Blazing Ice (32 page)

“The analyst was looking at original imagery. We have here only his representation of that. But it looks to me like the passage is still open.”

The laptop made the rounds so everybody could get a good look. When it got back to me, I pointed to the crevasses between ASTER 2 and ASTER 3.

“These we know about. We drilled them and crossed them last year. Hopefully they'll be safe again this year.”

Then I pointed to a dense cluster of blue lines just south of CAMP 20. “I have no idea what this is. We didn't see anything there last year. But we only look down twelve and a half meters with our radar. So I don't know what the analyst was looking at.”

I finished. “Now you know everything I know about this place. Any questions?”

None.

“Right. When the weather lets us, I want to check out the breach with Greg and Tom in the PistenBully. We'll take an Iridium phone and call you on the hours. If we get to ASTER 2 and everything looks okay, we'll call you forward. I don't intend to come back here unless we have to.”

The skies broke clear the morning of November 27. The PistenBully headed out.

Our radar didn't pick up anything to tell us what NGA saw south of camp with that first cluster of blue lines. It all looked like plain, unbroken ice on our screen. That was good news.

Farther down the line, ice movement at ASTER 2 and ASTER 3 measured much slower than I'd predicted. That was more good news.

We looked over the crevasses we already knew about and saw no change in their radar signature. By all appearances, the passage was good to go.

I called the waiting fleet forward. We threaded the needle's eye, made forty-six miles, and left The Shoals of Intractable Funding behind us.

The next day, we reached the foot of the Leverett Glacier. From five miles out, I spotted a black dot down in the ice valley below it. Our big friend waited for us.

We ran down the gentle slope over crumbly ice, its glazed surface preserving the tracks we'd made a year ago. We followed them right to the D8 where it sat proudly atop its berm, basking in the warm sun. Russ and John V. would wake the bulldozer from its sleep tomorrow. Others would reconfigure sled trains for five tractors now.

I was more interested in checking the route up the foot of the glacier. If the ice had moved as much as I anticipated then we might be locating an entirely new route. But the post nearest our camp had only moved an incredible fifty-three feet since last year. While that made me hopeful, I kept such thoughts to myself because so many things were about to change.

In 640 miles we'd barely left sea level. Over the next seventy miles we'd climb seven thousand feet. Some of those pitches were steep enough that tractors would be towing tractors.

Five tractors for the climb were good. Sidetracking another pair of fuel tank sleds would lighten our overall load, too. All but one tractor would drag two sleds upgrade.
Quadzilla
would pull three. On the Plateau we might reconfigure: four tractors, three sleds each, and use
Fritzy
as a flagging tractor for the new route. It'd be cold up there. The flagger would welcome a warm cab to follow the PistenBully. Meanwhile, we were still at the bottom.

The next morning Greg, Tom, and I prepared to scout the old route. I solemnly approached Greg. “You understand that up to now you have been traveling across the Ross Ice Shelf?”

“Right, Boss,” he said.

“It's John. And you understand that the Ross Ice Shelf is afloat?”

“Right.”

“And up to now, you have never been on the continent of Antarctica before?”

“Yes.”

“Unfurl your Marine Corps flag. Fly it behind the PistenBully. Somewhere in the next five miles we're going to cross onto the continent. The U.S. Marines will lead us onto that shore and take the beach.”

Some beach. A cartographer had drawn the inferred continental shore line on our maps. We crossed his shoreline somewhere that morning on snow and ice. Fourteen miles later and two thousand feet higher, we turned around, looking down on the Ice Shelf no longer in front of us but below us. We'd found not one crevasse. The old flag line had hardly moved since last year. If that held and our path was crevasse-free last year, it ought to be crevasse-free now.

In camp at the foot of the Leverett, a fuel burning heater thawed the ice out of the D8's engine compartment. By mid-afternoon, Russ and John V. had the bulldozer running and hitched to the module sleds. That would be Stretch's load the rest of the way to Pole. The other sled trains were coupled and ready.

At day's end, everybody's news was good. We'd be at SPT-18 in a couple days, and I didn't plan on stopping there.

Greg and Tom led with
Wrong Way
, working westerly around the foot of the glacier. Stretch and the D8 pulled out with the red modules. Brad in
Red Rider
went next with the flatbed sled and
Snow White
, Stretch's original loads. Judy and John V. followed in the
Elephant Man
pulling the reefer van and a fuel tank sled. I came next in
Fritzy
pulling the spare parts sled and another tank sled. Russ ran caboose with
Quadzilla
pulling two tank sleds, and the crippled Pole tractor. This day was November 30.

In three and a half miles, we turned left and started upgrade.
Fritzy
and I hadn't rounded the corner when Stretch radioed, “I'm overheating. I'm stopping.”

Where was everybody? John V. was ahead with Judy; Russ was behind.

“John V., can you get up there with Stretch and check it out?” I radioed.

We all stopped, waiting on the sunny slopes at the toe of the glacier. John V. radioed back, more to Russ than to me, “I think we've got some cross over at the transmission oil cooler. It's pulled some glycol from the cooling system into the transmission.”

Russ radioed back, “How low is the glycol?”

They decided to top it up and keep an eye on it. I had all the oils and fluids with me in the spare parts van. When John V. showed up on a snowmobile to get a five-gallon can off me, I hailed him out of my cab door, “We've got seven miles of climb, on slopes like what you're on now. Then we're looking at a flatter stretch for forty or fifty miles.”

“Copy that. Good to know. We'll get the D8 going again shortly.”

Fritzy
idled seventy miles from our farthest south. The bright sun streamed through my window glass. I waited. I worried. I played what-if games. We'd brought every bit of deliverable cargo here. We'd shed tank sleds and fuel along the trail to pull that Pole tractor. If the D8 went down, no way we could drag that beast to Pole. If we abandoned it, we'd lose four LC-130s worth of cargo. Abandon cargo altogether, just prove the route?

“Okay, we're ready to go again,” John V. radioed.

Stretch had gone over a rise before his engine overheated. I couldn't see him, but I saw Brad in
Red Rider
start up the slope, then the
Elephant Man
. Finally, I turned the corner and started up the grade. Russell to my left was rolling now, too. Not much chatter on the radio from any of us.

Halfway up the glacier, we made camp on the long, gentle grade. Mount Beazley appeared fifteen miles farther up. Our course doglegged right around that mountain and led through the narrows into the headwall basin. A mile to our right, the spectacular jagged Gould Peak shouldered its way out of surrounding ice. To our left, rocky tops of nearly buried foothills dotted the rolling glacier-covered country.

The D8 gave us no more trouble that day. While I plugged in
Fritzy
outside the living module, Russ shuffled over the snow toward me. He'd just plugged in
Quadzilla
. His shoulders drooped. He looked weary.

“You okay, Russ?”

“We're screwed.”
Quadzilla
had blown an idler wheel bearing at the end of shift. Another tractor down. “And we don't have the parts to repair it,” Russ said.

“We can't move it?”

“Right.”

“Then all we can do is stay here until we find out what we
can
do about it. How's the D8?”

“We need to work on that, too.”

“Okay, Russ. Get your mind around being here a couple of days. Identify the parts we need. If we can find them on continent, maybe we can get them air-dropped to us. If we can figure out how to do this thing with four tractors, maybe we can get the parts flown to Pole and repair
Quadzilla
on the way back. I don't know what we're going to do yet, because I don't know what we
can
do.”

Russ already knew that, but he needed to hear me say it. I needed to hear myself say it. But Russ's eyes still said we were screwed.

“I'll tell the others we'll be here for a while,” I sighed.

Two days of Iridium phone calls to parts supply in McMurdo and to dealers in the United States. Two days of odd jobs around camp. John V., Stretch, and Judy changed out the D8's transmission oil. Greg helped Russ tear down
Quadzilla
. Brad and Tom snowmobiled back down the trail searching for missing parts off Russ's tractor.

Some of the parts we needed were in McMurdo. The rest were back in the States. An air drop wouldn't help us. One choice remained: leave
Quadzilla
, while spare parts expedited from the States flew to Pole. If we got to Pole, we'd bring them back with us. And if we returned with only three tractors, we'd be officially screwed if one of them went down.

Today, my brilliant plan for reconfiguring the fleet went right out the window. We still had all our cargo. But with four healthy tractors pulling uphill, instead of five, each would pull three sleds. Pulling heavier going south worked exactly backwards from anybody's plan. And once we got to the top, we were still looking at three hundred miles of what?

The briefing on December 3 started upbeat. “We get to make a
turn
today!”

Brad quipped, “We get to
move
today!”

Russ groaned, mourning the loss of his tractor. He'd ride in the
Elephant Man
with Judy.

“We were planning on shuttling up the headwall anyway,” I continued. “If we shuttle on the Plateau 'cause we're too heavy … well, we do have enough fuel to get us to Pole.”

I looked at Stretch, “And that's all I have to say about that.”

Stretch started up off his stool.

“But …” I timed it just right. Stretch scowled and sat back down. “I do have something else to say, and I've been holding it until this moment.”

Everyone was impatient to move out.

“Two years ago, Dave Bresnahan and I started this … now it's official. Just around the corner past Mount Beazley, look off to your left. You're going to see a rocky outcrop, about four hundred meters high. It forms a buttress on the west flank of the Stanford Plateau. That's the east flank of the entrance to the Leverett headwall basin. That buttress has a name … the
Magsig Rampart
!”

Gasps rose from everybody. Russ had wanted a place on the continent named for him. Not some far-off place, but a place he could see. A place he had been to. His history with the program went back to stations and winters forgotten or never heard of by most. We'd officially registered Russ's rampart with the U.S. Geological Survey's Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names. That name was officially accepted just before we launched this year. I read from the text of the application:

“Reason for choice: To honor a mechanic whose decades of service to the USAP over far-flung outposts of the continent of Antarctica now culminate in his key role enabling the success of the USAP's pioneering South Pole Traverse Project.”

The stunned crew cheered, wildly applauding the honor.

“Now … shall we go see that rampart?”

Stools scudded across the floor. Cabinets slammed shut. We scrambled out the door to our warming tractors.

Over the wind-swept, flatter section of the glacier we drove over tracks we'd put down last year, still visible on the crust. That surprised me, for I remembered snowy surfaces back then.

Ahead, Mount Beazley stood in full sun. Whirling sprites of snow-dust danced around its rocky summit. We rounded the dogleg corner and pulled abreast of the Magsig Rampart. Russ would stop and take a picture, but I was keener to see the headwall that had just come in view. Up there huge curls of wind-blown snow poured off the Plateau and spilled into the basin.

We left our icy tracks behind and started onto new drift snow. The trail steepened.
Fritzy
, the
Elephant Man
, and
Red Rider
stuck many times. Tom
and Greg ran ahead into the Parade Grounds to sweep the camp circle. Tom felt the frigid blast pouring over the rim when he stepped out of the PistenBully.

“It's dangerously cold up here. Be prepared,” he radioed to us still below. Tom had climbed Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas. He knew cold.

By the time
Fritzy
and I struggled into the Parade Grounds the wind had died down. We'd made thirty miles for the day. From the comfort of my warm cab I spied the route flags planted last year. We'd left eight feet of pole above the surface then. Now they were half buried. Our packed trail would be too deep to do us any good this year.

A fierce ground blizzard whistled through our camp when we woke. With only seven miles to the top, no one slept in. Our fingers drummed, waiting to seize a break in the visibility.

The monument posts up the glacier had moved little in a year, two hundred feet at the most. That was great news for the future traverse business. It meant the Leverett route was stable. But that puzzled me. The Leverett was the shortest glacier that drained from the Plateau into the Ice Shelf. The Scott Glacier west of us and the Reedy Glacier to our east were both a couple hundred miles long. And they cut down through the same elevations. In only seventy miles from top to bottom, the Leverett had the steepest gradient of them all.