Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  I was no cat skinner of Kim’s caliber, so I apologized. “I just needed to say that.”

  Kim peered off into tomorrow’s future. He saw it. “Thank you for that reminder. I needed to hear it.”

  Ralph backed onto a mound of snow he’d built near the rear of Kim’s dozer and stopped at the top. The extra height gave his winch mechanical advantage for lifting Kim. Allan and I had flagged a precise route to get to that point. The site for the mound lay perilously close to yet another crevasse.

  Each player rehearsed his or her role. I gave my last instruction: “Stay off the radios as much as possible. That’s not for McMurdo. It’s for us. Unnecessary chatter will break our concentration.”

  Realizing only then I had no role for myself, I muttered, “Now what do I do?”

  Kim adroitly answered, “Your job is to watch everybody.”

  “Right you are.” Allan and I withdrew the PistenBully to a safe spot on the road, well out of the action.

  Ralph paid out the winch cable while Russ walked it back, hooking it to Kim’s tilted machine. Kim swallowed hard, climbed back aboard, and started his engine. Tom and Shaun watched from both sides of Kim’s bulldozer for any new failure at the crevasse edge. I fidgeted with the radio mike in my hand and ran one last radio check from our overlook. Then I radioed: “Okay, Russ. It’s your show.”

  With both arms outstretched, and using hand signals that mechanics and operators understood, Russ stood like Stravinsky on the snow. Both bulldozers revved, snorting black smoke. The exhaust cleared, and the first dark puffs drifted, wraith-like, across the snowscape under the overcast skies. Russ’s left hand scribed tight circles in the air. The winch cable stretched. His right hand beckoned “come to me,” his fingers pinching “little bit at a time.” At the cable’s first steady tug, Kim’s bulldozer shuddered, then sank. Russ sliced his hands across his neck. Both dozers stopped.

  Shaun radioed, “A slight, not a great change in the situation. Maybe dropped three inches.”

  The bulldozers revved again. Russ caught both operators’ eyes, and then gave the downbeat: “Now!”

  Kim backed slowly against the taut winch cable, first clawing up, then teetering at the crevasse edge. A moment passed. Heavily, he tipped level. Ralph spooled cable until Kim footed on stable snow. Both operators stopped, then bowed to each other through their cab windows. When Ralph slacked the cable, the show was over.

  Allan beamed with pleasure in the PistenBully, congratulating me.

  “Congratulations, each of you!” I radioed, my heart still racing. I hadn’t let go of the mike. “Let’s get our equipment back onto the road and have some lunch.”

  By 1100 hours both bulldozers idled back in camp. Any lingering responsibility Kim felt dissipated in our shared pride.

  “You saved our bacon,” I told Ralph.

  “Aw, hell, it’s nice working with you again, ol’ Buddy. But I’m gone. I can get back just in time for a hot meal tonight in the galley.”

  Ralph tracked past our camp perimeter flags, headed back to town. The day had turned gold for us.

  That same afternoon, the McMurdo surveyors showed up at the Shear Zone in a red, track-driven pickup truck. Jeff Scanniello, the chief surveyor, and I had worked with one another over several years. We held each other in high regard. He was a bearded, rugged fellow with a sharp wit and sense of humor. Jeff would’ve stopped for a trailside chat with Ralph. He stepped out of his truck in camp, asking simply: “How’s it going?”

  “No … problem,” I answered. Our eyes met. He knew. But we’d get right to work.

  Jeff came to plant our first milepost at GAW+1. Its location lay between Crevasses 7 and 8, in ground we’d already proven safe. When he set the post with global positioning instruments, our green flag line ran close to his mark. We’d extended that line through all our chessboards using only the red-flag back sights Jeff located for us in early October.

  “Eight feet off in a mile. One and a half thousandths. Not bad for eye-balling,” I stood by my green flag, three paces away from his post.

  “Hah,” Jeff shot back. “The only time you’re on line is when you cross it.”

  I conceded, laughing, and we discussed plans to set the second mile post. We still couldn’t see HFS from the first one, but I thought we might from the next. It’d lie in the Miracle Mile. I wanted to use the mile posts for sights and run our green flag line right between them, all the way to the end.

  “Copy that,” Jeff acknowledged. “Next week?”

  I wasn’t so eager to push on to the Miracle Mile. When we found Crevasse 9, the Miracle Mile seemed within reach. We might advance from one crevasse to the next, right into it. But now I heeded Allan’s confession. We looked again at the questionable areas and black blobs we’d found weeks earlier. With the hot water drill and Allan’s radar expertise, new crevasses appeared on our roster. We had missed some.

  So we started back at Baby. We ran radar lines across it with the PistenBully at every imaginable angle. We ran parallel to it, our tracks straddling the crack. Only when the antenna passed directly over it, from any direction, did we see a clear crevasse image on our screen. Our New Hampshire training had taught us that a side-scanning cone of influence radiated down from the antenna, and contributed to the radar imagery. But that wasn’t true here.

  Russ cautioned us, “It’s the ones that sneak up on you from behind that will get you. Your radar’s way out in front. Before it sees a crevasse your tracks are already over it!”

  We started filling in the gaps between our numbered crevasses. First, we discovered Crevasse 3.1 crossing part of our road. It pinched to a close just short of the green flag line. Radar run directly along the flag line failed to detect it, yet five feet south the radar showed it plain as day. We opened an access hole in it and sent Tom down to see what was really there. From inside the crevasse, he reported yet a deeper, intersecting crevasse below it.

  “It is extensive,” Tom said. “Perhaps twenty feet wide, and I can see light in the distance.” Again I feared monsters hiding below us.

  When we shot the slot, intending to fill it no matter what, Russ called our attention to something behind us: “That one just sneezed!” Powder smoke wafted up from another access hole in another crevasse not far away. They were interconnected.

  Hunting crevasses became less like stalking big game and more like hunting unseen devils. The more we looked down through the snow, the more complicated the Shear Zone got. Allan’s helicopter flights had found us in the worst of it. I felt the project slipping away, wondering whether we could really understand the place.

  “It’s a son of a bitch,” I declared. “But even if we don’t get to HFS this season, we’re going to bomb-proof everything in our way as far as we do get. We’re not going to leave bad work behind us.”

  Weather didn’t help. Frequently our light flattened so that we couldn’t see our own shadows against the snowy surface. Moving anywhere in the Shear Zone was like drifting in a cloud. Vertigo played its tricks. Crevasse edges disappeared. We didn’t dare run the bulldozer at those times.

  When the weather was poor, we advanced the cause some other way. Sometimes we followed flags into the Zone and drilled and blasted. Sometimes we sent a mountaineer down an access hole. Often we stayed in camp waiting for better weather. Shoveling drift snow claimed a lot of our time.

  By Friday, November 22, we worked back to the black flag that marked where I’d watched Stretch and the D8R enter the Shear Zone. Now Allan’s radar showed us a distinct crevasse-form there: an hourglass shape. The surface layers of the compressed image sagged into the neck. Below that, the whole image flared into a wide bell. The bell was filled with chaotic reflections that we no longer trusted. This was Crevasse 3.4.

  The hot-water drill found a small void below this questionable area. At twenty feet down, the bit dropped two feet through air, and then found solid snow again. We continued drilling solid to forty feet before we pulled out of the hole, puzzle
d.

  “What do you want to do about it?” Russ and Kim asked, manning the drill.

  “Shoot it,” I snarled. We drilled and shot the five-spot pattern.

  When the smoke cleared, we looked down through an irregular chimney, just big enough for a man enter. At its bottom was a tiny black hole. Shaun roped up and lowered himself down the chimney. Crouched at the tiny hole, he looked into the blackness, then he turned to our expectant faces waiting above: “There is an immense cavern here.”

  “Now what do you want to do?” Russ and Kim asked again.

  “More holes. More powder!” I bellowed, finally glimpsing the monster.

  When the air cleared from the second blast, we cautiously looked over the crater’s rim into the biggest, blackest hole we’d ever seen. Powder smoke curled around in its darkness. To a man, we gaped in disbelief. “Jeezus it’s big.”

  “We’ll let that one air out,” I told the mountaineers, business-like. “That’ll do for today.” How could I have sent Stretch over that?

  The next morning, when he returned to surface from the immense cavern, Shaun reported the enlarged access hole lay against the side of a huge room that spanned twenty-five feet. The underside of the bridge sagged deeply into the void, adding another ten feet to the thickness we had drilled. The void ran as far as Shaun could see into the gloom, with no end in sight on both sides. We measured its depth at 110 feet. Crevasse 3.4 deserved a special name, like Baby had a name.

  This one we named Mongo.

  We had a day or so to think about Mongo. That afternoon we decamped for McMurdo. Two new CRREL people had arrived. I wasn’t sure what for, but Mongo would have to wait until we brought them back.

  Monday our numbers briefly swelled by four. The CRREL investigators joined Allan. Jeff Scanniello and his helper came out for the day to locate the next milepost.

  Kim, however, took seriously ill once he got to camp. I raised Jeff, who had already planted the new post and was on his way back to McMurdo, on the VHF radio. “Survey 1, we have an important package that needs to get back to town right away. Can you meet us, and take it in with you?”

  I rushed Kim, and extra fuel for Jeff, across the McMurdo Ice Shelf in the PistenBully. Shaun followed in a snowmobile. Somewhere in the middle, Kim transferred to Jeff’s speedier truck, and Shaun returned to camp. I followed Jeff into town at my own pace and stayed there for the night. On arrival, I dropped by McMurdo General.

  “They’re not going to send me off to Christchurch,” Kim spoke hoarsely, rolling his head sideways on the gurney. “But I’m going to be here for a few days.” He sounded rough and looked worse.

  “I’m glad you are going to stay put.”

  “But I want to go back camping with you all.”

  “I want that, too,” I assured him. “But I’m going to take another operator out tomorrow. Give yourself a couple of weeks. If the doc says okay, I’ll bring you back. You can believe it.”

  Brad Johnson, Kim’s replacement, was an amateur mountaineer, expert blaster, and a fine dozer operator. The handsome young man could help out in nearly every aspect of our work. Meanwhile, the arrival of the new CRREL investigators in camp had come as a surprise. I asked them bluntly that evening, “What are you doing here?”

  They’d assumed I knew. With the bearing of an affronted Spaniard, dark-eyed Jim Lever explained, “We’ve been engaged to come to the Shear Zone to determine crevasse bridge strengths … to gauge safety issues for heavy vehicle crossings.”

  “Aw, Christ! So that’s it,” I laughed. “George Blaisdell said I’d have answers to my questions on that subject by Thanksgiving, but I thought he’d be sending research from the CRREL library. I didn’t realize he was sending out two bodies.” Did we have enough food for them?

  We got over the awkward moment with straight talk. Jim and his partner, Russ Alger, a husky, jovial fellow from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, discussed their needs for field support. I considered how to accommodate them. For my part, I described our progress across the Shear Zone.

  “I’ve no intention of crossing a bridge based on anyone’s stamp,” I responded to their caution. “I intend to find every crevasse that stands in our way, drop its bridge, and fill it. What you can tell me is how deep to drill.”

  Apparently I made no sense. It was a dense point. We’d seen questionable images, but they hadn’t. Nor had they seen our drill.

  “Suppose you tell us something about bridge strength that relates its thickness to its span. We can determine both those dimensions by drilling. Now we come to a questionable area under our road. We drill it to a certain depth, and we drill a line of holes across it. Say we don’t find a void. Your calculations could allow us to walk over that questionable area without actually knowing what it was because its thickness and widths met your strength criteria.”

  They got it conceptually, but they’d have to see it. It was then Jim’s turn to ask the challenging question. “You stated that you crossed Mongo at least one dozen times with a D8, both coming and going. And you stated that a D8 is most likely the heaviest point-load that will ever cross the Shear Zone. That is valuable information. How would you like us to deal with that?”

  I hadn’t considered the politics of embarrassment before. “You tell the truth.”

  We got along fine from then on. Tom worked full time with Jim and Alger, looking out for their safety, and assisting in their technical investigations. They’d work in designated areas well clear of other activity.

  While we filled crevasses and prospected out to 12, Tom and the CRREL engineers exposed a bit of the bridge at Crevasse 6. Using that, they derived thickness-span ratios that could support our ten-thousand-pound PistenBully.

  Emboldened by their findings, I sent Allan and Shaun in the PistenBully to retrace our radar survey past the second milepost, now that we knew exactly where it was. We could see the post at HFS from there. They’d have a visible target and could steer very close to where our road would actually go. Allan’s next printed record showed us for the first time exactly where and how many crevasses we’d have to cross. He also showed us several new questionable areas.

  So we were taking little steps, one at a time, since we started over. HFS was still a long way off. But Allan was now scheduled to redeploy. We’d miss him, but he’d be leaving us far better equipped to fend for ourselves.

  On the afternoon of November 28, Allan and Shaun set off for McMurdo on a pair of snowmobiles. We who remained at the Shear Zone saluted Allan’s departure with a very large blast in which we neatly dropped the bridge over Mongo.

  The next morning, Mac-Weather announced a three-day storm was moving into the area. We went into McMurdo ourselves and found Allan had already caught his flight home.

  As investment in our project’s future, I’d planned to rotate as many mechanics, mountaineers, and equipment operators through the Shear Zone operation as practical. Russ knew that when he sat out this time. But the enforced break did him no favors. He was not comfortable around the bustle of McMurdo.

  Shaun also stayed behind. He’d fly home on family leave and be gone for two weeks.

  The storm that ran us into town passed. On Tuesday, December 3, we returned to camp with mechanic Rick Pietrek. It was his turn. The tall, beefy Wisconsinite had served many years in Antarctica. He brought with him his friendly presence and enthusiasm for our project.

  Morning in camp opened with bright, clear skies. I threw the whole crew, CRREL engineers included, at completing the green flag line.

  Besides guiding us through the crevasse field, the green flags played a dual role as a strain grid. The moving ice shelves would carry our road northward, but we couldn’t predict how fast the road might move, nor how it might warp. Back in Denver I’d planned the strain grid to monitor that movement over time. Periodic surveys at each flag station would show how the road deformed and what it might take to maintain it.

  “Every three hundred feet,” I reminded them. “That’s every hund
red yards. Plant them at least a foot and a half deep. And plant them as ‘doubles’: two green flags together, one banner just below the other. We’re getting so many flags out here now, you can’t tell at a distance which is which. Doubles will stand out.”

  The crew split in two. Both teams carried three-hundred-foot cloth measuring tapes and bundles of green flags on eight-foot bamboo poles. Jim, Alger, and Tom took a tripod and level with a telescopic sight. They covered the span from the second mile post to HFS with the PistenBully. Rick, Brad, and I took binoculars. We used snowmobiles to cover the gap between the first mile post and the second. At day’s end, a line of flags stretched in front of us to our goal … something other than illusory, white plains.

  “We’ve done ourselves a great good,” I congratulated us at dinner. “Flags every three hundred feet to HFS. Now we know exactly where our road is going, because we can see it. Think, for a moment, of all the steps we’ve taken just to get—”

  “Did you say three hundred feet?” Tom interrupted. “We used the meter side of the tape … ours were every hundred meters.”

  The effect on the strain grid measurements would be negligible. But I realized then, profoundly, I had a whole new set of people to work with.

  “Very well,” I said, calmly. “We have green flags every hundred yards from GAW to GAW+2. From GAW+2 to HFS, we have flags every hundred meters.”

  Smiling, I asked Jim and Alger: “You guys ever work for JPL?”

  Following their befuddled silence, Tom volunteered: “Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Lockheed-Martin gave them miles. JPL read it as kilometers. Or vice versa. They missed Mars on account of it.”

  We all laughed.

  By December 10, Jim Lever and Russ Alger had completed their studies. On that day we filled Crevasse 6.1, finally passing the one that sent us back to the beginning on November 19.