here and along the way. We'd pick them up on our return. We'd get lighter going south, breaking trail as best we could. And we'd hope the compacted trail would set up behind us for our return.

“We'll keep heading south until we consume half our fuel or half our time, whichever comes first,” I declared the next morning in the galley. “Only then will we turn back north. But to make any southern progress at all, we're going to start shuttling our loads. We'll have to be smart about it, but that's what we're going to do.”

Others surely thought the same thing, but I had to declare it. Even though we'd sidetracked some loads two hundred yards back at SOUTH, we still couldn't advance what we kept all at once. Shuttling meant moving a portion of our loads forward, and then going back to retrieve the remaining portion. For every mile won, we'd cover three. We'd pay a high cost in fuel to do that. We'd also pay in spent emotions. But this was the change I had to make.

Not every tractor would be involved in shuttling, so there was the added challenge of finding constructive work for those who weren't engaged. At our
next camp, sixteen miles beyond SOUTH, Stretch and James went back to retrieve two loads. Russ and John Penney remained in camp working maintenance chores and coordinating radio comms with the dispersed crew. I joined Norbert and Allen on the radar team, and we flagged the next twenty miles forward. Though we hadn't seen a twenty-mile day since departing the Shear Zone, this next stretch held suspect terrain where hidden crevasses might lurk. When we rejoined the camp at day's end, I had good news.

“We never found a crevasse. And we've proved a hundred-foot-wide safe corridor for the next twenty miles. And … we never saw a dornik all day.”

The dorniks lay behind us now. But the days got warmer, the snow got softer, and we wallowed more and more pushing south through the snow swamp. One day a tractor could pull two fully loaded fuel tank sleds. The next day it could only pull one. Bewildered, we altered our shuttling plans as the conditions changed. And, we got very good at rescuing stuck tractors and repairing broken sleds, quickly.

On passing one hundred miles from SOUTH, we planted a tall wooden post into the snow and stood for a photograph beside it. That photo showed a weary, unsmiling crew standing in flat light with no horizon.

Farther down the trail, a failed fuel injector disabled one of our tractors. Again, we didn't have the spare with us. A crew rotator flight would soon swap out Allen O'Bannon, but this time we wouldn't wait for the plane. We fit plastic skis under the disabled tractor, and then dragged the
tractor
forward. The surprising success of our improvised rescue skis got us talking at dinner again.

Russ started it. “I think we need to try hover barges.”

“What'd they do with
Maxine
? They retro-ed it in '93,” I chimed in. “You think NSF would go for that again? Hah! Proven technology only.”
Maxine
was a small hovercraft purchased by the USAP. It'd been trialed on the Ice during the late 1980s and early '90s. NSF scrapped it.

“No, no,” Russ insisted. “I'm talking about hover
barges
. Barges, not hovercraft. A big barge with an air cushion under it. It don't take much air, less than five psi. You move big printing presses around warehouse floors with aircushions. That'd work here. Just load up a barge and turn on the air. We'd pull the barges with our tractors. Nothing to it.”

“It'd work until the wind came up. Blow you all over the place,” James observed.

“Yeah, or until you crossed a crevasse and the wind dropped out from under you. Then what do you do … fill the crevasse up with air?” I speculated.

“Or until you had to go up hill …” McCabe again.

“Yeah, but all you'd have to do is get to the base of the mountains. You could drag everything the rest of the way from there, just like we're doing now. On a hover barge, I bet you could move ten times as much as we're moving now.” Russ was right, of course.

“Ten times nothing is nothing.” Stretch brought us back to reality.

“But it sure is nice to think about.” Russ again.

“I wonder how big you can get that plastic? I wonder how heavy you could load it,” I mused.

“Man, that stuff is sure slick,” Russ said.

We dreamed of floating unimaginable loads across the Ross Ice Shelf, effortlessly. We conjured wonderful designs using technologies not proven.

While we dreamed, the Twin Otter caught up with us. Mountaineer Scott “Scooter” Metcalf stepped off the plane to replace Allen O'Bannon. Scooter was fit. He wore a short black beard and mustache and a topknot of curly dark hair. He stood five-and-a-half-feet tall. The rest of us were all six feet, or over. A shorter fellow among towering grumps in close quarters might find himself uncomfortable.

We stayed in camp for a day to adjust Scooter's sleep cycle. Russ and John Penney dealt with the fuel injector.

When the tractor was ready, James and Stretch took
Quadzilla
and
Fritzy
back twenty miles to retrieve a load. They arrived back in camp for lunch, and then advanced that same load another twenty miles forward. While they were gone, Norbert picked up news on his amateur radio that Saddam Hussein had finally been captured. None of us liked having our marines and soldiers killed in Iraq, but now we cheered. I passed on Norbert's news when the shuttle crew came within VHF range.

James's tired voice radioed back: “Finally, some good news.” They'd covered eighty miles that day only to return to the exact point where they started.

At two hundred miles past SOUTH we planted another wood post, and again we stood for a photo in the flat light that wouldn't leave us. While the crew slept that evening, I placed a red mark on a particular day later in December on the wall calendar in our galley. The next morning Scooter immediately noticed the red mark and demanded to know what it meant.

“It's a red mark, Scooter. That's all. It's a red mark,” I curtly replied.

Seven miles past our last post, things changed. We'd been sidetracking pairs of fuel tank sleds across the swamp. As one tank emptied, we left it on the snow along with a second full tank to guarantee our return fuel. Now only two full tank sleds remained, which we could haul forward all at once. No more shuttling.

On Christmas morning, the distant mountain fronts of the Transantarctics gleamed above our southern horizon, our first clear day in weeks. We made an unprecedented thirty miles, and in the process we crossed the 180 degree meridian in latitude S 82
^o
25'. Russ sleuthed out that since we had crossed the dateline, we could have Christmas again. The next morning we did: we slept in.

After waking, we shared candies and packages from home that the Twin Otter had brought along with Scooter. Personal Christmas cards read aloud cheered us. We passed out tokens from the folks in Alberta who'd made our modules. Wooden backscratchers I purchased from a rubber-tomahawk store back home went 'round to everyone. Now we could reach back inside our heavy coats and go after an itch.

I found a quiet moment later that morning and called my wife using our Iridium phone. She answered her cell phone from Preservation Hall in New Orleans. It was intermission at the jazz music venue. She, our son, and our brand-new daughter were passing through on their way to Grammy's house in Florida for the holiday. I'd had no idea, but I had a great laugh.

That was only a brief escape for me. We started down the trail again that afternoon in calm weather, watching as the mountains grew clearer and larger. The snow felt firmer under my tractor. Were we coming out of the snow swamp, or was it just the lighter loads? Perhaps those mountains made some kind of local weather, better snow. Perhaps it was all a phantom.

But that same afternoon we only made twelve miles. It was our worst day ever. Three pineapple lockdowns on our container sleds broke. These were
nearly indestructible devices that tie the container van to the sled base. When the last one broke, we were out of replacements. After cobbling a solution of heavy chains and sacrificed tools, we again picked ourselves up and got on down the trail.

James was dogging Stretch's module train in
Quadzilla
when he screamed out on the radio: “Stop, Stretch! Stretch, stop! Stop!”

All our trains halted. We dismounted again and surveyed the damage. Another turntable pin had snapped in two, this time on the energy module sled. The module balanced precariously on its undercarriage. A false move would bring it to the ground. If that happened, we had no means of lifting it back onto the sled chassis;
Fritzy
's crane was not up to it, so the wreck would have had to stay in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Come alongs pulled the undercarriage pieces back into alignment. Through a hole we cut in the bathroom floor, we dropped the replacement pin into the turntable. The energy module was again secure on the sled chassis. We had dodged a serious bullet, and we thanked God for the Texan's vigilance.

That evening's e-mail brought me a startling Christmas message from the big chair in McMurdo. It was the NSF accountant, again, demanding an exact accounting of our disappointing performance against our preseason expectations.

We'd been busy that day repairing pineapples and turntable pins and were presently exhausted. We were committed to going as far south as half our fuel or half our time would allow. But we had discovered a region of exceptionally soft snow forcing us to shuttle, and that had consumed an inordinate amount of our onboard fuel supply. While we'd hoped to reach the base of the Leverett Glacier, I doubted we would accomplish that this season. In as much as we were traversing unexplored ground, I couldn't predict how far we might get.

That evening's report to Mac-Ops gave our condition: “Situation desperate. Odds against us. Just the way we like it.”

The next day, we made thirty-one miles with no shuttling. The day after that we made it another fourteen, arriving at a point designated RIS-1 on the proposed route. It was our first targeted point on the Ross Ice Shelf, and it lay 397 miles from the Shear Zone. We had enough fuel to advance another twenty-five miles.

But this was December 28. Red ink on the calendar marked the day.

“Here,” I declared, “is where we turn around.”

Here
was where we confronted our disappointment, but
here
was where we acknowledged we had done our best. The mountains beckoned us south, but over the next two days we rested.

Norwegian Roald Amundsen had cached whole seal carcasses on his depot journey in 1910, the year before his dash to the Pole. He'd intended to use them as food, both for his men and for his dogs. Since he didn't know how much snow might accumulate in those spots, he planted the frozen seals head first, upright and sticking well out of the snow. That way, he stood a better chance of finding them the next year.