Blazing Ice (24 page)

Susan sported a blue plastic tiara studded with multicolored gems of paste. She looked absolutely silly. Red and green bunting and flickering low-energy lights in plastic tubes draped our galley. Judy and John Penney whipped up a pancake breakfast, which we relished, served with maple syrup and real butter saved for the occasion. Outside the sky was as bright blue as it'd been each hour of the past twenty-four. Today was Christmas.

“John Wright has offered a thoughtful design for the best drag for our purposes,” Susan declared. “On a scale of one to one hundred, what is your score for his design?”

My brainchild consisted of multiple rows of heavy gauge six-inch diameter pipes, linked by chains that could easily be disassembled or reassembled to any configuration that matched the snow conditions.

“Ninty-five,” Russ offered, deferentially. Susan wrote forty-seven on the chart she'd drawn on the white board.

“Thirty-six,” Brad called out. Susan wrote forty-four.

The gang piled on. Between Susan's scorekeeping and collusion with the crew, I headed toward ignominious loss.

Russ offered a huge rolling drum fitted to an axle and a draw bar. John Penny drew a broad inverted plate bearing chevron ribs that stirred the snow as it dragged along. At the final tally, Jim Lever's design, looking similar to mine but with the addition of plastic sheets loaded with fuel bladders, won resoundingly. I had to find $1,000,000.

Slipping outside the living module for a moment, I left the crew to judge whether or not I were a piker. But I reentered the galley, opened my wallet, and ceremoniously pulled out a $1,000,000 bill. With all the pomposity I could muster, I announced, “Jim Lever, according to our impartial judge in this rigged contest, you have won this prize. I freely give it.”

Jim got his bill, and everyone else did, too. “This is your bonus, spend it wisely.” The seven $1,000,000 bills I had purchased for seven dollars at a Colorado greeting card store.

We hung out for the day on the south side of the Shoals, waiting for a Twin Otter. When it landed that afternoon, one pair of our McMurdo eyes crawled out sporting a red Santa hat. George Blaisdell brought mail from home and digitized ASTER imagery on a disk. We saw for the first time in our galley what he'd been looking at. Plainly, when ASTER did see a crevasse, a crevasse was there. Equally plain, our camp lay at the southern limits of the satellite's coverage. ASTER would be of no further use from here south.

Outside, Brad and Judy refueled the Twin Otter. It'd battled headwinds most of the way out, though there was no wind at our location. The plane took on 351 gallons to assure its own trip back to McMurdo. That amounted to two tractors worth of fuel on a big day. As George reboarded for the return flight, he asked if there were anything else he could do for us.

“Thank you for that. You might look into flying supplemental fuel to us. I hope we get into the Leverett. But who knows what we'll find between here and there. If we do get there, I want to get to the top. I'd hate to turn back for lack of fuel.”

“Will do,” he agreed.

“George, if we make L-00, you'll know we are on the Leverett. We'll get serious about fuel then.”

The day after Christmas, we slept in again, breakfasted late, and remained generally idle. We'd launch again the next day, and we had a few chores around camp to prepare for that. As long as our heavy tractors stood down, we burned little fuel. Our camp generators running around the clock consumed only a gallon and a half per hour.

Stretch and I prospected the next fifteen miles south. We stopped at a turning point where our new course would take us straight to L-00, another fifteen miles away. But looking straight at L-00, we couldn't tell what the glacier we sought was. There was no break in the mountains, or clear valley before us. All along the foot of the mountains, to our right and to our left, the Ice Shelf dipped into a low swale, and then rose gently up the other side to meet the coast of the continent.

In the mid-1990s Evans's team assessed the Leverett route over the Transantarctics leading onto the Polar Plateau. They airlifted onto the glacier, disembarked crew, snowmobiles, camp gear, and simple survey devices for a ground
reconnaissance. They didn't have ground-based ground penetrating radar. However, a New Zealand helicopter that year brought Steve Arcone, Allan Delaney, and their radar out from the not too distant Shackleton Glacier Camp, a temporary science field camp. They flew an aerial radar survey of the Leverett. I inherited their information.

We, on the other hand, had ground-based ground penetrating radar. We'd see things Evans's team had not.

On December 27 our fleet approached L-00. That was the farthest down glacier our predecessors had reached. L-00 supposedly located the base of the Leverett where it converged with the floating Ross Ice Shelf. Our maps even plotted L-00 precisely on the continental shoreline buried beneath the ice. But, seven miles short of L-00, our tractors started laboring up a gentle grade. We were on Leverett ice for the first time and had left the Ice Shelf behind in the swale. L-00 did
not
mark the base of the glacier.

We'd emptied four out of eight three-thousand-gallon fuel tanks and were now drawing from a fifth. By straight measure, we were dipping into our return reserve, and the ground ahead was unknown to us.

“We have a deeply buried crevasse here,
Fritzy
,” Susan's voice squawked over my radio. She ran a quarter mile ahead with John Penney and Jim Lever.

“Copy that,” I answered. “Come back and give us a camp circle.”

It was midday. We stopped the heavy fleet several miles short of L-00.

I joined the prospecting team after lunch, taking a seat behind Susan where I could see her radar screen. Then the four of us launched back toward L-00. The next two miles brought twenty more crevasses. The PistenBully broke through the thin bridge of the twenty-first. Susan and Jim lurched forward, thrown against the front of the cab. The radar slammed into the dashboard. I lay plastered against the front of the passenger compartment.

“Man, I hate this shit!” I swore.

“
You
hate it?” I heard Susan mutter.

“Aw! Aw, jeez!” That was Jim.

None of us was hurt, and for the moment the PistenBully seemed stable. But we had no idea what lay around us. Any move we might make gambled making a dangerous situation worse. Susan's side of the PistenBully had dropped in. She couldn't get out through her door. Jim's side, the left side, rode up. If he got out, that might be all it took to send us and the PistenBully
into the void. Plus, he'd be leaving the driver's seat. If he got out, there'd be no one at the controls. I could get out on the left side, too, through a side door. But I'd no idea what I'd be stepping onto, or into, and I wasn't going to tie myself off to the PistenBully.

It had to be me. As we tipped over the edge, I crawled out to size up our situation.

John Penney came up behind on a snowmobile. I signaled him to stop, then I looked around. The antenna boom lay flat on the snow in front of us. The right track of the PistenBully had broken through a crevasse lid. A faint depression in the snow approached us at a low angle from behind and to our right. This was the sneaky one Russ had foreseen two years ago in the Shear Zone. Susan had been about to call halt for a crevasse that just appeared on her screen, an image of what lay twenty feet ahead. But our right track had already found it. Jim backed the PistenBully out, teetering for one heart-stopping moment before he found flat ground.

Our approach to L-00 had brought us up the eastern side of a broad outflow fan of glacial ice. All the crevasses we'd just encountered lay over the edge of that fan, on its shoulder.

We'd talk over our second close encounter in the morning.

The following day we withdrew our camp to the foot of the glacier, down in the swale. From there the scouting team worked westerly around the base of the fan and located a looping, crevasse-free route to L-00. Elated by a quick solution for a change, we sidetracked three fuel tank sleds and two tractors at the base of the glacier. With the remaining fleet rigged for the climb, we started up, sailed past L-00, and made camp ten miles beyond it. December 29 was a good day for us.

Now firmly on the Leverett Glacier, we entered the Transantarctic's jagged, alpine mountains. Nunataks poked their stony tops through the glaciers that nearly buried them. Solid rock took on real colors of browns, reds, and blacks no longer washed out in the vague grays of distant horizons.

That night I sent “Report from the Field #6” to my bosses in McMurdo. Copies, as usual, went to Dave and George. Field reports described our doings in narrative detail not readily gleaned from daily reports. We were on the Leverett
at last, but we had new terrain problems ahead. Our fuel supply allowed two more days of southern advance.

The next evening's check-in with Mac-Ops brought a hopeful message: my bosses requested an Iridium phone conference in the morning. I looked for good news of fuel coming our way.

“Good morning. What can I do for you both?” I greeted them when I phoned in at the designated hour.

“We don't understand your latest messages,” they replied. “Are you using some kind of code?”

“No … I have no idea what you're talking about,” I answered, nonplussed.

“Well, what, for example, do you mean by ‘loo?'” They pronounced the word like the British word for a toilet. Possibly they referred to one of their higher-ups named Lou.

“Ummm … could you spell that, please?”

“El-oh-oh,” they came back. “What are you trying to say here?”

“That's el-zero-zero. Outside your office, posted on your wall, is a map of our proposed route. The key turning points are all labeled. One of them is L-00. We have been trying to get to L-00, and have finally succeeded. It means we have crossed the Ross Ice Shelf. It means we are on the Leverett Glacier.”

“Oh.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No, we see. That's all.”

“Wait a minute before you hang up … Can you advise any news of supplemental fuel?”

“Fuel is short everywhere.” The curt reply ended the phone conference.

Later that morning we advanced the fleet fifteen miles up-glacier. The mountain walls slowly enclosed us. In the afternoon the prospecting team probed another fifteen miles forward. They returned to camp declaring the route segment crevasse-free and flagged.

“George, we're up here with three tractors and one tank sled half full. I left three tanks and two tractors at the bottom for the return trip. I believe we can get to the headwall, but I don't believe we can climb it with what little fuel
we have,” I explained over the Iridium phone. It was New Year's Eve. We were camped halfway up the glacier, waiting for another Twin Otter.

“An assessment of the headwall would still be good,” George encouraged. “But I don't think we can get fuel to you at your location.”

“I don't need fuel at this location. But if you can get me fuel on the Ross Ice Shelf sometime later I'll go back down-glacier and get those other tanks now. I'll use that fuel to get up this thing.”

“I see. I believe the Air Guard will do that. Proceed as you describe, and try and make that assessment. But stay in touch in case something new comes up.”

When the Twin Otter completed its resupply and mountaineer exchange we again refueled the plane from our own stores. That left just over a thousand gallons in our one tank sled. I'd been on the cusp of calling the turnaround that day, but the hope of receiving landed fuel on the Ross Ice Shelf changed all that. We had a chance for the top. I sent half the crew down-glacier to recover the depot.

On January 2 the reunited fleet camped just short of the headwall basin. Our next course bent around Mount Beazley's stony, beige buttress. Through the narrows, we stared up at the unbroken, snow-covered rim of the Polar Plateau. It encircled the entire headwall under a brilliant blue sky. Our task stood vertically before us.

Jim Lever and Allen O'Bannon, who'd replaced Susan at the Twin Otter put-in, made the camp circle for the evening. They cleared half the ground inside it and called the fleet forward. While the rest of us unhitched and refueled, Jim's voice broke onto
Fritzy
's radio: “We'll be right with you … just as soon as we've crossed back over this crevasse we just found.” Those were the exact words I'd used when Susan and I broke through the first time.

I muttered, looking out from behind our refueling station.

The two men were standing outside the PistenBully, a hundred yards away. The PistenBully was on its feet and running, not down in a hole. I called them back on the radio. They were okay, merely sizing up their situation. They did not want the D8R to come out and fill their hole with snow.

“Take some pictures,” I radioed. “We'll talk about this one tomorrow morning, just like the others.” They recrossed safely, but that was our third close encounter.

January 3 the crew split once again. Russ, Stretch, Judy, and Brad remained in camp. They greased bearings in the sleds' running gear, replaced turntable pins, and checked cables, turnbuckles, and shackles in the rigging. They left nothing to chance for the climb.

I joined John Penney's team scouting into the headwall basin itself. We followed the 1995 team's path. Our radar found many crevasses on a three-mile stretch where they'd climbed over a shoulder and onto a glacial “street.”

“Streets” are elongated ridges of ice, aligned with the flow of the main glacier. They might be a hundred yards to a quarter mile wide, and they might stand ten to fifty feet high. We'd discovered street tops gave us crevasse-free surfaces here. And we'd followed street tops through all their bifurcations from L-00 to our present camp.

This street flowed right out of the basin. Our last two close encounters had found crevasses on street shoulders, just like our radar showed us now. The heavy fleet wouldn't attempt going over it. But getting into the headwall basin
was
our next job.