Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

“Okay. Matthew, you’re a mountaineer, and you’ve got a lock on crevasses. Think about old, gruff Russell. He was in the Shear Zone when Linda went down. He saw that huge bulldozer disappear with two guys on board, so Russell knows something about crevasses.”

  Matthew’s attention grew.

  “Think about Stretch. Stretch has run that eighty-six thousand pound D8 Cat right up to the very edge of crevasses. Right there in the Shear Zone, last year … He filled them full of snow and drove over them. Stretch knows something about crevasses. And those two guys are in their bunks, not twenty feet away from you.”

  My point began to dawn on Matthew.

  “Now me,” I said. “I have a feel for how huge masses of material behave under stress. And I’ve studied and studied this route. I know something about crevasses. My first choice is to avoid them. Our problem is we’ve got to find the crevasses before they find us. My second choice is to destroy them. Like we did in the Shear Zone. You’re a mountaineer, and a damn good one I understand. You know something about crevasses, too. But you haven’t got a lock on them. See what I’m getting at?”

  Matthew nodded deeply.

  “We all think about crevasses all the time,” I said. “And you can be sure every one of us is scared to death of them. That’s why I’m up late at night and can’t sleep. I’m looking ahead to the Kelly Trend, wondering what crevasses may be lurking there tomorrow.”

  Matthew sat back in his chair. I never moved my legs, or changed my slouching posture. I wanted to relax, and I was doing a fine job of it.

  “I’ve enjoyed our conversation, John,” Matthew said before retiring to our bunkroom.

  “I have, too, Matthew. I’m glad you’re with us,” I complimented him. “And if Jeff Schwartz were here, he’d have something to tell us about anti-Semitism and the crevasse.”

  Matthew went to bed, laughing. An hour later, so did I.

  Back in the “real” world, Raymond Lilley, an Associated Press writer from Wellington, New Zealand, reached me by e-mail while I was still in McMurdo. We’d just concluded the second year’s slog across the Ross Ice Shelf, and I would be heading home soon to the real “real” world. The contractor’s manager of public communications referred Lilley to me.

  Lilley’s beat included the USAP’s doings, particularly those emanating from Ross Island. New Zealand claimed the island as its territorial dependency. The first 640 miles of our route to the base of the Leverett Glacier started at Ross Island and ran right across New Zealand’s claimed sector. The traverse project was big news.

  Lilley’s interest was not one of territorial encroachment. The Antarctic Treaty Nations set aside all such issues when they agreed how nations should get along on the continent. Instead, the issue of public interest for Lilley ran toward the boldness of our undertaking, the environmental consequences of ongoing traverse operations, and the historical nature of the project. New Zealanders were particularly fascinated by the project since their man, Sir Edmund Hillary, had been the first to drive a tractor to South Pole. Fifty years later, here come Americans talking tractors in terms suggesting traffic.

  Lilley asked good questions, referring to that which we were building as “road.” Answering him challenged my lexicon as I sought to avoid using that word. Excerpts from the e-mail interview ran:

  Lilley: What was the toughest part of the road-forming?

  Wright: It is all work, and none of it easy. Last year it took us 3 months to go 3 miles across a crevasse field. The tough part of that was the tension of working in a place full of dangerous, hidden crevasses. This year we went out to 425 miles across the snows of the Ross Ice Shelf. That was breaking trail … a long, slow slog in soft snow. The toughest part of that was always urging for more distance and having our hopes thwarted by the soft snows.

  Lilley: Will that work stay in place, particularly through the shear zone?

  Wright: Yes. I need to qualify that. The improved surface—marked by bamboo poles with flags—will remain compacted and harder as a result of our work. It will stay in the same place relative to the flags. But “in place?” No … the Ice Shelf on whose surface it is built is dynamic … in slow, fluid motion. So, the improved surface we built moves with the flow of the Ice Shelf. We have measured 6.5 feet per day in places. But as the ice moves, it takes the flags with it, and so we know where the improved surface is … next to the flags. “Particularly through the Shear Zone?” Our passage through the Shear Zone—made last year—remained intact and fit for passage this year. The passage was about 1,000 feet farther north than when we left it last year (due to Ice Shelf movement), and about 100 feet longer (the ice had stretched). We located 5 new crevasses on our crossing. These were juvenile features, not big enough to require mitigation … yet. We keep our eye on these, as well as the other 32 we dealt with last year.

  Lilley: What is the length of the ice road now, after two years driving/forming it?

  Wright: 425 miles.

  Lilley: Do you have a guesstimate of the time pole trips will take once the road is through?

  Wright: Early feasibility projections performed by engineers at CRREL (US Army Corps of Engineers—Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratories) in 1999–2000 estimated 20 days outbound and loaded, and ten days return deadheading—a 30-day round trip. Any update on that estimate should await the actual completion of the passage.

  Lilley: How different are the tractors you use from the Fordson tractor Sir Ed Hillary and the expedition used to reach the pole?

  Wright: I thought Sir Ed Hillary drove a Massey Ferguson? Anyhow … “how different are they?” You have seen Hillary’s. Pretty small. Not meant for cargo delivery … that wasn’t his purpose. I believe he was hauling his own expedition supplies and air dropping supplies as well. Not unlike a “science traverse” today. Conversely, we’re aiming to haul not just stuff we need, but a whole lot more stuff that is needed at South Pole. So we have heavier tractors, heavier loads, more horsepower, the advantage of modern engine and tractor technology and far more years’ experience in the Antarctic environment than did pioneer Hillary. My hat’s off to him.

  Lilley: Do you think the pole road an attainable goal? (What I mean by this is whether, given such obstacles as the shear zone, bad weather, etc., it can become a functioning road in your estimate?)

  Wright: Yes.

  Lilley: Is it possible/likely the road could be used outside the strict summer season?

  Wright: Doubtful. The limiter would be the unavailability of emergency support in the winter months.

  Lilley: Does the “road” have a working name?

  Wright: No.

  Lilley wrote an eight hundred word piece that incorporated our interview, adding text and quotes from other sources concerned with environmental impacts. Among the more interesting speculations were those for environmental impacts of incidental tourists who might want to use the road. Lilley’s article went out on the AP wire under the title “Ice Highway being cut to Earth’s Last Frontier.” Other news media picked up the story, and the headline freely changed as local editors adapted it to local interests. An Arizona Republic article, printed in Phoenix, called it “Interstate 10 Below.” A friend at home told me radio announcer Paul Harvey decried the idea as a dumb waste of U.S. taxpayers’ money.

  After Lilley’s article came out, NSF amended its public communications policy. Henceforth, all public statements about our project would be cleared through Peter West of the NSF’s Office of Legal and Public Affairs. West addressed a large convention room filled with Annual Planning Conference attendees. He explained that of all media inquiries he fielded for NSF at-large that year, over 60 percent of them focused on the South Pole Traverse project.

  Meanwhile, I never called it a road. Not to Lilley anyway. Remote Over-snow Antarctic Dragway worked. R.O.A.D. But that depended on what the meaning of the word road was.

  At some point politics’ swamps and jargon’s crevasses would stop progress altogether. We needed to get back to pione
ering the real thing.

  9 Farthest South—Year Three

  “Burma-Shave alert!”

  Operators in six tractors motored south across the snow-covered infinity toward a stark blue-on-white horizon. Each turned up their radio volume and waited. Green flags on bamboo poles ticked by every quarter mile. One by one, each marker harkened back to days when some of us delighted in finding verse by the side of the road.

  The radios squawked again: “Roberts climbs … In lofty places … Has close shaves … On Everest’s faces …” Then a pause: “BURMA-SHAVE!”

  “Score!” another radio sang out.

  “Maybe a seven.”

  “Six.”

  “Nah, that’s an eight or nine. Good to the last strop!”

  That so many of us appreciated Burma-Shave jingles betrayed our average age.

  The going was much better for us this third year across the Ross Ice Shelf. This year we needed distance, and we were getting it. We cruised over a well-packed trail. Only six inches of new snow covered it in a year. Get off the trail, and we were back in the swamp. But staying on it, we turned in record fifty-mile days. Not once did we shuttle a load. We were happier this year. It showed in our banter. Last year we hailed one another by a tractor’s fleet number. This year we were Fritzy, Elephant Man, Quadzilla.

  Fritzy was mine this year. It was the dual-track yellow tractor with the rear mounted knuckle-boom crane. Fassi, an Italian company, made the crane. Russ Magsig could never quite remember Fassi. But Fritzy stuck well enough with him. That worked for the rest of us, too.

  Russ ran the Elephant Man, the modified dual-track yellow tractor with the crew cab mounted above the engine that I’d run last year. Elephant Man was ugly, but it took its name because it pitched and rolled like a howdah on an Indian elephant’s back.

  Brad Johnson took Quadzilla, the red, articulated four-track Case. Our strongest puller, other than the bulldozer, Quadzilla mimicked the mighty monster’s name.

  Stretch’s D8R bulldozer went by Mary Lou. All the historic D8s at McMurdo took the names of cherished women: Linda, Rebecca, Mary Ann, Pamela. Ours held to that tradition, taking the name of Judy Goldsberry’s twin sister.

  Judy ran a tractor we borrowed from the McMurdo fleet. We never named #283.

  We were still two days away from our farthest south at RIS-1, but we’d arrive a day ahead of schedule. We’d sleep in and play for a day, waiting for the small Twin Otter to land beside us. When it came, we’d switch out Mike Roberts and Russ Alger. They’d been good comrades.

  A few days before, we crowded into our mobile galley waiting out a snow storm. Mike Roberts gave us an engaging lecture on climbing Everest. The lanky mountaineer had been to Everest’s top more than once. With his lecture, he took us all there. His stature among his peers was world-class. His bearing as a human being brought out the best in all of us.

  We’d lose a lot of laughs when Alger boarded the plane, too. Alger installed instruments on our sleds to monitor their response to terrain. One morning he fiddled with pitch-and-roll sensors on the living module, delaying our morning’s launch. Russ Magsig quipped, “We have just enough technology to stop progress all together!” Alger giggled. He never spoke a cross word, or lost his sense of humor.

  Outside Fritzy’s elegantly curved, tinted window glass the cold lands and green flags rambled by. I relished our high spirits, but I could not recall starting another Ice season already exhausted. I had tried the meaning of “full support for the development of the South Pole Traverse.”

  Traverse know-how eluded the United States Antarctic Program. It had developed the finest polar airlift capacity of any nation, but it had abandoned long-haul surface traversing decades ago.

  Existing technology didn’t work on the virgin snows of the Ross Ice Shelf. We’d proved we couldn’t pull all our loads with four tractors last year. We needed a fifth. That tractor sat in McMurdo, scheduled to be dismantled and flown to Pole in pieces on three LC-130 flights. We could drive it intact to Pole, if we could get it. Simple.

  Instead, NSF ordered a study of matrixed scenarios: the use of a fifth tractor, on one hand, weighed against fuel delivered by air to four tractors in the deep field on the other hand. My study concluded only the fifth tractor eliminated shuttling and refueling delays. Two days before its release, Erick Chiang and the accountant declared: “There will be no fifth tractor for the South Pole Traverse.”

  George Blaisdell had arranged a CRREL study demonstrating the complete traverse could be managed with only four tractors. But those engineers’ sharp-pencils admitted no margin. They had not broken trail across the swamp.

  One slim possibility remained: use of another McMurdo fleet tractor on the trail, while McMurdo used South Pole’s tractor until time to fly it to Pole. In late September, days before we deployed to the Ice, I called Dave Bresnahan.

  “Dave, we have a nonsense situation here. We have won a fifth McMurdo tractor. And we have a fifth tractor operator. Judy has completed her physical qualification and all other paperwork. She’s scheduled to depart North Dakota to join us on traverse. Her ticketing deadline is two days from now. Human resources here will not allow the travel department to ticket Judy because they’re waiting for official hiring approval from the accountant in your office. Can you get me some word from NSF—like now—so we can get Judy to the Ice?”

  Judy Goldsberry, a ranch woman from Makoti, North Dakota, wanted to “go hell-ing around the continent” with us. When she gave up ranching in Makoti, she worked as an equipment operator on a pipeline crew. Then she moved into town and taught physical education in the public schools. These days, during the northern summers, she helped run a horse packing business on the Maah Daah Hey Trail in the Roosevelt National Park. During the southern summers, Judy worked on the Ice. The last couple of years she’d been the heavy equipment foreman at Williams Field. She’d often seen us off with a friendly word at the city limits as we ran back and forth to the Shear Zone, working our way across crevasses.

  I met Judy on the road to Williams Field skiway my first year in 1993 when I’d stuck the blaster’s truck in soft snow. Judy then patrolled the road with packing and grooming equipment, and she stopped to pull me out. Being new to the Ice, I braced for the hard time McMurdo hands usually gave a newcomer. The dark-haired, lean woman got out of her tractor and showed me kindness instead. After pulling me out of my wallow, she explained how the flag lines on the Willy road worked.

  I remarked on Judy’s instinct to kindness years later, and thanked her for it.

  She smiled back, explaining, “Oh, I just loved that job! People are nice to you when you’re helping them get unstuck.” Judy was a good hand. And tough.

  This year, Judy flew down to McMurdo on the same plane with me. It was early October. Right behind us came U.S. Air Force C-17s bearing our improved sled parts. Our hopes for success turned on these parts and the fifth tractor.

  Two days away now from the farthest south of our second year at RIS-1, lumbering toward that blue-on-white horizon, recollections of time wasted invaded my cab. Outside, on our compacted snow road, everything—everything—we did to improve our mobility after our disappointing second year worked. But beyond that wooden post at RIS-1 lay virgin snow and no trail. Somewhere ahead lurked a crevasse field we didn’t know much about.

  “Alger!” I radioed the radar team ranging in front of the heavy fleet.

  “Go ahead, Fritzy,” Alger drawled with accents of Michigan.

  “When you guys get to our campsite at the end of the day, sweep a broad circle around the camp flag, a couple hundred foot radius. We’re going to do that every day from now on. We’ll call that our camp circle. If you don’t find any crevasses on that circle, then we’ll pull into it and make camp. Do you understand?”

  “You betcha, Fritzy.”

  Route planning consumed me in the off-season. The land could kill us. Historical works from the earliest explorers, reports from 1950s science expeditions, opinion
s from modern glaciologists, maps both modern and old, and all the latest satellite information I could get my hands on went into route planning. Two-week excursions into matrixed analyses that nobody read wasted time that would’ve been far better spent making sure my crew survived.

  Terrain assessments often pointed to regions of crevasse probability rather than certainty. I’d briefed the crew on suspected crevasses ahead. But with our mixed backgrounds, probability meant different things. The ultimate crevasse hazard, however, meant the same to each of us. Alger’s PistenBully tracks would say, “stay inside this circle,” a safe perimeter everybody could grasp at a glance.

  “John, I could smell the fear on you guys this morning when you brought up the snow swamp. Last year must have been just horrible.” Judy caught me outside, attending to Fritzy on the morning of November 30. We were breaking camp at RIS-1, starting our tractors and rigging for travel.

  “It was. You understand we’re going onto virgin snow? We travel close from now on. Watch that train in front of you. If a sled’s breaking, we need to catch it before the whole thing collapses.”

  “I got that loud and clear,” Judy acknowledged, moving off to #283.

  We’d arrived at RIS-1 four days earlier, fully one month ahead of our arrival the year before. Ahead, ice-covered peaks of the Transantarctic Range broke up our formerly smooth horizon. While we waited for the Twin Otter, we spent a breezy day under clear blue skies tending to camp chores and playing.

  Brad, Mike, and Stretch flew a colorful, two-handed parasail kite my wife and kids had given us. Brad, flying the kite, stepped onto one of our slick recovery skis. Soon that kite pulled three grown, giggling men, one after the other, around the camp circle, riding the three-foot-by-ten-foot plastic sheet like a surfboard.

  John Penney launched his remote-controlled model airplane and flew it overhead. He’d attached a lightweight digital camera under its wing. From that day on, when weather allowed, we enjoyed seeing oblique aerial photos of our camp on his laptop.