Blazing Ice (7 page)

“I know, I know,” Dave shrugged.

We enjoyed a catered lunch with Bordeaux wine in the same conference room we'd occupied all morning. After lunch, Patrice described terrain problems they faced on their route and the novel solutions they applied to them. To deal with rough or undulating surfaces, they installed shock absorbing systems on their sleds, and they replaced traditional steel hinges with elastomeric bushings.

The French ran two-thirds of their traverse on the Polar plateau. That's where Brooks told of rough ground over sastrugi—long, wind-sculpted forms
in dense, hard snow. Brooks reported they ran a dozing blade ahead of their fleet. They still did according to Patrice. The blade rough-leveled the snow, pushing it into a berm on the downwind side of their road.

The berm became a snowdrift catcher. Every time they pushed new drift snow against the old berm, their freshly plowed road crept gradually upwind. That meant their heavy tractors following the blade always tracked on virgin snow.

The USAP had not traversed heavy sastrugi in years. We really didn't know how. Would we need a forerunner blade, too? Around McMurdo, we dealt with sea-level snow on the ice shelves. We learned to get on top and stay on top of the snow. We dragged grooming equipment behind us. Slowly we built a stronger, compacted road under us.

The years-old berm on the French road became their trail marker. But in flat light the berm was impossible to see. So the French installed forward-looking stadium lights, little suns atop their tractors, to illuminate it. When an operator wore special goggles fitted with yellow lenses, the berm appeared through the white-out. Our project had no proven route in front of it, hence no berm. For the time being we'd use flags on bamboo poles to mark our way.

“Patrice, how much does the ice under your road move?” I asked, awkwardly trying to overcome our language barrier.

Patrice looked at me questioningly, then over to George for help. He'd known George for several years.

George stepped up. A broad-shouldered, lean, athletic fellow himself, his tow-headed crew-cut and aquiline aspect suggested a scrapper. But his musical diction put one at ease. “John is asking about glacier and ice movement along your route, Patrice. Do you know how much your road moves as a result of the movement of the ice on which it is built?”

Patrice showed us a map of a former route from Dumont D'Urville to Dome C. Overlying the old route was the trace of their current one, which showed they had blazed some short cuts. I made a mental note: “meaning lost in translation.”

“How about crevasses along your route, Patrice?” I asked on a slightly different tack. Ice movement often caused crevassing.

“We have a few at the start of the climb out of Dumont d'Urville, but that's all. Nowhere else,” Patrice allowed.

“And how do you know they are there, and nowhere else?”

“Because we see them with our eyes,” Patrice answered, nonplussed.

Again I let it go, wondering what manner of glaciological study might have been applied to selecting their route. They had established it long before ground penetrating radar was available.

Our discussion turned to their sled fleet: cargo sleds; fuel tank sleds; and berthing, galley, and energy-production sleds. The USAP had none of these things. Every one of them would have to be designed, specified, shopped, built, and delivered. We discussed which sleds worked for the French and which needed improvement. Patrice gave us construction drawings for their sled fleet.

The second day covered operations. Patrice emphasized the importance of personal comforts and cleanliness for the crew. Ralph and I raised eyebrows to one another in agreement. Our traverses around McMurdo had been sixty-mile day trips to well-provisioned outposts. Neither of us could imagine what day-after-day might be like on a long traverse. We didn't want to spend the end of each day setting up tents and camping on the snow.

Patrice gave me a crew roster and duty list. “You carry a physician, a full medical doctor … is that your standard practice, or is this one who just happened to be available?” I asked.

“Yes … we always bring a physician.”

“And what does he do when he is not doctoring?”

With a shrug of his shoulders, arms outspread and palms upturned, he answered with a heavy accent, “We train him to drive a tractor, and he drives a tractor.”

I smiled. That would be difficult for human resources. But should we have a doctor, too? With all our aircraft available in the summer, and our extraordinary search-and-rescue capability, could we make do with a paramedic instead?

“And you have no designated cook?” I looked at him questioningly.

Patrice's face became animated for the first time. “Ah! Never again will I hire a cook! They are temperamental! All they do is throw flour around the kitchen!”

Frenchmen were famously finicky about food, yet Patrice adamantly refused to have a cook. A Tasmanian caterer prepared their frozen meals in bulk. They pulled the day's meals from cold storage every morning, thawed them inside their galley module, then heated them at meal times. TV dinners would not be particularly welcome with our crew, so I asked Patrice for a sample menu.

“Pretty good,” I looked up from the menu to Dave. “Fascinating … no cook … that opens up a whole bunk space. Maybe a second heavy mechanic? Maybe a surveyor. Maybe a mountaineer?”

The first evening in Brest, we five Americans found ourselves strolling its pleasant streets, checking out restaurants for exciting menus.

George and Jason paired together for a while. Jason, a sharp young engineer newly on board at CRREL, was also new to me. George had Jason in mind as CRREL's technical contact in support of our project. The scope of CRREL's opportunity occupied their discussion. Jason had never been to the Ice. For that matter, neither George nor Jason, nor even Dave had ever traversed.

Dave strolled apart, deep in thought. I commented to Ralph: “You know … Patrice has been there. We're hearing from a guy who's fought his way down the trail.”

Ralph and I had been on some tough traverses. We shared an admiration for Patrice because we recognized his struggle. Ralph added, “When things are going good, it's all good. When it hits the fan, it really hits it. I wonder if these other guys understand that you're on twenty-four hours a day? That saps you. You know it.”

I did know it. And I'd been meaning to talk that up with Dave. He strolled ahead of us across a broad plaza decked with granite-gray flagstones, bronze statuary, and brass handrails leading up stone stairsteps. High summer at Brest's northern latitude brought full sunshine at this late hour. I caught up from behind, leaving Ralph so Dave didn't feel we were ganging up.

“Dave, you and George worked up the feasibility study that launched the current project. Do you remember the section that dealt with shift cycles and hours of work?”

They'd concluded that the best shift cycle ran twelve hours on and twelve hours off. Better than twenty-four hours around the clock, hot-bunking multiple crews. Better than two shorter shifts back-to-back. The standard work contract on the Ice called for six nine-hour days per week. We'd have to pay extra for daily twelves. I wouldn't depend on the goodness of dedicated hearts to give it up. And I needed good people, especially when we were getting started.

“What are you thinking?” Dave reserved judgment.

“I don't know yet how to manage this with the support contractor, but I do know that if we don't pay for the extra time, then all I'm going to give
you
is six nines on the trail.”

Dave asked about weekends and holidays. I'd stay silent on those and make them field calls. We'd all want to make hay when the sun was shining, but if weather or breakdown stopped us, I'd call break.

“What do you need from me?” he asked, pausing momentarily, his eyebrows knitting.

“Your support for winning appropriate pay for twelve-hour shifts. I don't know how
pinche
NSF would be about that.” I spoke the latter with an accent of Mexico.

“NSF won't be that way if your request is reasonable. See what you come up with out of your own offices and make a proposal. I'll support you.”

The pay hike didn't come that first year crossing the Shear Zone, so we put in nines. The hike came the next year, and we launched our fleet with twelves.

Our berthing and energy production sleds came straight from French plans. We modified their fuel tank sled with a longer but smaller diameter cylinder. For the same three thousand gallon capacity, we both lowered the sled's center of gravity and improved its stability. The French elastomeric bushings, which were actually bridge support components that accommodated structural squirm, found their way into our fleet in abundance.

I never saw Patrice again, but over the years we corresponded frequently. We exchanged my route notes and operations reports for his annual traverse summaries. My heart broke when Patrice suffered a mishap on the trail. I cheered when they commissioned Concordia Station at Dome C. Patrice's traverse delivered all that material.

On our own trail, I often wondered, “How would the French handle this particular problem?” Sometimes I found an answer.

October 31, 2002
. Five souls stood on the snow beside a ten-foot-tall wooden post. Two upright fifty-five gallon drums flanked the post. Carved deeply into its top were the letters G, A, and W.

“GAW” stood for Grid A West, a theoretical relic of the SPIT work. Three miles east of GAW stood another post with two more black drums next to it. That was HFS. Home Free South. Two weeks before, a helicopter flew us out from McMurdo to plant these posts. The helicopter jumped us safely over the ground between them.

Between GAW and HFS lay the McMurdo Shear Zone: badlands of hidden crevasses wide enough to swallow a bulldozer.
Linda
went down in one of them twelve years before.

The ground toward HFS looked identical to the ground we'd crossed getting to GAW: a featureless plain of white, flat as a pancake. From the helicopter, we saw no gaping fissures in its unbroken surface. The crevasses, if they were there, were bridged over with snow.

We'd flagged a twenty-three-mile route from McMurdo's Williams Field skiway to GAW. That was easy. Our radar never saw a crevasse. We staged our gear over the route many times. We radared a safe perimeter just short of GAW, flagged it off, and built our tent camp within it.

In the still, cold air of a day when the sun simply would not set, we stood on the snow looking east at our job. Build a road across this place. Build it twenty feet wide. Make it safe for tractors and sleds. Search all ground in front with ground penetrating radar. If it detected a void lurking under a bridge,
stop. Blow up the bridge. Bulldoze snow into the slot. Fill it. Pack it. Drive over it. Look for the next crevasse. Search and destroy.

There were four others besides me. Richard “Stretch” Vaitonis, a tall Wisconsin corn farmer, would run the new D8R bulldozer. Shaun Norman, a world-class mountaineer from New Zealand, and American mountaineer Eric Barnes knew alpine crevasses well. Russ Magsig, the mechanic, was the only one among us who had seen the Shear Zone.

CRREL radar experts were scheduled to join us, but the program's ponderous deployment process delayed their arrival. We'd trained with them in New Hampshire months earlier. Everything in New England then was green. Working in leafy woods, we practiced finding bedrock cracks in abandoned quarries. We studied printed radar images of hidden crevasses.

At McMurdo early in October, we cobbled a vehicle-mounted radar platform to a PistenBully. This was a light, ten-thousand-pound snow crawler borrowed from the science fleet. Painted red and black, it looked like a lady bug on tracks. Its cab sat two. Behind the cab, a passenger box could hold four. A twenty-foot-long radio tower from McMurdo's scrap yards became a prod we pushed in front of the PistenBully. The radar antenna fit to the front of the prod, cushioned off the ground by an inflated inner tube. A cable ran back from the antenna into the cab. It connected to the smart part of the radar device where a computer screen displayed what the antenna saw.

In tests over known crevasses near McMurdo, one of us drove the Pisten-Bully while another monitored the radar. At seven miles per hour we could detect a crevasse under the antenna and stop the vehicle before it overran the crevasse edge.

Five days earlier, the McMurdo surveyor came to our Shear Zone camp and planted a line of red flags on bamboo poles. The flags pointed past GAW toward HFS over the horizon. We couldn't see HFS, even with binoculars. High ground, perhaps a snowdrift or an ice rise, hid our target. But the surveyor's back sights showed us which way to go.

There were no more preparations to make. I focused on the enormous whiteness ahead and held back loving visions of my wife, son, and growing family. This was how I made our living for now.
There is no other job. This is the job
.

We crossed the imaginary line at GAW and entered the Shear Zone for the first time. We went hunting for crevasses.

One thinks of ice as a solid substance, not as a dynamic piece of real estate.

But with masses of ice hundreds of feet thick, the ice at its base turns plastic under the sheer weight of the ice above it. The mass flows like a viscous fluid seeking its own level, impelled by gravity. Ice near the top of the mass does not flow like plastic. It remains brittle, breaking into cracks called “crevasses.”

A belt of such crevasses stretches seventy-five miles from the tip of Minna Bluff to the tip of Cape Crozier. The belt forms where two floating masses of glacial ice come in contact. These masses are so large they go by the name “ice shelves”: the McMurdo Ice Shelf, the size of a small county, and the Ross Ice Shelf, as big as France. Both are covered by deep snow.