Blazing Ice (43 page)

The voice came back: “I assure you this is no joke. Please send your men right away.”

Looking queerly at the microphone, I asked back, “Right. Who is this?”

The voice gave a name I do not remember, then added: “I am the contractor's human resources representative for South Pole Station.”

Enough!
“And we are four, and scattered about your station. You are one. You may bring these papers to our camp yourself. Traverse clear.”

I turned off the radio, now that it was working.

The papers arrived later that afternoon, brought by our friend Jason. They were identical to those we'd signed on the Ross Ice Shelf. The three signers had not initialed each page of the document.

Jason also brought a single page for me to sign. It was the last page of a document titled “Pre-Season Performance Expectations.” That document normally contained several pages. The one page contained no text, no discussion, no expectations, no space to initial … just a line to sign and date.

“It's been lovely here,”
Judy smiled. “And today is a fine day to go.”

December 28 was a fine day: bright blue skies, a scattering of high cirrus, and not a breath of wind on the ground. Judy walked with me across the station's campus toward Summer Camp and our waiting fleet. We'd just enjoyed our last breakfast in the South Pole galley. Her mood was important to me, important to all of us.

She'd once commented back down the trail, “Sometimes I feel like I'm living in close quarters with seven husbands!” She spent a lot of time with Myers-Briggs analyses, seeking enlightenment on different personality types. However, Judy got along with each of us guys through her innate strength and goodness. But seeing her lady friends, faces without beards, had been a blessing. “We had Christmas gifts for each other. My friend showed me all around the new station. And we just talked and talked … We had the
best
time!”

Talking was a job requirement for me. The contractor mandated safety talks each day at the start of shift. These became our morning briefings. We held them while our tractors warmed up. Some were more useful than others, particularly those that laid out terrain intelligence. Now I wearied of the sound of my own voice. The others wearied of it, too.

As we neared our tractors, Judy peeled off to start the
Elephant Man
.
Red Rider
and the PistenBully were already running. I went to start
Fritzy
, making a mental note to stow the flagpole before we broke camp. Today our flag hung limp. Direct sun had vaporized the ice that froze it the other day.

The others were as ready to go as Judy, but in our galley their faces wore blank expressions, braced to endure another briefing. They knew what I was about to say. But I had to mark the moment of change.

“We have established and proved a heavy haul route to South Pole. We have delivered eleven LC-130 loads of cargo as evidence. We have one more task to perform, and that is: get back to McMurdo and get back safely. A safe and successful roundtrip completes our mission.”

I added new information: “We're anxious to get home, although I can't imagine a meeting or an e-mail in McMurdo I regret having missed. But charging for the barn is when we get careless. That's when one of us gets hurt. So do build this into your thinking: we will make several planned stops.”

We'd grab our sidetracked sleds on the move but take at least a full day back on the Leverett with
Quadzilla
. We'd make another stop at ASTER 2, rig for radar and prospect a shortcut to FORK. That might take a day or two. We'd stop at SOUTH where we stashed an old sled loaded with fuel drums last year. I'd decide whether to leave it or retrieve it to McMurdo then. Finally, we'd stop at the Shear Zone as usual and radar the crossing before bringing the fleet over.

“
Our
job is not yet done. Now let's go finish it.”

One of my shorter briefings, it broke up immediately to the sound of stools scudding across the galley floor and feet shuffling out the door. Greg and I collided at the doorway.

“Hoo-ahh!” I mumbled. “Did I say it right?”

“That would be
Ooh-Rah
!”

From
Fritzy
's cab, I spotted no stray legs wandering around
Red Rider
which was hitched to the module sleds. “Brad?” I radioed.

“Ready.”

“PistenBully?”

“Two aboard and ready.” Greg and John V. would bring up the rear this time. The PistenBully was now stripped of its radar boom. All of that was stowed in a sled behind me.

“Judy, what do you got?”

“
Elephant Man
has four on board and we are ready.” Stretch, Russ, and Tom rode with her. She pulled the refrigerator van, a full tank sled, and the empty spreader bar rig. No stray feet around her train, either.

“Judy, anybody milling around behind me?”
Fritzy
and I hitched to the milvan sled, the flat rack sled, and the second full fuel tank sled.

“You're clear.”

“South Pole Comms, South Pole Comms … South Pole Traverse.”

“Go ahead, South Pole Traverse,” Brad's friend acknowledged.

“South Pole Comms, South Pole Traverse is departing South Pole Station for McMurdo. Request permission to proceed across the extended center line of the runway.”

“South Pole Comms copies all. Proceed as requested. Have a good trip.”

“Thank you. Brad, take off!”

A small group of Polies at Summer Camp waved good-bye. Another workday for us all.

We awoke the morning of January 3 in the Parade Grounds, under the headwall of the Leverett Glacier. A thick ice fog filled the basin. Wet snowflakes drifted tentatively through the still air. We saw nothing of the Plateau's rim. We could not see the stony faces of Mt. Beazley, nor Magsig's Rampart. We saw neither a flag ahead, nor a flag behind. A month's worth of new blown snow obliterated all signs of our outbound track. Thirty miles below sat
Quadzilla
, alone and waiting.

This foggy morning we weren't going anywhere. Stretch was already up and at his oatmeal when I rose. After one look outside, I whispered quietly at the bunkroom doors: “Fog. Sleep in.”

“Odd,” I mentioned softly to Stretch. “Coming down the Leverett last year we ran into fog and big wet flakes. Remember that?”

Stretch squinted into his memories on the galley ceiling. “Yep. It was foggy then. Real foggy. But it didn't last, once we got below it.”

“Yeah, that's right. We did get below it. There's something weird about the weather around here that I just don't get. It's wet.”

We'd seen the dry, katabatic dumps off the Plateau up here. But even last year we dragged our way through soggy stuff at the bottom. Those snows came from gyres off the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas and swept along the mountain fronts. This year we got into wet storms at CAMP 20. By the time we got to the base of the Leverett, our surface was crumbly ice, not snow.

Mike Roberts tipped me off last year to an ephemeral lake of liquid water he'd once seen at the base of the Shackleton Glacier. That was one of the big glaciers we drove past after turning at FORK. Mike's lake was a shallow ponding of melt water, perched on the ice. He hinted we might find something like that one day at the base of the Leverett. Liquid water in a shallow lake could hide a multitude of crevasses.

Hidden crevasses may be today's or tomorrow's problems. But liquid water around here, even just wet snow, portended something else: warmth. What did that mean for the Ross Ice Shelf? Two-thirds of our route crossed it. In March of 2000 the big B-15 iceberg broke off the Shelf's edge into the Ross Sea. It corked off McMurdo Sound, and among other things kept us from getting that extra fuel we needed last year. Calving off the seaward margins is the typical way ice shelves shed mass. But in February 2002, over on the Weddell Sea side of the continent, the entire Larsen B Ice Shelf completely disintegrated in three days. Glaciologists called that event
rapid ice melt
. I guess so. Climate folks were now talking about catastrophic impacts of whole ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melting rapidly.

If an ice melt was going on here, slow or fast, we'd see it first near the ice shelf margins: at the seaward edge and possibly at the continental shore, such as at the Leverett base. That'd be something, to find an open-water channel at the shore instead of ice. For that matter, I wondered, what good would McMurdo be if Ross Island on which it sat was surrounded by open water? Ross Island lay right at the seaward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. The base of the Leverett might become the next southernmost deepwater port. Our modest effort to cross the Ross Ice Shelf would become a footnoted “so what?”

Last year's snow pits at the base of the Leverett had shown us thin lenses of blue ice. Liquid water had been there, but it was all a mystery to me. I called the region the Lake District. The D8R had spent nearly a year in it. I wish it could tell me what that was like.

I made coffee and posted a note on our whiteboard: “Next weather call at 0900.” Nothing to do but wait. We had a good run up to this point.

Our return trip over Plateau had gone well. What took an exhausting nineteen days to cover on the outbound leg, took only six coming back. Our road-work through the swamp held up.
Fritzy
and the
Elephant Man
wallowed only
once. No shuttling. One broken sled: a sastrugi snagged a ski on our spreader bar rig. Picking up the sidetracked tank sleds added no noticeable burden. We hit SPT-18 at the top of the Leverett early enough on the sixth day to bail over the headwall and make camp in the Parade Grounds.

This morning's fog arrested our northbound momentum. I resorted to posting weather calls on the galley wall, and at 0900, I asked my
eyes
to join me for a recon. From thirty paces in the direction in which we thought lay the next green flag, Greg and I turned around to find the big red living module nearly invisible through the pea soup. Turning again to face down the trail, we stood several minutes peering for any sign of a green flag.

“Not for me. You?” I asked.

“I see nothing.”

Our boot prints guided us back to the living module. We barely made those out in the flat light. I erased 0900 on the whiteboard, and replaced it with 1000.

At 1000 hours and at 1100 hours, our recon brought the same results: no flag, no go. We made an early lunch. If the weather lifted by noon, we stood a good chance getting to
Quadzilla
that evening.

Greg brought the binoculars for the noon recon. Again, we followed our boot prints to the end of our beaten path. Then we ventured another hundred feet farther. For five minutes we stared in a promising direction.

“If we can sneak forward and spot a flag through this stuff, we could lay a track out to it with the PistenBully. We could go flag to flag following the PistenBully tracks,” Greg offered.

As long as we could spot a flag. A certain track ten feet in front was as good as a flag at a quarter mile. Trying it would break our frustrating idleness. “Good idea,” I agreed. “You see a flag?”

Greg, the binoculars still at his eyes, said, “I see one out there that comes and goes. Take a look.”

“Point,” I asked, taking the binoculars.

For some time I looked in that direction. Then for a brief moment the fog thinned. The washed-out but unmistakable form of a stick of bamboo with a banner dangling from the top appeared.

“I see it!” Then it was gone again. “Greg, we don't have any black flags for at least the next mile, so that's a green one. I'm game. Let's go back and tell the others to start their engines and hitch up. Good eye.”

“If you lose sight of the vehicle in front of you, or the tracks you're following, stop right where you are. Radio the rest of us that you have stopped. We'll all stop then and wait until you can see. I'm going to ride with Greg in the PistenBully. I know this Leverett route best of any of us.”

We'd not be steering by GPS. The crevasses we knew about were too close to the road to trust GPS with it usual position errors. We'd be looking for green flags, and they'd be hard enough to spot. Greg and I would make many stops.

“Brad, don't run over us, we're that little red thing in front of you. John V., bring up
Fritzy
, please. And Judy, you'll have four pairs of eyes. Have a good time. Now let's see what we can do.”

Descending from the Parade Grounds, our fleet proceeded flag to flag, making lots of stops, and some of those lasted as much as ten minutes. Greg and I advanced as far as we dared, never losing sight of the flag behind us. Then we'd stop and wait, until Greg spotted one in front of us through foggy partings. We covered three miles that way, and lost quite a bit of altitude. As we pulled abreast of the next green flag, Greg announced he could see the one past it.

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

“Really.” Moments later he said, “I can see two!”

I still couldn't see the first one.

“Are you following our tracks okay?” I radioed back to Brad.

“No problem,” Brad answered.

“Take off and lay us some tracks, Greg!”

The second flag was actually a wooden post marking a turning point. Crevasses lay within two hundred feet of it. Jim Lever found one of them last year in a close encounter.

“We marked it with several black flags. They're off to our right. Stop at the post. The green flag line turns left there.”

Greg stepped out of the PistenBully with the binoculars. The heavy tractors stood at idle behind us. In a minute, Greg popped back into the Pisten-Bully: “Got it!”

We reached the new flag. From there we spotted the next three. Within a mile the snowy surface stretched out beyond the last flag that even Greg saw.
Ten miles and two thousand feet below our start, we broke through the bottom of the fog.