Blazing Ice (36 page)

Then, on December 11, we entered sastrugi of legendary size.

Six-foot-tall giants ran out in long ridges of wondrously fluted, wind-sculpted snow. Carved into windy arroyos and coulees, they called to mind the Badlands of South Dakota. Whole armies of Sioux warriors, draped in white camouflage, could be hiding among them not more than a hundred feet away. I'd never see them from the warmth of
Fritzy
's jolting cab, behind my sheltering glass.

And they were hard. They'd bend a shovel. In places the D8's steel tracks barely left a cleat mark on the trail. The flagging crew augered holes before they could plant a flag. Yet, oddly, little drift snow accumulated among them despite the high winds.

Stretch's big blade took down the tops of some. Our other tractors lined up directly behind him. No need to track-pack a wide road base here. The surface was hard enough already. All the while, the rough ground took an aching toll on each of us and our machinery. It broke lock-downs on our container sleds. It broke
Snow White
's axles. When something broke, we all stopped. Pole seemed very far away.

On December 12 we celebrated another victory in passing 87 degrees South, a whole degree since the top of the Leverett. That particular degree-made-good meant we'd successfully sidestepped the crevasse field spotted on the aerial reconnaissance. At the end of this day, I found Greg outside the modules, plugging in his PistenBully. He and his crew had yet another rough one.

“How you doing?” I asked cautiously.

“We ought to name this place Sastrugi National Park,” he declared, offering a more noble handle than Dornikal Forrest.

“Greg, how would
you
move a platoon of marines over this ground?”

Greg stared thoughtfully across the icy rills, moving imaginary troops.

“Helicopters,” he said finally. “What's on your mind?”

“That'd be the ticket.” I laughed. I'd expected some twist on amphibious assault vehicles.

But a lot was on my mind. We were getting beat up. What if we needed a medevac? There were no helicopters at Pole. If one of us went down, a Twin Otter wouldn't have a prayer for a safe landing here. We'd have to retreat a
long way to better ground. If we retreated, what more damage might we bring on a victim or the fleet? And there was no telling how far ahead these badlands stretched.

“Greg, until we can get back here with big blades and smooth the rough places in earnest, we'll have trouble moving ourselves. Right now we don't have the fuel to spend on grading. We dropped one of four fuel tank sleds. We're tapping into the second, and we haven't made it halfway from the Leverett to Pole. I'm thinking
fuel
for one thing.”

Russ walked up then, his gait shuffling sideways, his shoulders drooping. We were all weary but Russ the more so because he worried about our machines. Even so, Russ mustered a laughing smile. “Whew! This is
rough
!”

“Yeah it is,” I agreed. “Just get me the next thirty miles to Pc. Can you do that?” That gave Russ a target within reach. Something he could take on.

“Thirty miles, huh? Pc?” Russ walked away, mumbling, “Thirty miles …”

Each of my hands and feet operated different controls in
Fritzy
's wildly pitching cab. The small of my back mapped every jolt. While my eyes sought to untangle the chaotic ground, my ears listened keenly to the radio for word from Tom or Greg.

Somewhere during the last two days our single-file line of heavy tractors had shot the five-mile-wide gap. We did it over the roughest ground we'd yet encountered. The radar never found a crevasse. And Russ got us to Pc.

We spent the morning just past Pc repairing things: adjusting the D8's track tension and fixing our radar antenna. Greg's team again got the worst of it. They broke their brake line, their steering controller, their antenna boom, and finally the antenna itself. Jostling over the rough ground had broken a wire inside the antenna box.

Once underway, the radar team moved out ahead of the fleet. For an hour and a half we advanced over the sastrugi when Greg radioed, “We've broken the antenna boom again and are returning to your position to make repairs.”

Jeez-sus, what next? Two miles!
“Copy that,” I acknowledged. “Crew, close up and plug 'em in. I need everybody in the galley at 1100.”

“Our situation is this,” I explained. “One of our radar antennas is broken beyond our ability to repair. We're using our only spare, and we've a good chance that it, too, will break in this ground. We could easily find ourselves without ground penetrating radar.”

We'd passed the last known crevasses between us and South Pole. Crevasses we didn't know about were, of course, the greater danger. While I felt we had a low probability of crevasses over the next 170 miles, I'd sought the additional opinion of experts on exactly that question. As of today, I had no response.

We were beat up, yet we yearned to move forward. But my issue was not how anyone felt. One of our charges had been to go over every inch between McMurdo and Pole with ground penetrating radar. Now we questioned whether the PistenBully itself, let alone the radar equipment, could hold up in these sastrugi.

“Like it or not, we may lose our ability to detect crevasses. Our choice would be grim: we turn around and go back to McMurdo … over the route we
have
proved safe.”

Every face displayed abhorrence for that. I was willing to go the remaining distance without radar. But I wasn't the only one that mattered.

“If we completely lose it, I don't want to wait for a decision from NSF like we did last year, waiting for no fuel. I'm going to explain our situation to my boss and apprise Dave and George at NSF. Before I do that, I put this question to you because there is risk. Each of you has the right to your say: Are you willing to proceed to Pole without ground penetrating radar?”

No one wished to discuss it. I gave a scrap of paper to each, asking them to mark their answer with a
Y
for
yes
or an
N
for
no
.

“Take your time. We're not going anywhere else today. I'll look these over a bit later.”

The crew placed their scraps into a bowl without hesitation. Then they left the galley to attend to camp chores and to repair the antenna boom once again.

Stepping back into the comms booth, I raised my boss back in McMurdo via Iridium phone. He'd been on the Ice when
Linda
went down, and the subject of crevasse detection had been particularly sensitive between us. Now, he was vague in his recollections of our agreement. He didn't object, however, to waiving the radar requirement at my discretion. And I didn't tell him of our poll, nor of the results, because I had not yet looked.

Next, I wrote an e-mail to Dave and George, informing them of our situation. I begged for one more effort at securing the glaciologists' opinions. It was another note in a bottle.

Seated in the comms booth, I leaned back in the caster chair with my hands clasped behind my head, gazing at the ceiling, and drew a deep breath. Finally I sagged forward, rocked to my feet, and reached for the bowl. This was my decision: if one paper said “no,” we turned around.

Unfolding seven papers, I found seven
Y
s and smiled. Then I stepped outside to let the crew know, and to give each my thanks.

With sastrugi everywhere, we might lose radar at any time. But when we got underway the next day, nature seemed to approve of our decision. She gave us a daylong display of sundogs and haloes: otherworldly wonders of the polar atmosphere in geometric patterns of rainbow-like arcs surrounding the sun, filling the sky. A burning sun pillar appeared first on our eastern horizon, circled with the sun north behind us, then finally due west to our right.

At day's end, Tom approached me as I was plugging in my tractor. “About two miles out this afternoon, just after we got going, the ground got a lot smoother. It was actually pretty benign on the radar. Maybe it'll stay like this.”

The evening's e-mail brought a response from glaciologist Gordon Hamilton, forwarded by George: “It is about as safe as you can get …”

December 16 was the day I mark in hindsight that we came out of Sastrugi National Park, which had delighted our eyes, wrecked our equipment, and rattled our bones.

This was also the day we started counting down the miles to Pole: 149 miles to go.

While watching the snowy surface for signs of more sastrugi from
Fritzy
's cab, I mused over the origin of that field of monsters. All of a sudden, I felt a sinking in my tractor seat. I looked right, then left. My tracks spun faster than the snow went by me. My slip gauge registered 30 percent. Too much.
Fritzy
sank, slip at 100 percent. I shifted to neutral, cursed, throttled back to idle, and then grabbed the radio.

“Brad …” One word did it.

“I see you. Coming up on your right.”

My feet sank sideways into the soft stuff when I got to the bottom of the ladder, and I fell. Through a face full of snow, I saw exactly what I expected:
Fritzy
, down on her belly pan, wallowed in.

In a too-familiar drill, I rolled to my chest, shoved my mittened hands down, worked my knees under me, staggered up in the soft snow, and grabbed my shovel and tow strap. Up front, I got down on my knees again and dug out the big shackle attached to
Fritzy
's undercarriage.
One loop through the shackle, stand up. Unroll the strap. Wait for Brad.

Brad stopped on my right, got out, unhitched
Red Rider
, got back in, pulled ahead, then backed up to me. I slipped the free loop around his hitch pin, stumbled back to
Fritzy
, and climbed in. Brad pulled ahead again, taking slack, and looked back through his windshield. We nodded “ready.” He raised three fingers on his left hand. Two. One.

The strap stretched,
Fritzy
spun her tracks, and lurched forward. We arced up, out, leveled, and ran forward under tow until we footed on firm snow. Resurrected, we finished the drill.
Stop the tractor. Get out of the cab. Stagger around the snow. Unhook the tow strap, coil it, exchange a few words, climb back in cab, and try again.

I always felt apologetic to my rescuer. But sooner or later, everybody helped everyone else. Coiling my tow strap, I met Brad between tractors, and said simply, “Thank you.”

“No worries,” he shrugged. “You suppose we're out of those sastrugi?”

“I wouldn't know. Flying over this country, I saw s'trugi everywhere.”

There was no wind. A piercing blue sky overhead held a thin gray mist of floating ice crystals, like dust motes, stretching out to that brilliant, burning sun pillar. It was a fiery, biblical apparition dropping straight down from the sun to the land. A rainbow halo encircled the whole show. Looking back to Brad, and then at our two tractors, I remarked, “The CRREL boys call this an
im-mo-bi-li-za-tion
.”

Mine was only the first immobilization of the day. I stuck many times. So did
Red Rider
, and so did
Elephant Man
. Only the D8R remained immune. Our immobilizations came so frequently that Brad and I split our loads five miles out from the evening camp. We shuttled them the rest of the day. That added thirty extra tractor-miles to reach twenty-one made-good.

When Tom told me the surface was better for the PistenBully and the radar, I thanked him, but mentally filed his report OBE—Overcome By Events. Maybe we'd left sastrugi behind, but now we had two tractors shuttling. If that got worse, we'd be seriously tapping our fuel supply.

The next day,
Fritzy
and the
Elephant Man
wallowed many times, but curiously
Red Rider
didn't. Why? I don't know, but I was happy for Brad. We posted twenty-eight miles without shuttling. The day after,
Elephant Man
and
Red Rider
saw all the immobilizations.
Fritzy
got off scot-free.

During the afternoon, Greg's team planted a tall post along the trail, scribed P-100. That meant one hundred miles to Pole. Somewhere within the last twenty miles, we'd topped our second summit. My GPS altimeter showed a high at 9,640 feet. But the surface everywhere around was flat to the horizon. Only our green flag line gave us any hint of direction.

Russ's voice broke my musings: “
Fritzy
, can you come back here and give us a tow?”

Russ rode in the
Elephant Man
with Judy. I looked over my shoulder and spotted their black dot on my northern horizon. They'd be about five miles back.
Red Rider
was still rolling halfway between us.

A mile north of the post, I passed Brad and waved. He waved back. Just as he did,
Red Rider
sank.

“I'll come back for you.”

“Copy.”

When things went well, replies came in the form of “copy that.” Just “copy” meant we were tired.

Russ waited with tow strap at the ready beside the
Elephant Man
. I wheeled around, and backed up
Fritzy
. Automatically, Russ dropped my hitch pin through his strap loop, then climbed back aboard Judy's tractor. I took tension.

“Ready?” I called back to Judy.

“Ready.”

Snatch. Jerk.
Fritzy
sank. I throttled down and looked back at the
Elephant Man
. It hadn't budged. Backing over my tracks, I turned slightly onto fresh snow, and took tension again. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Snatch, slip, grip, lurch. We crawled forward inching the
Elephant Man
out of its wallow. Then we were up on surface again.

“I'll pull you to the hundred-mile post, since I'm going there anyway. I'll cut you loose there.”

“Fine. Just fine. Really. It's fine,” Judy came back. She was tired, too.