Blazing Ice (9 page)

“I'd say that is a good idea. Ask if they want to first. I'd like to go.”

The blueness inside the crevasse was dazzling. The graceful sweeps and curves of the crevasse walls seemed feminine; its space both quiet and close. It seemed anything but treacherous. Seductive perhaps.

And cold enough that an hour shuttling up and down the ropes ran us out of the hole. We had work to do, and we were much warmer on top. The skies had grown overcast, flattening our light. A light wind brought ground snows swirling around our ankles.

We needed a slot here, one that measured as long as our road was wide. I'd open the slot by breaking the bridge toward the access hole that we'd just climbed out of, and I laid out the drill pattern to do that. “Russ and Stretch, you guys will drill.”

With no particular reaction, they nodded in assent.

“Use the big auger. You won't have to drill as many holes. Pound for pound, the big stick weighs ten times the little stick and packs that much more wallop.”

They smiled at that.

The two men tied off to a pair of snowmobiles parked to the side, and stepped onto the boards. Drilling proved as awkward for them as it had been for me working alone. The knowing glances they stole to each other indicated that they agreed: “This is work!”

Gazing eastward toward HFS, I thought the same thing. Evans's legacy suggested we might find thirty to forty hidden crevasses. They'd strike across our line, angling right at forty-five degrees. The typical crevasse should be ten feet wide and ninety feet deep. Its length and bridge thickness would vary. And if those predictions were right, we had a lot of drilling, and a lot of work, ahead of us.

Shaun and Eric manned the PistenBully looking for crevasse-free ground behind us. We needed a safe place to gather snow, and a safe path to push it up to the crevasse edge. I wanted to bring the bulldozer into the field and fill Crevasse 4.

Russ and Stretch retired from the bridge, bringing the drill with them. Fatigued, they sank onto the snow and helped me finish making charges.

“There's got to be a better way,” Russ said.

“Know one?” I asked but got no answer. Then, grinning, “Well, I hate to blow all your good work to smithereens…”

Stretch chimed in, “I don't mind that one bit. That'd be a good thing to do with those holes.”

“Very well then. You fire the shot.” I smiled again.

The mountaineers had nearly found us a snow farm when they brought the PistenBully to our firing line. I gave the countdown. Stretch rammed the handle back down in the blasting box.
Ka-whammmmmmmmm
!

A long curtain of smoke and snow flew into the air. The light breeze pulled the smoky drapery aside. Airborne snow bombs arced gracefully down around us.

The last bulldozer that went into the Shear Zone did not return. Twelve years later I was about to order another one into the field that took Brian and
Linda
down. I wished it were an easier decision, but I couldn't shake the weight of it. Stretch's bulldozer warmed up while we ate lunch. Its eighteen-foot-wide, seven-foot-tall “U-blade” readied itself for real work.

“I'm going to take a snowmobile out, and then I'm going to stand right by that black flag. The one over that big blob we don't know what it is. I'm going to watch,” I explained in our Jamesway. “When you bring out the D8, Stretch, and you come up to pass me, watch me. If I wave you off, throw it in reverse and back the hell out of there.”

Stretch nodded. If we got it to Crevasse 4, we'd learn what the crevasse-filling business was all about.

Our light flattened under the overcast sky. I stood next to that one black flag.

A half mile away in camp, the D8R lifted its blade off the ground. The bulldozer crept through a broad right-hand turn then faced straight down the road toward me. Not a sound came over the snow. I looked around at all the other flags. That one was safe, this one was questionable. Could something be hiding under that twenty-one feet we had drilled everywhere probing the black blobs? A faint, rhythmic clattering arose. Stretch had covered half the distance already. The PistenBully carrying the others followed not far behind.

Louder and louder, eighty-six thousand pounds clanged down our road at five miles per hour. I pulled my gloved hands out of my parka, poised to wave Stretch off. My eyes fixed on the ground beside the black flag.

The snow itself vibrated. Fifty feet away Stretch never slowed, watching me intently. I nodded to him, and then quickly looked back down. Vibrations rose into my bones. Stretch ran right over the black blob.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Fifty feet past me, Stretch was still watching me over his shoulder. I looked up, signaling okay. In another hundred yards he stopped short of the slot's edge. We shivered with relief while the D8 idled. Whatever the black blob was, it didn't take Stretch, or me, down.

“Out there you see a forest of black flags,” Eric pointed north and west as we gathered around the bulldozer. “We don't know what's in that mess. We saw crevasse signs in there. We saw black blobs. And we couldn't make sense of any of it. But what we do have,” Eric pointed out a row of black flags closer
in, “is a small field between us and those flags where we found nothing. No breaks, no blobs.”

“Are you clear on where you can farm snow, and where you can't?” I asked Stretch.

“Yep.” He nodded to the mountaineers.

Ciphers I'd worked out in the office during the northern summer showed our D8R could push a thousand cubic yards of snow per hour over a two hundred–foot carry distance. We could gather enough fill close by the crevasse edge to fill it. But we did not know how the crevasse edge would hold up to a working bulldozer on top of it.

“What do you think about pushing several big piles of snow right to the edge, and then pushing the whole pile over all at once?”

“I can do it that way, if you want,” Stretch offered.

“I do want. That snow will run out in front of your blade by fifteen feet as you're pushing. Your blade is another three feet in front of your machine. That gets your main weight eighteen feet back from the edge. I'd like to see more for the time being, until I see how that edge is going to behave.”

“I see what you're after,” Stretch agreed.

The rest of us spotted for Stretch at the edge, our radios ready. Stretch backed toward the boundary of his farm. His tracks vanished in the flat light. In front of him he saw only flags and bodies wearing red jackets. A dozen black flags marked the edge of the slot. Two red flags, thirty feet apart, marked his dump gate on the centerline of our road.

Shaun and Eric took positions on both sides of the red flags. Russ and I crossed the timbers over the bridge, and watched from the backside.

Stretch started forward, gathering a rolling, curling pile of snow. When the toe of the pile reached the edge, I waved him back for another load. He brought up five piles before I radioed, “Everything looks good. Let's push that over and see what happens.”

Snow cascaded into the slot. Billowing snow-dust rose from the void. When it settled, the bulldozer sat contentedly on its side of the crevasse, its blade five feet back from the edge.

“Have at it then, Stretch. Same way, unless one of us stops you.”

The crevasse seemed to fill slower than the one thousand yards per hour predicted. We peered daintily over the edge. But after an hour into the show, Russ's radio blared: “There she is! She's a-rising now!”

A half hour later, Stretch filled it to the brim, parked his D8 on top of the snow plug, and we took the picture. We could do this job.

The day Shaun and Eric climbed out of Crevasse 2, I'd received a radiophone call from CRREL radar expert Allan Delaney. He'd been in Christchurch the day we returned to the Shear Zone and caught a plane to the Ice that very day. He had completed the preliminaries in McMurdo and was ready to join us, but we had a couple more days of work at the Shear Zone before we could return to town and get him.

I explained over the radiophone: “Our highest priority is running a helicopter radar survey of our crossing. We've made some devices for this. They're down at the hangar. Can you introduce yourself to the folks at Helo-Ops? You've done this kind of thing before. I don't think they have. You'd spend good time for us with the pilots discussing the mission requirements.”

“Yes, I can do that,” Allan said, simply.

By November 7, we'd filled Crevasse 4 and were ready to go back to Mc-Murdo. We had not one but two helicopter missions brewing.

But we awoke on November 8 to a rising snowstorm, and couldn't see the green flags leading back to McMurdo through the blowing snow. We'd planted them every quarter-mile. Looking back toward the Shear Zone, our green flags there stood out easily enough. They were planted every three hundred feet. We'd stay at the Shear Zone where we could see well enough to work.

Russ, Stretch, and Shaun hauled out the Jiffy drill and set it up over Crevasse 5, a hundred feet past 4. With three drillers, backs to the wind, the drilling still was not any easier. While they drilled, Eric and I manned the PistenBully, advancing our pawns. We found Crevasse 6 another five hundred feet past 5.

By midday the weather dropped from bad to worse. Back at Crevasse 5, snow swirled about the driller's parka cowls and clung to their faces. It was time to bug out of the Zone and hunker down in camp. I had a couple jobs to take care of on the way back, but I had no time to explain myself.

“Pile in, guys. Russ, you'll drive when we're ready.”

Shaun helped me park our snowmobiles on top of the bridges at 5 and 4. We aligned each with the crevasses' strike, just off the road line, and covered both under their black tarps. Next, we tied off the two bridge planks to the PistenBully's tow hitch.

“Stop at Crevasse 3,” I told Russ. “Drive slow.”

The long planks had been painted with black epoxy, impregnated with grit for traction. We laid the planks over the crevasse bridges at 3 and 2 exactly as we had done with the snowmobiles behind us.

Back in camp I spoke over the noise of the flapping tent skin to four stony faces: “I bet you wonder what that last bit was all about?”

A man in McMurdo wanted to fly over our road with an infrared camera. His camera saw cold things as black, and warm things as white. Knowing how much colder it was inside crevasses than on surface, he hoped to find crevasses hiding under thin bridges. We had just set up a test on four known crevasse bridges. On a clear day, he'd see our sun-warmed planks and snowmobiles in white. Maybe he'd see the crevasses under them in black.

We'd go back to McMurdo when the weather let us.

The hollow, throaty wind outside blew steady. We had all served in the Antarctic enough to know it by its sounds. These sounds said “wait.”

We were warm and comfortable inside the Jamesway. Each of us drifted into our personal torpors, some took up books, some napped on their cots, and some wrote letters. Fine snow whistled its way through any thin parting in the tent it could find. In little growing piles, the snow moved in with us.

At dinner, all of us sat around the long aluminum table. Metallic sounds joined the chorus. Folding steel chairs rang across the wood floor. Flatware scraped across plastic plates. Cups clapped upon the tabletop. Sullen and waiting, nobody spoke.

“You must have seen some weather in your time?” I asked Shaun, breaking the silence.

Shaun looked up from his plate to see all eyes on him.

“Well, actually that was my first job in the Antarctic …” he cleared his throat.

Shaun had broken in on the Ice with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) as a younger man. He drove dog sleds for the BAS on the Antarctic Peninsula. Dogs had long been banned in Antarctica by the time the rest of us started. Shaun's first assignment had been as a weather observer on Deception Island—a quiet volcanic island the British shared with Chilean and Argentine bases.

The young Shaun disembarked the British resupply vessel, and watched the ship sail out of the circular harbor inside Deception's submerged caldera. That night he gave his first weather report to England by UHF radio: “We have snow today. And wind.”

A distant dispatcher took his report.

“And we have hail. The sky is black; obscurity 100 percent.” It was high Antarctic summer, with a twenty-four-hour sun overhead, somewhere.

“Did I mention we have lightning and thunder?” That was the first time lightning had ever been reported in Antarctica.

“And, oh yes … the volcano is erupting. We have ash and cinders falling.”

Now we looked at Shaun incredulously. The eruption had clouded the skies over Deception Island, producing its own extreme weather. The Chilean base had been completely destroyed. Salvaging only the clothes they wore, and the cross from their chapel, the Chileans marched in single file around the caldera's rim. They bore their cross before them through the falling ash and cinders, hail and snow, and lightning and thunder, to the British station. Shaun painted a picture Werner Herzog would envy.

Early in the morning of November 9, we woke to a “sucker hole” in the storm, an eye of calmer weather. “Mac-Weather, this is Shear Zone Camp,” I called in.

“Go ahead, Shear Zone.”

“We see blue skies overhead. Ten-mile-per-hour surface winds. How you there?”

“Clearing for the moment. Thinking about coming in?”

“Yeah. Think this hole will last three hours?”

“Maybe. You got a big storm right behind it. If you get in now, you'll stay in town for a few days.”

“That is our intention. Shear Zone clear.”

We roused, battened down the camp, piled in the PistenBully, and raced the sucker hole across the ice shelf.

The hole slammed shut behind us at McMurdo. Five days of blizzard winds filled the town with snow, delayed helicopter flights, and pinned us down.