Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  “Brad, are you ready?”

  “Red Rider’s ready.”

  Four.

  “Elephant … Judy. You ready?” Judy and Brad would run in front of me today.

  “Elephant’s ready.”

  “Stretch?” Stretch was behind me.

  “R-ready.”

  “Russ? How’s the caboose?” Russ ran behind Stretch.

  “Quadzilla’s ready.” Six and seven, and I make eight.

  “Okay, Greg. Take off.”

  The clang of drawbars clapping steel hitches rippled through the fleet as we pulled into formation, one tractor at a time. The PistenBully swung in front, towing two snowmobiles. John V., bundled up, rode one of them with fifty flags at the ready. Brad rolled out next. Behind him one, two, three, and finally four sleds started sliding forward. Then Judy and the Elephant Man: one, two sleds. Then me in Fritzy. I felt my train lurch: one, two, three sleds.

  A few seconds passed. Stretch radioed, “I’m rolling.”

  Finally Russ: “Quadzilla’s rolling.”

  The Ross Ice Shelf is for crossing, and this morning our sails unfurled. Our best daily distance made good for the loaded, outbound traverse last year logged 50½ miles. This year, once we passed the dorniks and sailed past SOUTH, we made fifty-five. The next day we made sixty. And the day after that we made seventy. The paper traverse to Pole worked if we averaged only fifty miles a day.

  Our sixty-mile day might have been better, but for an unusual interruption. I told the crew that morning, “Expect a Twin Otter sometime today. If we’re moving, close up ranks and stop in line on the trail. He’ll land beside us. We won’t make camp.”

  New digital data had come into McMurdo a couple days before. Our Iridium link didn’t have the capacity to receive it in the field. Dave copied it to disc and tried to chopper it out to us, but McMurdo weather had grounded him. We’d since passed out of helicopter range. Today Dave was going to try it with a Twin Otter.

  “What is it?” Brad asked.

  “I expect it will be a map of some sort.”

  A map of the breach through The Shoals of Intractable Funding, I hoped. The measurements at our monument posts last year predicted the ice moved fast in that region. Our flag line could’ve drifted toward some shoal we didn’t know about. The breach might not be open this year, and I didn’t want to spend another month looking for a new one.

  “It comes from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.” That sounded impressive. “They call themselves NGA, and they’re wrapped up some way with the National Reconnaissance Office. They were looking at the Shoals last month. It’s spook stuff, and I don’t understand all I know about it.”

  Eyebrows raised around the galley. We had an event coming.

  My desire for a reliable map of hidden crevasses found expression before I’d ever seen the Shear Zone. And though we’d tried airborne infrared and airborne radar in the field that first year, we had little success making that map.

  After the year of our miserable slog across the Ross Ice Shelf, I attended a USAP Planning Conference in Syracuse. This was near the New York Air National Guard’s base at Schenectady. As always, the Guard was well represented. And they were friends of the traverse. They saw the traverse not replacing air missions to Pole but offering them mission options to different locations around the continent.

  Colonel Dunbar was one of those friends. He caught me at the snack table, in the hotel hallway between conference sessions. He was probably a little bit older than me, but like all the clean-shaven guardsmen, he had a boyish face. Wherever I ran into him, whether on the Ice, at the contractor’s office, or at these conferences, he was upbeat about the Guard’s mission.

  “There’re some people here I want to introduce you to. They’re with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and I think they’ve got something you can use. They want to meet you.”

  “The National what?”

  “The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. They run the satellites that look down on you and read what brand of cigarettes you’re smoking.”

  “Well, I don’t smoke. Can they read that?” I laughed. Colonel Dunbar laughed, too. I licked the pastry remains off my fingertips, grabbed a napkin to finish the job, and wondered how reading cigarette labels in Antarctica from an orbiting satellite was going to help the traverse.

  Colonel Dunbar led me to an unused room off the hallway. Turning through the door, he beckoned to a couple other men standing among others mingling in the hall.

  “John, this is Colonel Bright,” he said, indicating the one who wore an air force uniform, another boyish looking man. Then, gesturing to the other gentleman dressed in business-like civilian clothes, he said, “And this is Pete Ofstedal with the NGA.”

  Pete wore glasses and was balding. He was a fit man who displayed perfect posture.

  “Howdy, fellas,” I greeted them, shaking hands.

  “Colonel Bright and Pete Ofstedal are working on analyzing deep field landing sites in Antarctica. You might be facing some of the same problems they’re looking at.”

  I could imagine their concerns with deep field landings. A picture at my desk showed one of their LC-130s with its ski slumped in a crevasse. That happened two years ago. I picked it up from there: “You want to know where the hidden crevasses are? And something about the surface roughness of a prospective landing site?”

  Pete nodded, “Precisely.”

  “And you’re using satellites to look down and see what you can see?”

  “They are among our ‘National Assets,’” Pete confirmed, using an oblique reference to “secret satellites.”

  “Colonel Dunbar here says you can read the label off a cigarette pack at one hundred miles. Can you see through snow and find a hidden crevasse?”

  “That’s what we’d like to know. We have a multispectral capability.”

  Meaning not just the visible spectrum that reads cigarette labels, I thought. “Are you talking infrared?”

  “That’s classified,” Pete said.

  Nobody had ever said that to me seriously before. Always it came in the form of a joke, followed by “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  “Could you could produce a flat map that showed hidden crevasses?”

  “That’s exactly what we’d like to do,” he said.

  “Me, too. How can we help each other?”

  Other folks peeked into the room, and, seeing the four of us quietly talking, they ducked back out. Movements in the hallway suggested another conference session was getting started. The four of us, however, were content to stay where we were.

  “I understand you know where some hidden crevasses are?” Pete asked. He’d seen my presentation earlier. It included pictures of the Shear Zone.

  “And you want to do some ground-truthing?” I asked. My eyes narrowed, looking sideways at Pete.

  “That would be ideal.”

  “How close can you get? If you can read a cigarette label, you are talking pretty close?”

  “How close we can get, as you say, is also classified. But we can produce geo-referenced imagery, and each pixel has a tag.”

  Geo-referenced meant latitude and longitude fixes. The question was: how big were their pixels? I already had access to twenty-five-meter pixel imagery on RADARSAT. They were too large to show all but the biggest crevasses.

  “I’d like to know something about your wavelengths and your resolutions.”

  “You need a security clearance for that. Do you have one?”

  “No, but I’ll get one. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I will,” I told him. “But how about an image itself?”

  I told them about a fellow at NSF who once sent me a “derived” image of ground we crossed on the way to the Shear Zone. Colonels Dunbar and Bright were both familiar with that ground. It was the White Out Landing Area downwind from Williams Field. The derived image showed lines and color-shaded areas, but the fellow who gave it to me couldn’t, or wouldn’t, id
entify its classified sources. The image was of no use since I didn’t know what the symbols meant.

  “We could probably work around that,” Pete encouraged me.

  “Great. So, I need to give you something you can use.”

  Our road across the Shear Zone crossed a lot of crevasses. We blew up their bridges and filled them. All our work was now covered under new snow, but I’d marked every crevasse with signposts and flags. Because the markers, and in fact the whole road, moved, Jeff Scanniello surveyed the markers annually. He used highly accurate, differential GPS.

  “The crossing is three miles long. Suppose I gave you the coordinates of the endpoints of that line, and simply told you ‘between these two endpoints are many crevasses,’ but I didn’t tell you where they were. Could you then take that information and have a look at the ground along the road?”

  “Yes,” Pete said. “That is exactly the kind of information we can work with. And you would be able to tell us afterwards how our work compares to what you know?”

  “Certainly. But I’d want to see your product, not just send you the answer sheet.”

  “With a secret level clearance you can do that,” Pete explained.

  I was quite satisfied with the way our conversation was going. Pete and the two colonels were, too.

  “What does all this stuff cost, by the way? I don’t manage a huge budget.”

  Pete answered, full of gravity, “We do not charge for the use of our National Assets. The National Science Foundation has no cost exposure in what we are discussing today. I’m due to make a presentation about it tomorrow. I hope you’ll attend?” Looking squarely into each other’s eyes, we shook hands in agreement. The four of us then ambled down the hallway to rejoin the conference underway in the big room.

  Back in Denver, I began the entangled process to win my clearance. Meanwhile, I provided NGA with the information it required to run its test on the Shear Zone crossing. NGA conducted that test near the start of our third year in the field.

  My clearance came through after that field season. In June 2005 I visited the NGA office at Scott Air Force Base. It was full summer in Illinois, and the middle of the long winter’s dark on the Ross Ice Shelf

  Pete, along with NGA analyst Steve Wheat, escorted me to the second floor of a windowless, brick building. Steve stopped me just short of their own sea of cubicles while he went ahead. His voice sounded over the cubicle walls: “There’s a secret level clearance on the floor.”

  I swelled at having my presence heralded with such formality for I was proud of my clearance, proud to be participating in the high-level government world of classified knowledge. Steve came back to get me and led me past those same cubicles. Every computer screen I passed had been blanked out or turned off completely. Steve had been warning folks that I had only a secret level clearance, not nearly as high grade as the top-secret field around me.

  Laughing, I followed Steve into a secure conference room in the center of that office floor. Inside was a long table, surrounded by plush, comfortable swivel chairs. An assortment of air force officers, Colonel Bright among them, and National Reconnaissance Office personnel joined us. In that room, we viewed the classified imagery.

  I was astonished. The numbers of crevasses they saw, their locations and orientations in the field, all agreed precisely with my ground truth.

  When the meeting broke up, Pete and Steve drove me across the green, tree-lined campus in Pete’s compact sedan.

  “Pete,” I said, “I’ll have to submit a trip report describing what I’ve found, so I want to know what I can say. I don’t want to spoil our collaboration by saying or doing something clumsy.”

  Pete discussed his guidance with me at length. Then he asked, “Having seen what you have today, and confirming the accuracy of our work, wouldn’t you say there is a high potential here for science in Antarctica?”

  “You mean because National Science Foundation runs the show? Of course. But I could care less about science, Pete. What I’m talking here is mission safety assurance. I’m talking about saving the lives of my crew.”

  Pete smiled, nodding deeply, signaling our convergence. “The assurance of public safety is the prime component of our mission.”

  “Well, Pete, I don’t know how many people constitute ‘public.’ But I’ve shown you pictures of Linda. Two people went down with her, and by rights they should both be dead. I don’t want any Lindas. Those two people, and the ones that may follow me … is that public enough?”

  “No more Lindas,” Pete repeated.

  “Hey, can you guys look at something else for me before this next Ice season starts?”

  A motorized roar crawled up my backbone and passed overhead. Inside Fritzy’s cab, I ducked. The red-and-white Twin Otter, then its shadow, buzzed low over the length of our caravan.

  At 115 miles past SOUTH, our trains closed up and halted. The light ski plane circled overhead. Wherever they might find us today, the probability of crevasses alongside us was nil. When the plane taxied up to the side of the living module, a tall, bewhiskered Irishman stepped out and walked right up to me. These days he was our project’s greatest ally.

  “I believe you wanted this,” said Dave Bresnahan.

  “You bet I want it. We’ll be there in a few days. Thank you.”

  Dave placed the fruits of space-age technology in my hand. Less than a century ago the likes of Shackleton and Scott strained in their traces across this same stretch of Ice Shelf, man-hauling sleds for weeks.

  “I also brought you these. Today was cookie day in McMurdo.”

  The others had dismounted their idling tractors and tentatively approached us across the snow. I hollered, “Come on over, gang. Cookies!”

  As they gathered around, I explained to Dave, “We’d like to invite you in for coffee, but we’re rigged for running and on a record pace.”

  Dave graciously bowed. “I’m not one to stand in the way of a record.” But then as an afterthought he added, “Some of your folks in the Chalet gave me these … they said you need to sign them.”

  Dave pulled a small sheaf of folded papers from his hip pocket, and handed them to me. The papers spelled out rules for use of the McMurdo information systems. There were three forms, one each for Stretch, Russ, and John V., who had all arrived on Ice in August. They’d signed the forms then. And then the form changed. The crew that arrived in October signed the new form. The other three had signed the old form. They needed to sign the new form. Today’s forms came from an intermediate boss that my boss’s boss had recently installed between him and my boss. And they came with a threat from the new intermediate boss: “Anyone who does not sign I will happily send home on the next plane north.”

  My folks? The southwestern horizon showed no mountaintops yet. That’s where we’d see them first. Here, the flat white sameness surrounded us.

  “What could they possibly be thinking… ?” I muttered.

  Dave grabbed the papers, and gestured as though he were wiping his butt with them. He handed them back, smiling, and said, “That’s what the papers are good for. Just sign ’em.” Dave was getting good at tempering my frustration with the bureaucracy.

  We snapped a photograph of the signing: Dave looking on, Stretch signing the papers using my back for a desk, the Twin Otter in the background … at 82 degrees South latitude on the Ross Ice Shelf.

  On November 20 we took a long lunch under a warm sun at the 180 degree meridian. The Transantarctic Mountains had just reappeared on our southwestern horizon when we crossed into the western hemisphere.

  The next day we passed the monument post at RIS-1, still on good pace. I stopped there only long enough to capture the post position on GPS and to record the snow level. The others showed their respect to our old farthest south by driving right past it. The snow swamps of Year Two had become nothing but a bad, bad memory.

  But our idyllic passage broke up toward the end of shift when Stretch radioed, “I got smoke!”

 
“Traverse, halt! Wait for further,” I grabbed my mike. “Russ, go up and take a look, tell me what you need. Acknowledge, PistenBully.”

  “Wrong Way copies,” said Greg’s voice.

  We stretched out over a mile. The PistenBully ranged farther. Russ, whether he heard me or not, would close up on Stretch and look it over. Nobody would get in front of Greg.

  Shortly Russ’s voice came over the radio, “Fritzy, I need the long-handled torque wrench and the 1¾-inch socket.”

  “Copy that. Do we need to make camp there?”

  “We may just tighten the hub bolts. But it may be something inside.”

  When Wrong Way moved out again, we had two hours left in our day. But before two miles had passed Stretch radioed, “I’ve got smoke again! I’m stopping.”

  “Traverse halt! Make camp.”

  Wrong Way approached from the south to make the camp circle around Brad. Judy circled Brad, parking the Elephant Man’s train on his left. I pulled up right of him, unhitched Fritzy, and then ran a mile back.

  Stretch and Russ stood outside of their tractors, looking over the left rear drive wheel of Stretch’s machine. Blistered black paint on its hub exposed rusty, brown metal flakes. Raisin-sized black bits clung to the hub, and lay scattered on the bottom of the track belt. There was no smoke now, no steam, no melting snow. No oil on the snow. The drive wheel was dry as a bone. But it had been hot, and probably was still hot.

  “I used the fire extinguisher,” Stretch explained as I walked up to them. I didn’t spot residue, but I smelled grease and oil. Not rubber. It was something inside.

  “Russ, I take it you don’t think we should risk driving this to camp?” I asked.

  “Right.”

  “Okay. We’ll drag it. Plan on tomorrow to work on this.” A day to figure out our situation took pressure off Russ. He’d enjoyed our southern momentum as much as I did, but now he’d feel responsible. I didn’t want him to assume that burden.

  We unhitched Stretch from his train. When Brad and Greg arrived in Red Rider with a pair of the plastic recovery skis, Stretch drove his crippled tractor onto the skis. I listened for metal grinding around his hub, but didn’t hear it.