Frozen in Time (28 page)

When winds picked up in the afternoon, Balchen and Dunlop decided it was time. The survivors and the Dumbo crew scrambled on board while Balchen, Strong, Dolleman, and Healey rocked the plane to break its icy cradle.

Dunlop raced down the glacier runway. He tried for nearly a mile, occasionally bouncing several feet off the ground. But just as on the previous day, he couldn’t gain lift. He turned the Dumbo around and tried in the opposite direction, but again had no luck. Their chances were running out. The plane’s already slim margin of fuel was nearly gone. The damaged engine wouldn’t take much more strain. Dunlop got out and strategized with Balchen.

“If I hadn’t flown in this ship before,” Dunlop told the legendary pilot, “I’d almost say that this ship wasn’t built for flying.”

Confident as ever, Balchen claimed that all they needed was more wind. The pilots and crew stood around, talking and taking pictures. After several hours stronger winds arrived. One cost of the delay was the absence of an escort: Turner’s B-17, running low on fuel, had returned to Bluie East Two.

Balchen and the three trail men shook hands with the men boarding the Dumbo, as both groups headed toward uncertain futures.

THE SLED DOG TEAM PASSES THE PBY DUMBO AS IT WARMS ITS ENGINES.
(U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH.)

T
HE FOUR-MAN TEAM
of Balchen, Strong, Dolleman, and Healey soon began the demanding march with their dogs to Beach Head Station. They followed a winding route that stretched more than forty miles with detours to avoid crevassed areas.

Later, Balchen recounted the journey with undisguised pride: “I have no instruments along for land navigation, and I have to guide the party by dead reckoning. With a prismatic pocket compass and a protractor, I make computations in pencil on a diary page, and clock off our mileage on a distance-measuring wheel fastened to the runner of the sled. For five days, we hole up [during] a
williwaw
”—a frightful storm—“staking our dogs securely, and digging under the snow ourselves to ride out winds up to 150 miles an hour. Ten days later, we have worked our way to the coast, through drifts and
sastrugi
as high as three feet.”

All four men and their dogs arrived safely at Beach Head Station. On April 18, 1943, a plane picked them up there and returned them to Bluie East Two.

A
FTER
B
ALCHEN AND
the trail team rocked the Dumbo free from the ice, Dunlop set off down the glacier runway once more, heading uphill into the resurgent wind. Again the Dumbo bounced along the way, but this time the wind rushing over the outstretched wings provided enough lift to separate the plane from the ice cap.

With the damaged engine straining, Dunlop gained altitude slowly. Low on fuel and losing oil, he cut the dying engine when the Dumbo was about one thousand feet above the ground. Then he adjusted the angle of the right propeller so it sliced through the wind, a technique called “feathering the engine.” Otherwise, drag created by the shut-down engine would have threatened the plane’s ability to fly. But Dunlop’s prudent move triggered a new problem.

Without power from the right engine, the Dumbo hung in the air as though planning a return to earth. Balchen’s scheme seemed to be failing, and the passengers feared for their lives. After a heart-stopping pause, the plane went into a dive. Dunlop fought in the cockpit, but the Dumbo kept losing altitude. He leveled off, but soon the plane was barely more than fifty feet above the ground.

Spina looked out the window in the Dumbo’s side blister and saw the ice cap rushing toward them. He and Best thought they were about to crash, ending their ordeal and their lives in the cruelest possible way. Harold Larson, the Dumbo’s radioman, saw the survivors’ white-knuckled distress. He patted them on the backs and told them everything would be fine, whether he believed it or not.

No one was comforting anyone in the cockpit. Fearing disaster, Dunlop resolved to restart the damaged engine to gain altitude. It was a risky move—if the engine exploded, they’d be done for. But if they didn’t want to crash, they needed its power, even briefly.

Dunlop restored power to the engine; it strained and complained, but it held together. With both propellers spinning, Dunlop pulled back hard and got the Dumbo’s nose pointing upward. But now he faced a new obstacle: the mountains that guarded Greenland’s coastline. Dunlop demanded that the plane continue to climb, hoping to gain enough altitude while both engines worked to clear the highest peaks. In the cabin, the passengers watched silently through the windows as the mountains approached.

As Dunlop struggled, the instrument panel before him displayed a terrifying sight: the cylinder head temperature gauge for the damaged right engine was deep in the red, far past the danger zone. Leaking oil and pushed beyond its limit, it threatened to catch fire and explode. With no other choice, Dunlop continued to climb.

The Dumbo rose, and the jagged mountains passed beneath them. When Dunlop felt confident that they’d cleared the peaks, he shut down the damaged engine and began to lose altitude. He pointed the plane east toward the water, in case they had to employ the seaplane’s buoyant qualities. That move reflected Dunlop’s newest worry: using the second engine for part of the flight hadn’t been part of Balchen’s calculations. Now they were nearly out of fuel.

Listening to the crew’s conversations over a headset, Monteverde heard Dunlop ask the flight engineer how much fuel remained. The disturbing answer was, about 120 gallons. The Dumbo was burning seventy-three gallons of fuel an hour, and was still more than an hour from Bluie East Two. Monteverde could do the math. Based on their distance and fuel consumption rate, they’d have perhaps thirty gallons to spare. For a plane with a fuel capacity of almost 1,500 gallons, that translated as a teacup of water to sustain a thirsty elephant. A strong headwind could suck the Dumbo dry.

F
OR THE NEXT
hour, Dunlop tried every trick in his pilot’s bag. Yet nothing could prevent the plane from losing altitude. From his desk outside the cockpit, radioman Harold Larson called Bluie East Two to say that the Dumbo might not make it. Without Pappy Turner’s B-17 as an escort, no one would know where it went down. The base answered that it would send a new spotter plane, and soon a twin-engine Beechcraft AT-7 appeared alongside the Dumbo.

Somehow, Dunlop kept the air beneath his wings. About five minutes from the base, he spotted the mouth of the fjord leading to Bluie East Two. Dunlop asked again about fuel. The engineer told him that the gauges read empty.

Dunlop faced a choice upon which all their lives depended. He could aim toward the fjord for a controlled water landing, or he could go for broke. Dunlop chose the latter. He’d fly toward the base until the last fumes were gone and the lone engine quit. Then he’d glide the rest of the way and make what pilots call a dead-stick landing.

Dunlop told everyone aboard the Dumbo that if they heard the remaining engine sputter out, they should prepare for a crash. The men in the cabin piled bags and equipment against the hard metal bulkheads to soften the blow. They sat together with their backs against the cushioning material and braced for impact.

As the Dumbo lost altitude, Dunlop lined up for his one shot at an approach. Now he discovered yet another problem. The dead right engine controlled the hydraulic pump for the landing gear. Using a hand crank, his crew lowered the main wheels manually, but they had no manual control for the nose wheel. Dunlop would have to bring the Dumbo down onto a hard runway on its snout.

This was the very danger the plane’s manufacturer had expressed two months earlier in the message to Balchen. Too much pressure on landing might collapse the forward bulkhead. But with no fuel and a dead engine, Dunlop had no choice.

He touched down with the plane’s main wheels. Dunlop fought to keep the nose up and away from the landing strip, without raising it too high and bouncing the tail on the ground. Within seconds, he began to run out of runway. Dunlop eased down the Dumbo’s nose, to use it as a brake. The maneuver had to be handled just right—fast enough to stop, but not so fast and hard that he’d break the plane in two.

When the nose touched down, the Dumbo made a sharp turn, veering directly toward Pappy Turner’s B-17, which happened to be parked at the far end of the runway. Dunlop braked as hard as he could. The men in the Dumbo braced for impact. Turner’s bomber loomed ahead. The two planes, one in motion, one a stationary target, both of them committed to saving the PN9E crew, closed to fifty feet.

Then forty. Thirty.

Fifteen feet from Turner’s B-17, the Dumbo skidded to a stop.

The plane carrying the last three survivors of the wrecked PN9E balanced motionless on its nose with its rear end high. The Dumbo looked as though it was taking a deep, well-deserved bow.

T
HE BASE AT
Bluie East Two emptied to greet them. The survivors grabbed handfuls of dirt from the runway to celebrate their deliverance from ice cap purgatory. If they had continued their matchstick calendar to the last day, the top row would have displayed four sticks, the bottom row six. They’d been on the ice from November 9, 1942, to April 6, 1943. One hundred and forty-eight days.

Armand Monteverde, Alfred “Clint” Best, and Paul Spina joined Lloyd Puryear, Alexander Tucciarone, Harry Spencer, and William “Bill” O’Hara as PN9E crash survivors rescued from the glacier beyond the Koge Bay fjord. The five C-53 crewmen they’d hoped to find remained lost. Also left behind were PN9E fliers Loren “Lolly” Howarth and Clarence Wedel, and would-be rescuers John Pritchard Jr., Benjamin Bottoms, and Max Demorest.

S
OME FORTY-FIVE YEARS
later, a fully recovered Clint Best told his grandchildren about the crash, the bitter cold, the deprivation, and the fear. He explained how the hardships were offset by the caring he’d felt from his friends. Best left out the worst parts, so as not to upset the children, but he did mention his bouts of dementia.

Above all, Best marveled at the efforts made to save him and his crewmates. “Money was never an object. If there was someone out there that needed rescuing, the air force went out to the rescue,” Best told his family. “They never give up. They never gave up on us.”

Despite the passage of time and the wisdom of age, Best struggled to describe how it felt to have survived. “As I’ve gone on through the years, it’s hard to figure out how you can be with eight other people, and one falls into a crevasse and disappears. It’s, ‘Why me, Lord?’ In this case it’s, ‘Why him?’ And the radioman goes after a plane and he gets killed, and the lieutenant comes down on the motorsled to rescue you, and he gets killed. You wonder why it’s all of them.”

Finally, Best settled on divine intervention: “I figured God must have had some plan in this world, that He let me along with the others remain.”

24

DOWN TO THE WIRE

AUGUST 2012

T
HE DOME TENT
is alive with excitement about the anomaly at BW-1 as we crowd together for breakfast on Tuesday, August 28. Between sips of coffee, Jaana happily displays a radar image on her laptop. She explains that it shows small hyperbolas near the glacier surface that are unmistakably a crevasse, and bigger and more dramatic hyperbolas deep in the ice that suggest a large UFO: an unidentified frozen object. The mood is light, and Alberto gets laughs by teasing Bil about the single “l” in his name: “What’s Bil short for, Bill?”

But enthusiasm leaches from the dome when Steve announces that a half-dozen team members must return to Kulusuk aboard the helicopter that’s due later today to airlift the Hotsy to BW-1. The decision to begin “demobilizing” from the glacier comes jointly from the Coast Guard and North South Polar, and takes the form of a plan agreed to by Jim, Rob, Lou, and Steve. Although the weather remains cold and clear at Koge Bay, a major storm is headed our way. Multiple helicopter trips will be required to get everyone and our equipment back to Kulusuk. If flights are canceled, some or all of us might be trapped here in dangerous conditions.

Bil and Alberto volunteer to leave to avoid canceling other obligations, but no one else wants to miss the hole-melting, camera-dropping finale. Steve clears his throat and reveals the names of the soon-to-depart: “So, going out today are myself, Terri, Ryan, Alberto, Michelle, and Bil. OK? Everybody else will be remaining, and the remaining group will figure out the lifts for tomorrow and Thursday.”

Several people object on Michelle’s behalf, knowing how much she wants to remain in camp. Steve wavers, asking Jim if he knows which Air Greenland helicopter is coming and whether we might fill it with more equipment and fewer people. But Jim wants to stick to the plan they’d made before entering the dome.

“We need to get people off the ice. That has to happen,” he says.

Steve finds a way to commiserate with the rank-and-file yet also support the team leaders’ decision: “Every one of us wants to stay. Unfortunately, six of us have to go back.”

Steve’s mixed message and his inquiry to Jim about fewer people leaving create an opening, and Michelle gains more voices of support. Frank, however, is silent, not wanting his relationship with Michelle to be seen as coloring his judgment as safety leader. Faced with more rumblings on Michelle’s behalf, Steve throws up his hands. “I’m not making a command decision on this one.”

That sets off Rob, who as second-in-command of the Coast Guard contingent occupies a parallel position to Steve’s on North South Polar.

“You’re the command,” Rob tells Steve. “That’s the job. You want me to make it?”

The tent goes silent until Bil tells Steve what everyone is thinking: “The gauntlet’s thrown on the ground there, bud.”

Lou steps into the fray, again raising the idea of sending gear before people. Discussion moves to the agenda for the day then circles back to the helicopter. Ultimately, Lou expresses support for the original plan, and both he and Jim say they believe that the six people Steve named should be the first to leave.

Steve seems distracted, agitated by the public conflict with Rob about command. He detours the discussion to describe how the campsite should be broken down and to list tasks needing completion before the helicopter arrives. Finally he musters himself to declare who stays and who goes.

“Michelle,” Steve says, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but—”

“I’m useful,” she tells him, listing her skills in mountaineering, glacier climbing, medical care, and elsewhere.

“Well, you know what,” Steve says, reversing field, “I’m going to make the command decision. Rob, you’re going.”

Blindsided by Steve’s switch and frustrated by a week of leadership he finds lacking, Rob can’t restrain himself. “See how that felt? Feel good?” he asks Steve mockingly. “That’s what it feels like—command!”

“Oh, really, thank you,” Steve shoots back. “Thanks for telling me what command feels like. Ever have a combat command?”

“You were saying you didn’t want to make a command decision,” Rob answers. “That’s your job.”

The glow is off the dome, and tension is now the order of the day.

B
EFORE THE MORNING
meeting ends, the six departing team members are told to gather their belongings and break down their tents. With no radar or magnetometer teams going out, there’s not much for the rest of us to do before the helicopter arrives. Eager to get as close as possible to the anomaly, Lou, John, Frank, Michelle, Jaana, and I head across the glacier to BW-1. John carries an ice auger to drill holes to see if we might find pieces of the Duck near the surface. We also bring the beachcombing metal detector, more for kicks than with any expectation that it would be powerful enough to find the anomaly so deep in the ice.

It’s an hour-long uphill climb, and we’re winded when we reach the orange flag. With time to spare, we soak up the sun and a spectacular view of Koge Bay, clogged with icebergs as big as cargo ships. It’s the clearest sightline we’ve had all week of the glacier where the PN9E crashed, a sharply rising, impossible-to-see hazard for any pilot “flying in milk.” Jaana and I take turns passing over the anomaly with the metal detector, which buzzes only when we accidentally bang it against our legs. John and Frank use the auger to drill enough holes to make a coffin-sized opening in the ice, but there’s no sign of the Duck. Soon the hole fills with frigid water flowing through the glacier, putting an end to the drilling.

The sun is warm and skies are blue, so several of us use our coats as blankets and stretch out for glacier naps. By noon, Michelle leaves to make lunch and Lou goes with her to oversee the first stage of base camp breakdown. A tempest of problems awaits them.

A
FTER SPEAKING WITH
airport officials by satellite phone, Steve reports that a thick fog has grounded the helicopters at Kulusuk at least until tomorrow afternoon. When the sky clears, Air Greenland will send a helicopter to move the Hotsy and to get as many people as possible off the ice ahead of the storm. In a small way, it’s good news for everyone who didn’t want to leave the glacier today. But that’s little consolation compared to the larger costs.

No helicopter today means no Hotsy move tonight. That means no hole-melting tonight or tomorrow morning to explore the anomaly. Even if the helicopter does come late tomorrow and moves the Hotsy, the storm might leave us no time to investigate BW-1. In that case, our only option would be a profoundly disappointing backup plan: place a satellite-tracking device above the anomaly and go home. We wouldn’t know whether we’d found the Duck’s crash site and the resting places of Pritchard, Bottoms, and Howarth. A year or more might pass before some or all of us could return. That is, assuming enough money might materialize to support yet another expedition. With no evidence more solid than radar and magnetometer hits, it’s doubtful. The thought casts a pall over camp.

In hushed conversations held in clusters around the rocks and tents, there’s talk of riding out the storm and moving the Hotsy after the bad weather passes. But that idea is soon squashed. We don’t know how bad the storm might be or how long it might last. And even if we did hunker down, we’d have little or no time afterward to melt holes. The Coast Guard’s C-130 is due to return to Kulusuk in three days, and that’s the only way to get our four tons of equipment back to the United States. There’s no hope of delaying the big plane, and the cost of flying the gear and everyone on commercial airlines is beyond prohibitive.

The bottom line is that if we want to investigate the BW-1 anomaly, it’s now or possibly never. Without a helicopter’s help, we have about twenty-four hours to somehow move the Hotsy 1.3 miles from Point A to BW-1, largely uphill and across innumerable hazards.

Lou, Jim, and several others stand in a tense knot on the ice field, discussing and rejecting one option after another. Lou is already on record as being uncharacteristically pessimistic about our chances: “There’s no way we can move the Hotsy over land.” It’s physically impossible, he thinks, and there’s a danger that a bridged-over crevasse might give way and swallow some or all of us.

Writing in his journal, Nick sums up the risks by recording observations from his first trip to the anomaly site: “The route to BW-1 was an indirect path through a series of open crevasses, surface meltwater channels, and hidden moulins [deep vertical shafts within a glacier]. These last ones raised my eyebrows. Not far beneath the surface you could hear water running. Not crevasses, but drainage tunnels, the plumbing of the glacier. Fall into one roped and you had a chance of getting out. Fall in unroped and you might just get flushed down to the fjord over the next thousand years.”

Jim isn’t cavalier about safety, and he doesn’t pretend to be a glacier expert, but he refuses to surrender. Just as Lou has scrounged and sacrificed to be here, Jim has put his reputation on the line. With the anomaly at BW-1 staring at him from Jaana’s screen—he’s a frequent customer asking for a look—Jim refuses to return to his desk at Coast Guard Headquarters without knowing what’s down there. Despite concerns from Nick and others, Jim believes that the safety team can find a solid path to move the Hotsy to BW-1. To make the trip less arduous, Jim and several others wonder whether the lids of large Pelican cases might be converted for use as sleds under the Hotsy’s wheels.

Several team members discuss abandoning the Hotsy altogether and carrying a second auger, fuel, and a pickax to BW-1, to see if those tools might reach the anomaly. The idea of leaving ahead of the storm, without any melting or drilling at BW-1, also hasn’t been ruled out.

As the chief hole-melter and Hotsy wrangler, and someone with a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for hard work, WeeGee keeps tabs on the swirling discussions. He moves among the groups, listening more than talking, assessing the ideas and attitudes of the would-be planners. After suffering through hours of inactivity and indecision, WeeGee’s frustration gets the best of him. He has no intention of leaving before he can perform exploratory surgery on the glacier. He’s certain that the Hotsy is our only hope, and he dismisses the idea that Pelican lids might help us push the seven-hundred-plus-pound machine to BW-1.

WeeGee disappears from the brainstorming sessions and grabs the second aluminum extension ladder bought in Keflavík. He separates the ladder into two parts, each twelve feet long, and carries one to the rocks past the toilet tent. He finds two closely set boulders and jams the ladder’s end into the opening. What seems like the act of a frustrated madman reveals itself as the inspired work of an innovator. Pulling down on the ladder, he bends it at the second rung. He pulls it out, inspects it, then bends it some more. When the ladder’s end is curved upward like the tip of a ski, he flips it around and does the same to the other end.

His orange boots stomping against the ice, WeeGee carries the custom double-curved ladder toward Jim, Lou, and the other planners. He halts twenty yards away and wordlessly slides it in their direction. The ladder skims across the ice like a sharpened skate and stops near their feet.

Jim gets the idea immediately. “Hell, yes,” he says. “Money.”

Bil wraps WeeGee in a hug: “You gave nobody any choice. This is how we’re doing it.”

WeeGee repeats the bending process with the second half of the ladder, and soon the plan is apparent to everyone. With the curved ladders serving as strong, lightweight runners, WeeGee intends to turn the Hotsy into a giant sled and use us as huskies.

Lou snaps back to his natural optimism and muses about moving the Hotsy tonight. Nick and several others tell him he’s nuts—the glacier’s surface is too slushy from the day’s sunshine. He relents only when WeeGee declares that we’ll wait until morning, when the route to BW-1 will have frozen overnight. WeeGee’s primary concern is about someone getting hurt, but he also worries that the ungainly Hotsy might tip over and break if conditions aren’t close to ideal.

As dusk approaches, WeeGee, Jetta, and Nick leave base camp for Point A to fasten the twin ladder skis side by side under the Hotsy. En route, WeeGee explains that he bent both ends of each ladder as a precaution, so the Hotsy can be pushed in either direction if one ladder end breaks or nose-dives into a ditch. When he says “ditch,” most of us hear “crevasse,” in which case a double-curved ladder won’t do anyone much good. On the other hand, even after WeeGee’s end-bending trick, about nine feet of each ladder makes contact with the glacier, or enough to span the widest crevasses we anticipate. As a last-minute tweak, WeeGee places shovels underneath two of the Hotsy’s tires, so they sit more squarely on the ladders’ rails.

Fully assembled, with the twin ladders strapped to the upper frame suggesting biplane wings, and the turned-up ladder skis evoking a central pontoon, the Hotsy’s homage to the lost Duck is complete.

“G
OOD MORNING, CAMPERS
!”

It’s 5:15 a.m. on Wednesday, August 29. A wide-awake WeeGee marches among the tents sounding reveille. The rest of us crawl bleary-eyed from our sleeping bags out onto the ice. The air is 23 degrees Fahrenheit, but swirling winds make it feel closer to zero. Icicles form instantly when Michelle pours water from a jerry can to prepare breakfast. There’s little chattering except our teeth as we gather in the dome to eat. Everyone knows what’s riding on today, and thoughts bounce from safety to our collective strength then back to safety. Jim breaks the silence by predicting that it will take four unrelenting hours to move the Hotsy to BW-1, a grind of fewer than six hundred yards per hour.

In groups of twos and threes, we trek to Point A, and by 6:20 we assume our positions. It’s an all-hands operation, with nine of us on the pushing ladders and nearly everyone else either yoked to a harness attached to the front of the Hotsy or walking out front to scan for hidden crevasses. A half-dozen orange flags bundled together on the Hotsy give it a festive look, as though it’s a crude carnival ride being moved onto a frozen fairground.