Lever and Alger rigged a V-shaped yoke of two long, heavy-duty towing straps. We hitched the four-sled train at the vertex, and two tractors, one each at the wide ends of the V. Placing a load-sensing device at the vertex, they directly measured the towing resistance of the sled load. The tractors took off, separating enough to draw the sled train through the virgin snow between them. The measurements indicated the towing resistance was 50 percent, exactly half the resistance of the sled train when towed in the tractor tracks.
“Jeez, I knew it was easier, Jim. But I didn’t know it was that easier!” I exclaimed. That was exactly the kind of information we needed.
“Now try this: as you can see, we can’t pull everything we’ve got down the trail. That’s why we’re shuttling. When our engine-load monitors in the cab show 80 percent to 95 percent, we get high traction slip and we’re going down. At our slow speeds, we have no reserve power to blast through the bog. When our engine loads run 65 percent to 70 percent, we rarely get stuck, and we have plenty reserve.”
Through a complex analysis, the CRREL engineers elucidated the mechanisms of our immobility. They produced a new load planning tool that resulted in zero “immobilizations.” The new tool targeted 65 percent available draw bar pull on virgin snow.
We now spent half of our return time to McMurdo conducting CRREL’s expedient tests. We were exhausted, but the CRREL boys were courteous enough to hold their freshness in check while we limped back. Once, they witnessed us repair a broken sled. John Penney unhitched Fritzy and backed it into position next to the sled. Stretch grabbed the ladder and secured the heavy chain to the top of the container. Russ fetched the parts, James grabbed the hand tools, and I ran Fritzy’s crane. No one said a word. From damage detection to back on the road, the whole process took only thirty minutes.
Lever apologized, “We should never have sent you out at 90 percent draw bar.”
“Jim, it was a lot of things. Not just draw bar,” I allowed. “We could always drop sleds. Mainly it’s this three year rush … just not enough time to be thoughtful. You pay for that one way or another. And you have got to be that much more vigilant for each other’s safety. Three years is a dangerous pace.”
On January 17 the traverse arrived back at the Shear Zone camp. We’d collected all our sidetracked sleds and trailers along the way. Over the next five days, we continued mobility testing in the camp while some shuttled partial loads into Williams Field. We were still operating on the “night” shift.
On January 22 we collected the remaining sleds at the Shear Zone camp and went in together.
“Mac-Ops, Mac-Ops. South Pole Traverse,” I radioed.
“Go ahead, South Pole Traverse. This is Mac-Ops.”
“Mac-Ops, South Pole Traverse has arrived back at McMurdo with all souls, tractors, and sleds.”
After sixty-six days in the field, we arrived back in McMurdo deeply fatigued. We’d take two days off, rest up, and then demobilize and winterize the fleet.
An accounting for our less-than-hoped-for performance had been ordered, and I prepared for the captain’s mast. The matter was postponed several times and later deferred all together. It’d resurface when I sought funding for next year.
This year we advanced the face of the trail 425 miles from McMurdo. We returned with three thousand gallons of fuel. Counting shuttling, we covered 1,485 miles all together. That is equivalent to the distance from McMurdo to South Pole, and half way back, with enough fuel to complete the round trip.
It was all there. But we could not get all of it going south at the same time.
On February 7, 2004, I boarded an LC-130 in McMurdo bound for Pole. At Pole, I met George Blaisdell. George now worked full time with NSF and was in a position to arrange an aerial reconnaissance. Together we boarded another LC-130 and flew over the entire proposed route from Pole back to McMurdo. Once airborne, we took observer positions in the cockpit.
We flew over a vast region of patterned snow on the Polar Plateau: sastrugi, elongated ridge-like features carved in the surface by wind and blowing snow. Sastrugi are generally hard, sharp angled, and make for rough travel by foot, ski, or tractor. We’d seen mild sastrugi down on the Ross Ice Shelf, at most a foot high, but ski-adventurers told of monstrous sastrugi on the Plateau. From the cockpit three thousand feet above them, I thought I saw some monsters.
Farther along the Plateau, as we neared the headwall of the Leverett Glacier, a field of open crevasses bore directly off the port side of the airplane.
“How far would you estimate those crevasses are?” I asked the pilot, figuring him a better judge of distance from his airplane than me.
“About seven miles.”
“Copy seven. Would you capture our present position by GPS, please sir?” I asked the navigator.
The navigator read off our coordinates. Later in McMurdo I combined those two pieces of information and plotted the crevasse field on our route map. The plot fell exactly on a proposed turning point. That was a point to avoid, not a place to go.
Circling the headwall of the Leverett Glacier and then descending to one thousand feet above surface, we identified many crevasses in the headwall cirque that I’d seen earlier in RADARSAT imagery available from the Canadian Space Agency. There were no unpleasant surprises here, just lots of unpleasant crevasses. Our planned route up the headwall still looked like the best one.
Swooping down the Leverett, again I saw no surprises: glazed, icy, windblown surfaces, but no blue ice fields that’d give us new kinds of traction problems. Our predecessors in the mid-nineties who’d targeted the Leverett, had selected well.
Toward the bottom of the glacier a low cloudbank obscured the Leverett’s confluence with the Ross Ice Shelf. The cloudbank forced us to climb. From our new height we saw the cloudbank nestled along a broad sweep of the Transantarctic Mountain fronts. It extended well out over the Ross Ice Shelf, but it broke up in the area of RIS-1, our farthest point south.
There were our tracks, where we’d turned around, and where we’d gathered up for camps, all this against the expanse of the snow swamp. We’d taken that ground and held it. And now I was proud of us.
But the cloudbank … My official report of the Airborne LC-130 Reconnaissance reads:
The same cloudbank that thwarted effective visual reconnaissance of the lower Leverett region also obscured the Transantarctic Mountain front and the proposed traverse route from L00 to RIS-5 through RIS-2. There is nothing to add to route-planning knowledge for that segment from this reconnaissance flight.
Underneath that cloudbank hid ground that nearly stopped the whole project. It was the ground we later named “The Shoals of Intractable Funding.”
8 That Word: Ruminations on the Meaning of Road and the Influence of Terrain
The word came down in a phone call during the northern summer a year earlier following our first season’s success in crossing the Shear Zone. Its impact carried over through the entire project, and waxed especially acute the year of our disappointing advance across the Ross Ice Shelf. The word denied the very nature of our project.
I had been seated at my manager’s cubicle in the Denver office and reached for the handset, glancing first at the “Caller ID.”
“John Wright speaking. That you, George?”
My phone offered a choice of several ringtones. I’d selected a woman’s voice that mechanically but pleasantly asked, “Are you there? Are you there?” I usually caught myself at the last second, amused, before answering, “Yes, I am here.” Thus, most of my phone conversations began with a smile on my end.
“Good morning,” came the familiar and cheerful voice of George Blaisdell in Washington, D.C.
After an exchange of pleasantries, George came to the point, “John, we need you, along with all of us, to refrain from using the word ‘road’ in connection with the South Pole Traverse Project.”
A telltale tik-tik-tik-ing of a computer keyboard sounded in the background of my earpiece. George was multitask
ing. I was bewildered.
“What’s up? We built a road across the Shear Zone, and we’re going to build a road to the South Pole.”
The National Science Foundation was crafting the environmental documentation for future traverses. The word had New Zealand and Australian environmental coalitions spun up about a highway cutting across the continent. “Road” conjured images of traffic. It misdirected attention from the numbers of LC-130 turboprop flights we might save. Attention that would be better focused on the fuel savings and emissions reductions for cargo delivered by a surface traverse.
Yet a photo of our D8R Caterpillar loading onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 in New Zealand appeared in the Christchurch newspaper last year. Its caption proclaimed: “THE ROAD TO THE POLE!” I thought that language came from the NSF. I thought it expressed high-level, programmatic brio.
“George, the French have been running a traverse for years. The Russians run from Mirny to Vostok. The Australians, the Germans, and for all I know the Japanese and the Chinese programs all run traverses. Is this opposition directed at their programs, too?”
“No … it’s pretty much directed at us. We’re the biggest kid on the block, and people like taking shots at the United States.”
George was an engineer with a specialty in snow and ice pavements. We were making a road, a road made of snow. And we were going to traverse it with tractors and sleds, just like those other programs did. I couldn’t imagine someone of George’s background not calling a road “a road.” Now he pressed me in the unique way a program officer at NSF could lean on a contract worker.
“I need your cooperation to not use the word ‘road.’”
“What word shall we use in place of ‘road’?” I chortled, an edge to my voice.
“We don’t have one for that. ‘Traverse’ works. ‘Route.’ ‘Trail.’ All I can say is: In this office we will not use that word in connection with the project.”
“George, you’re a messenger here, right?”
“That’s right,” he allowed, gratefully.
I gripped the phone, feeling my jaw tense. “Message delivered. This is big. I need to think about what it means. Talk later?”
“Any time,” George agreed.
I hung up and, leaning way back in my chair, stared at the office ceiling. No more frontier attitude … don’t want any cowboys … don’t call it a road … What does it mean?
An image of another guy in the executive branch came to mind. He looked me right in the eyes through the television screen. “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is,’ is.” Nobody wanted duplicity associated with our project.
I shook my head, rising from my ergonomic chair to take a stroll outside. I might find fresh air, and clarity.
The day was pretty and fresh. The few clouds brought soothing, long views of the Front Range Mountains to the west. My thoughts wandered as I strolled through the parking lot. Imagine grabbing the radio in the middle of the Ross Ice Shelf: “Stretch, I must insist you not use that word.”
We all built roads. And that’s what we called them. Don’t get off the road. Got to work on the road. We didn’t run helter skelter over the sea ice on those Marble Point traverses. We built and groomed a road from the snow resting on top of the sea ice. When the snow road set up, curing into a hardened surface, we flew across it. Deadheading back we covered the sixty miles in three and a half hours. Because we had a road.
I could tell the crew, “NSF does not want us to call it a road, this thing we’re building to run our tractors on.” We’d still call it a road. And I’d suffer their snickers for a short while during the season.
But in presentations to folks in the contractor’s office, to folks at NSF, and at times to journalists, I had to be on my toes because “road” was instinctive. It reached far back into collective human memory. The road to perdition. The swan’s road. Road as “way.” Don’t go down that road. Take the high road. Road map. Asphalt road. Macadam road. Dirt road. Snow road.
What are the consequences of not calling a road a road?
George Orwell described “Newspeak” in his classic future fiction 1984. Newspeak deliberately limited vocabulary’s range for the masses. In that future world Newspeak eliminated nuance and shades of meaning from interpersonal discourse. Argument, opposition, debate, all vanished. That was Big Brother’s object.
There were no Big Brothers here. There were just people like George, Dave, me, Russ … we wanted this traverse to become reality. Who were we fooling?
If we weren’t building a road after all, then we were just driving a tractor over a map. On paper we’d arrive at South Pole in no time. But we had to break trail first, and we had to build a road-in-fact to make that trail stronger and smoother. Across the street, orange State of Colorado dump trucks were busy maintaining the road.
Build. Maintain.
If we took away “road” from the language of our project, then we ignored the fundamental nature of the project. And we confronted unreal expectations for it.
Unreal expectations for time and money … those are the consequences of not calling a road a road.
I told Dave this was not a three-year project.
Our road was made of snow.
Most animals in groups will not wander aimlessly across a snowfield, breaking their own trail. Breaking trail is hard work. With a herd of caribou migrating across the snow-covered coastal plain of northern Alaska, for example, one caribou in front works his way through knee-high snow. Each following caribou beats the trail down more and more. The trailbreaker’s job rotates once in a while, but the herd moves forward in a long thin wedge, compacting the snow, making the path stronger. By its own traffic the herd makes a road.
The United States Antarctic Program builds fine snow roads. With vigorous effort, we’ve even built snow pavements that support a loaded C-17 cargo jet on wheels. There’s not much to it in concept: compact the snow. Get on top, and stay on top. Drag and groom the surface. Smooth it and keep drift snow down. The hard part is breaking trail in the first place.
It was hard, but even in the last year of our project my boss’s boss stunned me when he casually dismissed our efforts, reducing them to: “It’s just a matter of time and distance.”
“Well,” I countered dryly, nonplussed, “there is the small matter of terrain.”
We had CRREL mobility engineers working with us throughout the project, combining their ideas with ours, to derive mechanical mobility solutions. But our mountaineers often gave our best insights into the nature of the terrain that impeded our mobility. Their contributions were important to us. Because of them, I can now speak somewhat authoritatively about it.
For example, near surface, the snow is porous. Air transpires through the mass. When the local weather is stable over a long time, individual snowflakes re-form into angular grains, like sugar crystals. The grains do not immediately bond with their neighbors but remain a loose aggregate of tiny beads. Snow scientists have technical names for this snow form. When we found ourselves in vast areas of the stuff, we called it a “swamp.”
Mountaineer “Scooter” Metcalf had joined us in the second field season when we were stuck in the Ross Ice Shelf swamp. We didn’t understand it as a swamp at that time. All we knew was our tractors sank in it, our sleds broke in it, and for us to make any headway across it we had to split our trains and shuttle. When Scooter stepped off the Twin Otter, he stepped into a group of frustrated stiffs wooden-headedly slogging south. His voice carried a high-pitched edge, mimicking a wise-cracking comic, and we adjusted to our new seventh man.
Scooter spent his first day on the trail riding with me in the Elephant Man.
“They tell me in McMurdo you’re a pretty serious guy … a no-nonsense boss,” Scooter opened the conversation while I was busy.
I’d just started the Elephant Man rolling, pleased we hadn’t wallowed into the snow right away. His question hung a bit longer before I looked across the cab. “Well, that’s McMurdo.”
“They told me you’re hard to get along with,” Scooter said, staying on point.
“Then that depends on who they are.”
Many people would say that. I preferred keeping an amused distance there. But this was not McMurdo. I needed to rope in Scooter right away.
“I’m glad you’re here, Scooter. Understand, though, you have walked into a scene where we are finding and solving problems daily. Some we can solve now. Some we can’t solve this year. There’s not much you can do about that. But I’ve got some problems you can help with.”
“Problem solvers, eh?” Scooter interjected, gazing through the windshield past the colorful tractors against the featureless white ahead.
“That’s right.” I looked across the cab at him until he looked back at me. “Do you know anything about us?”
“Not really. This is my first time on the Ice. You guys are all Ice veterans. I’ve heard some names, and what some people say about them.”
“Like I’m hard to get along with?” I looked ahead again.
“Yeah. Like that. And that you never smile,” Scooter cracked back.
“That’s my face, Scooter.” I sighed. Elephant Man was still on top of the snow. “We have two superb mechanics. Russ Magsig has been coming down to the Ice since Christ was a corporal. He’s got phenomenal experience down here, and we all learn from him. Russ will rarely sit down and talk with you, though. Pretty much a hermit. John Penney served several years at Pole as chief mechanic. I worked with him there. John is articulate, keenly intelligent, and you should credit him with far more ‘stuff’ than you might if you thought him ‘just a mechanic.’ You’ll be working with John Penney. He’s captain of the flagging crew, and he’s a natural teacher. You’ll wind up rotating through different jobs on his crew.”
“That’s the radar crew in the PistenBully?”
“Right.”
Norbert ran the radar on that crew. He came out, like Scooter, to a group that was beat up already. They’d have that in common. Norbert would teach Scooter how to run the radar.
Blazing Ice Page 14