Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  After Red Rider towed him away, Russ and I stood alone on the snow. It was a rare moment on the trail when I could pick Russ’s brain without an audience. It was the sort of moment I treasured, though the present circumstances were not joyous.

  “Russ, you know we’re carrying all the spare parts South Pole ordered for that machine?” I opened.

  Russ half-laughed. “Yeah, but there’s nothing in that small box that’ll help us. This is major. It needs parts we don’t have, and a shop too.” Russ thought any attempt at a field fix would risk more damage.

  The MT865 was deliverable cargo. In our medium of exchange, it represented three flights to Pole. We counted on driving it there and pulling a load with it.

  “Run your diagnostics, Russ. Tell me what’s wrong and what we need to fix it. I’m going to think about dragging it to Pole and all the stuff that comes of that. Right now I’m casting a larcenous eye on those big plastic sheets under the fuel bladders.”

  “I’m thinking the same thing,” Russ said and grinned.

  I grinned back. “All right, then. Pull your load up to camp, I’ll have Brad come back and retrieve Stretch’s. Fritzy can’t pull it.”

  In this last-chance year, the loss of a tractor could mean failure two-thirds of the way across the Ross Ice Shelf. Whether we went forward to Pole or retreated to McMurdo, the remaining tractors would share Stretch’s load and pull his disabled tractor. We didn’t have the drawbar strength to do that without shuttling.

  But nobody wanted failure. Eight assessments of our situation brought as many, or more, solutions and partial solutions. That was all good energy for going south. At dinner I made it clear.

  “We’re not going anywhere right away. We’ll stay here tomorrow, relax, and figure out what we can do. We can do that …” I looked first at Greg, then to the others, and repeated, “We can do that because nobody’s shooting at us. We’ve also got a big friend waiting two hundred miles ahead at the base of the Leverett. I’d rather struggle two hundred miles forward than 450 miles back.”

  The ultimate solution was as much an enigma to me as to the crew. But they now knew I leaned south.

  Russ and John V. reported the Pole tractor had “suffered a bearing failure on the left side drive wheel, induced by a failure of the oil seals and resulting loss of lubrication oil—by burning.” The spare parts we needed were not on the continent.

  The choice was simple: either leave the tractor beside the trail and drag it back to McMurdo on our return trip, or drag the deadweight to its new home at Pole.

  We’d not tried towing it yet, except on the recovery skis. That was no way to tow it the remaining six hundred miles. Our best chance lay with the twin plastic sheets under the fuel bladders.

  Brad tended our fuel inventory this year. He said we now had enough empty capacity in our steel fuel tank sleds to hold the bladder fuel. Greg had rigged the bladder sleds in the first place. He and Brad saw to transferring their contents. The others helped fold and bind the empty bladders and used Fritzy’s crane to lift them in Snow White’s hold.

  Russ and Stretch secured the MT on top of the plastic sheets, chaining the tractor to the spreader bar sled that pulled them. The rig worked nicely in trials around camp. But in a sudden stop, the MT and the plastic sheets slid forward, colliding with the spreader bar. We could live with that if we remembered to stop slowly.

  To get a leg up, we sidetracked two steel fuel tank sleds, one empty and one full, for our return traverse. Then we redistributed the remaining sleds among our four working tractors. One or two of them would be overloaded. When we logged fifty-four miles the next day, even after rescuing stuck tractors, my damage report went in to Rebecca.

  Thanksgiving Day brought a blizzard of heavy, wet snow. We hunkered down, feasted, and sent holiday e-mails around the world. The day after Thanksgiving Russ closed our morning briefing: “Yippee! We get to make a turn today!”

  Since departing the Shear Zone we’d run a straight course for four hundred miles. When the Transantarctics finally appeared on our southern horizon, they grew ever larger as we approached their fixed panorama. Now we turned left at FORK, striking a parallel course to the mountain fronts, skirting just north of the Shoals at their feet.

  We motored past the mouths of deeply carved valleys, some cutting back into the Plateau for two hundred miles. Blue-ice glaciers filled the valley bottoms. Orange and yellow sunlight reflected off their mirrored surfaces with startling beauty.

  Greg and Tom prospected ahead in the PistenBully. From what I could see at a distance, they’d got out of their vehicle and were examining the ground ahead of them. My heart sank. Last year, somewhere near here, we’d crossed a quarter-inch-wide crack and traced it for over a mile, but it behaved more like a thin tidal crack than a rip-snorting crevasse.

  “John, I think you ought to take a look at this,” Tom radioed.

  The fleet pulled up, and we all got out of our tractors to inspect. In front of the PistenBully a long, trough-like track, eight inches wide, crossed our trail. Knife-like gashes marked the snow on both sides of it. Three-point dots, close together, skipped along the left and the right sides of the trough. The track looked like a giant zipper running across the snow.

  Penguin tracks. Adélie penguin by the looks of it. Belly sliding.

  How a penguin could have wandered this far “inland” over the ice shelf, let alone survive, mystified us. We were five hundred miles from the nearest open water. Yet here were these tracks headed straight for the Axel Heiberg Glacier.

  In 1911 Norwegian Roald Amundsen, whom I regarded as the greatest polar explorer of them all, selected that glacier for his ascent to the Polar Plateau. He became the first man to reach the South Pole. His modern-day countryman Børge Ousland chose the same glacier in 1997 for his descent from the Pole onto the Ross Ice Shelf. When Ousland skied into McMurdo, he became the first man to cross Antarctica alone and unsupported.

  I mused aloud, “Amundsen’s Ghost. Let’s take this as a good omen.”

  In fact, we made two turns that day. Our evening brought us to CAMP 20. We turned right at the post and settled down a half-mile past it. Now we pointed directly into the breach of The Shoals of Intractable Funding.

  A storm again stalled our advance from CAMP 20. All day driving, wet flakes plastered our tractors and sleds. We made four miles then hunkered down once more. The foot of the Leverett Glacier was only two days away.

  We waited impatiently. We had enough visibility to slog it out, flag to flag. But seventeen miles ahead lay the breach. It may or may not be open this year. I wanted all the visibility we could get if we ran into crevasses.

  At 1000 hours we crowded into our galley, looking at ASTER imagery of the Shoals on our laptop. Pointing to CAMP 20 on the map, I began pompously: “We are heah.” Then pointing to ASTER 2: “And they are theah.”

  Our course cut across the ice flow as it approached the breach. At ASTER 2 our course turned left and headed upstream. Downstream from the turning point lay a shoal of crevasses. ASTER 2 was drifting right for it. I didn’t know if the crevasses were moving, too, or if new ones were forming there just waiting for our drifting trail to drop into them.

  “This ice is moving two and a half to three feet per day. I think.”

  Last year did not allow enough time between measurements to get a reliable figure. We had only proved a hundred-foot-wide swath along the flag line. And the ASTER imagery was now three years old.

  “Let’s look at what NGA sent.”

  The NGA showed us a heavy black line representing our route. It started at CAMP 20, turned left at ASTER 2, ran through the other ASTER points, and terminated at ASTER 6. A light gray field covered both sides of the route to a width of a mile. Steve Wheat had drawn dark blue lines within that gray field wherever he saw a crevasse. A couple of dark blue lines plotted closely downstream from ASTER 2, but they did not yet encroach on our route.

  “The analyst was looking at original imagery. We have her
e only his representation of that. But it looks to me like the passage is still open.”

  The laptop made the rounds so everybody could get a good look. When it got back to me, I pointed to the crevasses between ASTER 2 and ASTER 3.

  “These we know about. We drilled them and crossed them last year. Hopefully they’ll be safe again this year.”

  Then I pointed to a dense cluster of blue lines just south of CAMP 20. “I have no idea what this is. We didn’t see anything there last year. But we only look down twelve and a half meters with our radar. So I don’t know what the analyst was looking at.”

  I finished. “Now you know everything I know about this place. Any questions?”

  None.

  “Right. When the weather lets us, I want to check out the breach with Greg and Tom in the PistenBully. We’ll take an Iridium phone and call you on the hours. If we get to ASTER 2 and everything looks okay, we’ll call you forward. I don’t intend to come back here unless we have to.”

  The skies broke clear the morning of November 27. The PistenBully headed out.

  Our radar didn’t pick up anything to tell us what NGA saw south of camp with that first cluster of blue lines. It all looked like plain, unbroken ice on our screen. That was good news.

  Farther down the line, ice movement at ASTER 2 and ASTER 3 measured much slower than I’d predicted. That was more good news.

  We looked over the crevasses we already knew about and saw no change in their radar signature. By all appearances, the passage was good to go.

  I called the waiting fleet forward. We threaded the needle’s eye, made forty-six miles, and left The Shoals of Intractable Funding behind us.

  The next day, we reached the foot of the Leverett Glacier. From five miles out, I spotted a black dot down in the ice valley below it. Our big friend waited for us.

  We ran down the gentle slope over crumbly ice, its glazed surface preserving the tracks we’d made a year ago. We followed them right to the D8 where it sat proudly atop its berm, basking in the warm sun. Russ and John V. would wake the bulldozer from its sleep tomorrow. Others would reconfigure sled trains for five tractors now.

  I was more interested in checking the route up the foot of the glacier. If the ice had moved as much as I anticipated then we might be locating an entirely new route. But the post nearest our camp had only moved an incredible fifty-three feet since last year. While that made me hopeful, I kept such thoughts to myself because so many things were about to change.

  In 640 miles we’d barely left sea level. Over the next seventy miles we’d climb seven thousand feet. Some of those pitches were steep enough that tractors would be towing tractors.

  Five tractors for the climb were good. Sidetracking another pair of fuel tank sleds would lighten our overall load, too. All but one tractor would drag two sleds upgrade. Quadzilla would pull three. On the Plateau we might reconfigure: four tractors, three sleds each, and use Fritzy as a flagging tractor for the new route. It’d be cold up there. The flagger would welcome a warm cab to follow the PistenBully. Meanwhile, we were still at the bottom.

  The next morning Greg, Tom, and I prepared to scout the old route. I solemnly approached Greg. “You understand that up to now you have been traveling across the Ross Ice Shelf?”

  “Right, Boss,” he said.

  “It’s John. And you understand that the Ross Ice Shelf is afloat?”

  “Right.”

  “And up to now, you have never been on the continent of Antarctica before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unfurl your Marine Corps flag. Fly it behind the PistenBully. Somewhere in the next five miles we’re going to cross onto the continent. The U.S. Marines will lead us onto that shore and take the beach.”

  Some beach. A cartographer had drawn the inferred continental shore line on our maps. We crossed his shoreline somewhere that morning on snow and ice. Fourteen miles later and two thousand feet higher, we turned around, looking down on the Ice Shelf no longer in front of us but below us. We’d found not one crevasse. The old flag line had hardly moved since last year. If that held and our path was crevasse-free last year, it ought to be crevasse-free now.

  In camp at the foot of the Leverett, a fuel burning heater thawed the ice out of the D8’s engine compartment. By mid-afternoon, Russ and John V. had the bulldozer running and hitched to the module sleds. That would be Stretch’s load the rest of the way to Pole. The other sled trains were coupled and ready.

  At day’s end, everybody’s news was good. We’d be at SPT-18 in a couple days, and I didn’t plan on stopping there.

  Greg and Tom led with Wrong Way, working westerly around the foot of the glacier. Stretch and the D8 pulled out with the red modules. Brad in Red Rider went next with the flatbed sled and Snow White, Stretch’s original loads. Judy and John V. followed in the Elephant Man pulling the reefer van and a fuel tank sled. I came next in Fritzy pulling the spare parts sled and another tank sled. Russ ran caboose with Quadzilla pulling two tank sleds, and the crippled Pole tractor. This day was November 30.

  In three and a half miles, we turned left and started upgrade. Fritzy and I hadn’t rounded the corner when Stretch radioed, “I’m overheating. I’m stopping.”

  Where was everybody? John V. was ahead with Judy; Russ was behind.

  “John V., can you get up there with Stretch and check it out?” I radioed.

  We all stopped, waiting on the sunny slopes at the toe of the glacier. John V. radioed back, more to Russ than to me, “I think we’ve got some cross over at the transmission oil cooler. It’s pulled some glycol from the cooling system into the transmission.”

  Russ radioed back, “How low is the glycol?”

  They decided to top it up and keep an eye on it. I had all the oils and fluids with me in the spare parts van. When John V. showed up on a snowmobile to get a five-gallon can off me, I hailed him out of my cab door, “We’ve got seven miles of climb, on slopes like what you’re on now. Then we’re looking at a flatter stretch for forty or fifty miles.”

  “Copy that. Good to know. We’ll get the D8 going again shortly.”

  Fritzy idled seventy miles from our farthest south. The bright sun streamed through my window glass. I waited. I worried. I played what-if games. We’d brought every bit of deliverable cargo here. We’d shed tank sleds and fuel along the trail to pull that Pole tractor. If the D8 went down, no way we could drag that beast to Pole. If we abandoned it, we’d lose four LC-130s worth of cargo. Abandon cargo altogether, just prove the route?

  “Okay, we’re ready to go again,” John V. radioed.

  Stretch had gone over a rise before his engine overheated. I couldn’t see him, but I saw Brad in Red Rider start up the slope, then the Elephant Man. Finally, I turned the corner and started up the grade. Russell to my left was rolling now, too. Not much chatter on the radio from any of us.

  Halfway up the glacier, we made camp on the long, gentle grade. Mount Beazley appeared fifteen miles farther up. Our course doglegged right around that mountain and led through the narrows into the headwall basin. A mile to our right, the spectacular jagged Gould Peak shouldered its way out of surrounding ice. To our left, rocky tops of nearly buried foothills dotted the rolling glacier-covered country.

  The D8 gave us no more trouble that day. While I plugged in Fritzy outside the living module, Russ shuffled over the snow toward me. He’d just plugged in Quadzilla. His shoulders drooped. He looked weary.

  “You okay, Russ?”

  “We’re screwed.” Quadzilla had blown an idler wheel bearing at the end of shift. Another tractor down. “And we don’t have the parts to repair it,” Russ said.

  “We can’t move it?”

  “Right.”

  “Then all we can do is stay here until we find out what we can do about it. How’s the D8?”

  “We need to work on that, too.”

  “Okay, Russ. Get your mind around being here a couple of days. Identify the parts we need. If we can find them on continent, m
aybe we can get them air-dropped to us. If we can figure out how to do this thing with four tractors, maybe we can get the parts flown to Pole and repair Quadzilla on the way back. I don’t know what we’re going to do yet, because I don’t know what we can do.”

  Russ already knew that, but he needed to hear me say it. I needed to hear myself say it. But Russ’s eyes still said we were screwed.

  “I’ll tell the others we’ll be here for a while,” I sighed.

  Two days of Iridium phone calls to parts supply in McMurdo and to dealers in the United States. Two days of odd jobs around camp. John V., Stretch, and Judy changed out the D8’s transmission oil. Greg helped Russ tear down Quadzilla. Brad and Tom snowmobiled back down the trail searching for missing parts off Russ’s tractor.

  Some of the parts we needed were in McMurdo. The rest were back in the States. An air drop wouldn’t help us. One choice remained: leave Quadzilla, while spare parts expedited from the States flew to Pole. If we got to Pole, we’d bring them back with us. And if we returned with only three tractors, we’d be officially screwed if one of them went down.

  Today, my brilliant plan for reconfiguring the fleet went right out the window. We still had all our cargo. But with four healthy tractors pulling uphill, instead of five, each would pull three sleds. Pulling heavier going south worked exactly backwards from anybody’s plan. And once we got to the top, we were still looking at three hundred miles of what?

  The briefing on December 3 started upbeat. “We get to make a turn today!”

  Brad quipped, “We get to move today!”

  Russ groaned, mourning the loss of his tractor. He’d ride in the Elephant Man with Judy.

  “We were planning on shuttling up the headwall anyway,” I continued. “If we shuttle on the Plateau ’cause we’re too heavy … well, we do have enough fuel to get us to Pole.”

  I looked at Stretch, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”

  Stretch started up off his stool.

  “But …” I timed it just right. Stretch scowled and sat back down. “I do have something else to say, and I’ve been holding it until this moment.”