“How deep does it drill?” I asked, noting Russ approaching our table with his own radar on.
“Well, as long as you’re drilling snow, not ice, it’ll drill as deep as the hose is long. Maybe a hundred feet.”
Russ searched out the back of his brain: “I think I seen one of them once.”
“To answer your question: no. We don’t have a hot-water drill,” I sighed. Russ’s shoulders dropped heavily.
“How’d you like to try one?” Brian asked. Russ looked up tentatively.
“What, next year?” I asked.
“I mean right now. I think there’s one on station, out at Willy Field.”
“Yeah! That’s the one I saw. I knew I’d seen one,” cried Russ. “I think we used it once to make a hot tub!”
The promise of chucking the augers gripped both of us. Brian arranged for a seismic crew, now waiting in town for a flight to the interior, to help us find the drill and get it working. Russ broke off from his work at the helo hangar to join them. Brian may have saved the day in more ways than one. We only looked down forty feet with our radar. If some leviathan were lurking below that, a hundred-foot drill hole might find it.
After more report writing that afternoon, I was back in the galley at dinner time. Russ found us all seated together: me, Shaun, Allan, and Don. Russ danced a jig, singing, “I found it! I found it under a snow drift at Willy! We dug it out and it’s on a sled! All we got to do is take it out there!”
“Try it out?”
“No. But that’s nothing. They showed me how it works. That’s all I need. I can make it work. I’ll make the bits for your different dynamite tomorrow. We got to round up some glycol. Give me tomorrow to work on it.”
Leaning back in my chair and smiling now, I caught Brian Stone’s eye. He sat at a different table but followed the action at ours across the galley floor. I signaled thumbs up. He returned a wink and a smile.
Outside our window, snow devils swirled furiously through town.
The morning of November 11 came clear, cold, and calm. Our chopper departed McMurdo with infrared. Mount Erebus lay off to our left. The twelve-thousand-foot active volcano formed the main mass of Ross Island, and on this day every crevasse on its frozen flanks stood out with uncommon clarity.
The stony ground of White Island, and Minna Bluff beyond it, lay off to our right. These were our landmarks. Some day we might see what lay beyond them. For now, we flew over the ice shelf, following our route to the Shear Zone camp—twenty minutes in flight, three hours in a PistenBully. The storm had wiped out most of our old tracks.
I sat in the rear seat of the helicopter. Don and the pilot sat up front. Just outside the helicopter, a long cargo basket contained the camera. Don held up a small viewing screen attached to a cable that ran through the left side door jamb into the basket.
“I’ll be recording everything as a moving video,” Don explained over the intercom. “We’ll have a running time and date stamp on the image. We can isolate stills of anything you want when we get back to the office.”
Though we’d reviewed our flight plans back at the hangar, approaching the Shear Zone now at three thousand feet above the ground, the question of what to do first came up. Don wanted to monitor the camera continuously. The pilot looked back, asking, “What do you want to do?”
“Let’s hover over the camp area first and see if he sees anything with the camera. We can get our bearings from there,” I suggested.
“Good enough. I got the camp at twelve o’clock,” replied the pilot.
Shortly, Don held up the screen so we could see the bright white images of our Jamesway and camp equipment. He was already pleased the apparatus was working. So was I.
We descended lazily to one thousand feet, targeting the two black drums next to the GAW post. Don picked them up easily.
“HFS looks just like that, three miles due east of GAW,” I explained through the intercom.
We flew over the Shear Zone slowly enough to appreciate all three miles. The pilot easily spotted our black boards against the white snow, and announced when we passed over them. Don, intently watching the video screen, saw them too, in infrared.
I could do little except gaze out the cockpit window. The snowmobiles parked at Crevasses 4 and 5 marked as far as we had gone with our road. From there it was a long two and a half miles of untracked snow before we flew over the drums at HFS. Since Baby, we’d found crevasses every couple hundred feet. At the rate we were advancing our road, it would be a long time to Home Free.
After our first pass at a thousand feet, we completed two more at five hundred, and then finished off with a low pass at 250. Then we climbed back to three thousand feet and headed for McMurdo.
Back at Don’s cubicle we reviewed the infrared images. At Crevasse 2, the long black board looked bright white. It pointed right toward a round, cold, black-as-night access hole fifty feet away. The grayish background of everything else showed no sign of a crevasse beneath it. With a sigh, I thanked Don for his efforts. Both of us were disappointed we’d not found a breakthrough in the crevasse-finding business.
In the galley that evening Russ, Shaun, and Allan found me at a table by a window.
“What’d you see?” they asked.
“A lot of snow in camp. We’ll have to dig out first thing. Never saw a crevasse we didn’t already know about. How’d you all do?”
“We fly the radar test tomorrow,” Shaun confirmed.
“I need another day with the drill,” Russ added.
With any luck, we’d head back out the day after tomorrow. The dull roar of myriad galley conversations long since replaced the drumming tent skin in camp. Either place, there or here, we waited.
Airborne ground penetrating radar played our last card. It wouldn’t give us the map I wanted. But it would show us a line, the flight line, and it’d tell us what it saw under that line in the form of a cross section. It’d show us the kind of image our radar produced when we pushed the antenna over the snow in front of the PistenBully. But the PistenBully weighed ten thousand pounds, and I refused to run it over terra incognita to HFS. If we could fly low and fly several lines close together, we might infer something of a map between the lines. A weather-window for testing the airborne radar opened up the next afternoon.
That evening I dined quietly with Russ when I spied Allan and Shaun entering the food line across the room. “They’re not smiling,” I muttered.
“It was altogether unsatisfactory,” Allan said when he joined our table. I appreciated his economy with language and didn’t ask for details of the failure.
“So there’s no hope of improving the system?”
“Not the sling.” Then he added, “The chief pilot would consider modifying the cargo basket to accommodate the antenna. He hadn’t committed to that when we left him thirty minutes ago.”
“Thanks for trying. Now here’s what I want you two to do.” I looked to Shaun and Allan. “Stay in town and work with the folks at the hangar on getting that antenna mounted in the basket, if they’re willing. Then test it out. If the test works, fly the mission. The rest of us are going back tomorrow, if we can.”
Our new cat skinner, or heavy-equipment operator, and mountaineer were ready to go. So was the hot water drill. We were looking at digging out camp, and that would take a while, but we did have the bulldozer. The other three of us on shovels would be enough.
If Shaun and Allan were unsuccessful, we’d abandon the helicopter radar reconnaissance. They’d come out to the Shear Zone on snowmobiles, and we’d have no choice but to do it all from the ground as we had been doing.
That was the new plan. But the next day, a big blow socked in McMurdo again and we didn’t go anywhere. The day after that we got out of town.
We arrived back at camp through the dregs of the storm with clear skies overhead and ground blizzards obscuring the surface.
Two of us were new to camp. Kim Uhde, the cat skinner, was also new to me. Kim came recommended by other operators in
McMurdo as an artist with a blade. I welcomed him. He was a tall fellow, well-built and meaty, with sparkling, eager blue eyes that looked over a spectacular walrus moustache.
Tom Lyman, the other new guy, I’d met during my search for alpine mountaineers. His resume stood out, listing experience in geographical information systems and global positioning systems. That technical complement to his mountaineering raised intriguing possibilities for the project’s future. The fair-haired Montanan had joined our group in New Hampshire for pre-season radar training. He was Shaun’s age and stature.
Our camp was lousy with drift snow. Russ fired up the generator and the bulldozer while the newcomers got their briefing.
“Over here is GAW,” I pointed to the four-by-four-inch post. “Everything past that is bad news, and nobody goes past GAW unless I know about it. That’s where the Shear Zone lies. Out there, where all those flags are.”
More than a hundred flags stood in a bamboo forest, three-quarters of a mile away. A line of green flags led into that thicket. They marked the left side of our road.
“All those other flags out there, the black ones and the red ones, mean something. We’ll tell you what they mean when we go out there. For now, if you remember nothing else, remember this: the green flags will lead you to safety. If you get out there in a blinding snowstorm and need to get back, go from green flag to green flag.”
“Got that,” Kim drawled. “Green is good.”
The wind slacked, dropping the airborne snow out of it. Towards Mc-Murdo, a wall of low gray clouds snarled over the surface. But here, a brilliant blue sky with clear horizons in three directions cheered us. We trudged around the camp area.
“And over here, this black plywood teepee-looking thing, that’s our crapper. It’s generally warm in there. Do your thing in a plastic bag in the bucket, then put the bag in the open drum behind the teepee. And that flag standing next to it, all by itself, that’s where we pee. It doesn’t look like it now, cause the ground is covered in drift. Pee there. Don’t want any yellow snow anywhere else in camp because we melt the clean stuff for drinking water.”
“Yellow snow over there. Got it,” the cat skinner drawled again. Tom nodded, his keen blue eyes showed he, too, was taking it all in.
A line of black flags stood a couple hundred yards north of the camp perimeter, not toward the Shear Zone but in the direction of Mount Erebus, which towered over us even here.
“That’s downwind generally. We’ve searched the ground up to those black flags. No crevasses found,” I explained to Kim. “There’s where you put the snow you’re about to push out of camp.”
“Black flags are bad,” Kim nodded. “You want me to feather the snow out or pile it up?”
While the bulldozer warmed, Kim walked around his machine, chatting with Russ before he climbed into the cab. Shortly the bulldozer snorted, raising a puff of smoke, and crawled forward. The rest of us grabbed shovels and started digging out around the small stuff in camp.
The air grew uncommonly still, and the bright sun warmed us. Those of us with shovels shed our jackets while we mucked out small nooks and crannies packed with drift snow. Kim pushed our work away with the big piles he carried in front of his blade. In three hours, we had a level campsite again.
Tom and Kim explored their new surroundings while I heated up leftovers begged off the McMurdo galley and raised Helo-Ops by the radiophone.
“We’re scheduled for off deck in a couple hours,” Shaun explained from his end at Helo-Ops. “The antenna is in the basket. We tested it over the Castle Rock loop. It works perfectly. The pilot wants to know, how things are looking at camp?”
“Congratulations. We’re mucked out and level. Blue skies overhead. The flags I’m looking at out this window are limp. Do you have ETA our location?”
“2000 hours. The pilot would like to land first in the camp perimeter and shut down. He needs to get oriented to the project.”
“Understood. You take care of his orientation. And I do want you to fly in the chopper when Allan’s running the radar. You may spot something in no man’s land that’ll be useful.”
Russ, Kim, and Tom warmed expectantly by the heating stove and understood the good news heading our way. Tom asked if we had a position on the post at GAW.
Puzzled, I explained that the surveyor had been out a couple weeks before and had captured a very good position with differential GPS. I rummaged through a stack of paper next to the radiophone, found the coordinates, and handed them to Tom.
He wandered over to GAW, while the rest of us rolled a drum of aviation fuel across the yielding snow to a fifty-foot circle of red flags. We’d pushed the poles down so far that only their banners remained above the surface. It looked to us like a landing zone should look.
Tom meandered back over to us. “I think GAW has moved maybe forty feet since the surveyor was here. I can’t tell exactly, but I’m certain it’s moved.”
I spotted the hand-held GPS unit Tom had. “How long did you occupy it?”
“Long enough.”
Tom’s finding opened a flood of possibilities. Nobody had moved the post. We knew the Shear Zone ice was moving north, but we’d not measured that yet. The surveyor’s recent work was only our start. The green flag line through the Shear Zone would be part of it, too. Now Tom suggested the ice was moving three feet a day. That tweaked the pattern we imagined flying in the next hour: the pilot would fly to coordinates for HFS we’d captured over a month ago.
“Nothing we can do about it now,” I shrugged. Tom agreed.
The whocka-whocka-whocka-whocka of an approaching helicopter also agreed.
The helicopter circled our camp, and then slowly, slowly dropped into the nest of red-flags. Heels first, then toes, its skids shimmied onto the soft snow. Billows of it pelted our faces. The engine whined. The rotors slowly turned to a stop. Our radar antenna looked down through a square hole cut in the bottom of its cargo basket.
“Nice job.” I complimented as Shaun and Allan climbed out. Then recognizing the pilot who’d helped me locate a traverse route across McMurdo Sound years ago, I smiled in greeting. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Scott Pentecost.”
“You bet. This is pretty neat out here. Good LZ, too,” he declared, referring to our landing zone. We’d crossed paths recently at a Colorado gas station, he on his Harley, me in my truck, both of us going somewhere else.
“Allan, everything working for you?”
“Everything works fine,” he said, not a word wasted.
They declined our offer of refreshments for the moment. Shaun gave Scott the briefing, and the three of them started the radar survey right away. We thrilled at watching the chopper zoom fifty feet off-deck over no-man’s land.
We gathered inside the warm Jamesway when they landed back in camp.
Allan pulled a metal folding chair across the floor and slouched firmly in it, stretching his legs to relieve his helicopter cramps. I pulled up another chair and leaned forward, elbows planted on my knees. The others stood still, listening.
“We have completed seven flights from GAW to HFS,” Allan reported. “One right down the line, two south of the line, and four north of the line. We have recorded the radar record of each flight, tagged at intervals with GPS coordinates.”
I nodded. I got the picture.
“However,” Allan went on, “I believe for windage and other considerations, some of our lines overlapped each other, particularly at the eastern or far side of the Zone. We had no reliable ground reference there to guide us.”
I nodded again.
“It appears that where you are now with your road lies right in the worst of it—the most crevasses, in the densest cluster.” Allan sketched a rough diagram in my logbook. My heart sagged.
He allowed that the southernmost flight line showed fewer crevasses, though he could not estimate their numbers yet. But all of the flight lines showed the densest cluster lay within the first mile and a half from GAW. Beyond that he reported an
area free of crevasses for two-thirds of a mile, then another half-dozen crevasses, and then another clear area.
Finally, he explained, “There are crevasses right at HFS, but for a mile beyond that there are none. I believe that HFS is truly home free and once you are past there, you are across the Shear Zone.”
Our road work had reached Crevasse 6, three quarters of a mile from GAW. Another three quarters might see us into that first crevasse-free area.
“Let’s call that the Miracle Mile. We got to call it something. Allan, I understand your report. It’s tremendously valuable. I’m not happy to learn we’re in the worst ground the Zone has to offer, but I’m delighted to learn the Miracle Mile is in front of us. Tell me … do you see any meaningful, qualitative difference between any of your flight lines?”
An exceptionally good listener, Allan pondered before answering. His eyes dropped to the floor. Some time passed while he considered “qualitative” and the import of his answer. When he looked up, he said simply: “No.”
That settled it. We’d go forward from where we were, in the worst of it, and hope for a happy arrival at the Miracle Mile. We wouldn’t change course from straight ahead.
I walked Allan and Scott back to the helicopter. Allan would join our camp after he processed his data in town. Shaun stayed with us.
We shot the bridge at Crevasse 5, and gave Kim his first taste of filling a crevasse. He learned the meaning of the flags, the boundaries of the fill-gathering area, and where the spotter would stand. “Watch him as you come up to the edge. He’s looking into the void that you cannot see,” I told him.
When Kim filled 5 to the brim, he parked his machine proudly over the plug he’d just stuffed into it. “I see what this is all about now,” he declared.
Moving on to 6, we set up our new hot-water drill and drilled more holes there than we really needed. Russ grinned with glee. Shaun and Tom prospected past us with the PistenBully and found 7 and 8.
Back in camp, we prepared for a trial run to HFS. I wanted to run the same transect with radar on the ground that we’d flown, but I wanted to prove we could do it safely. “Safely” meant without falling into a crevasse.
Blazing Ice Page 8