Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  Everyone was impatient to move out.

  “Two years ago, Dave Bresnahan and I started this … now it’s official. Just around the corner past Mount Beazley, look off to your left. You’re going to see a rocky outcrop, about four hundred meters high. It forms a buttress on the west flank of the Stanford Plateau. That’s the east flank of the entrance to the Leverett headwall basin. That buttress has a name … the Magsig Rampart!”

  Gasps rose from everybody. Russ had wanted a place on the continent named for him. Not some far-off place, but a place he could see. A place he had been to. His history with the program went back to stations and winters forgotten or never heard of by most. We’d officially registered Russ’s rampart with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names. That name was officially accepted just before we launched this year. I read from the text of the application:

  “Reason for choice: To honor a mechanic whose decades of service to the USAP over far-flung outposts of the continent of Antarctica now culminate in his key role enabling the success of the USAP’s pioneering South Pole Traverse Project.”

  The stunned crew cheered, wildly applauding the honor.

  “Now … shall we go see that rampart?”

  Stools scudded across the floor. Cabinets slammed shut. We scrambled out the door to our warming tractors.

  Over the wind-swept, flatter section of the glacier we drove over tracks we’d put down last year, still visible on the crust. That surprised me, for I remembered snowy surfaces back then.

  Ahead, Mount Beazley stood in full sun. Whirling sprites of snow-dust danced around its rocky summit. We rounded the dogleg corner and pulled abreast of the Magsig Rampart. Russ would stop and take a picture, but I was keener to see the headwall that had just come in view. Up there huge curls of wind-blown snow poured off the Plateau and spilled into the basin.

  We left our icy tracks behind and started onto new drift snow. The trail steepened. Fritzy, the Elephant Man, and Red Rider stuck many times. Tom and Greg ran ahead into the Parade Grounds to sweep the camp circle. Tom felt the frigid blast pouring over the rim when he stepped out of the PistenBully.

  “It’s dangerously cold up here. Be prepared,” he radioed to us still below. Tom had climbed Dhaulagiri in the Himalayas. He knew cold.

  By the time Fritzy and I struggled into the Parade Grounds the wind had died down. We’d made thirty miles for the day. From the comfort of my warm cab I spied the route flags planted last year. We’d left eight feet of pole above the surface then. Now they were half buried. Our packed trail would be too deep to do us any good this year.

  A fierce ground blizzard whistled through our camp when we woke. With only seven miles to the top, no one slept in. Our fingers drummed, waiting to seize a break in the visibility.

  The monument posts up the glacier had moved little in a year, two hundred feet at the most. That was great news for the future traverse business. It meant the Leverett route was stable. But that puzzled me. The Leverett was the shortest glacier that drained from the Plateau into the Ice Shelf. The Scott Glacier west of us and the Reedy Glacier to our east were both a couple hundred miles long. And they cut down through the same elevations. In only seventy miles from top to bottom, the Leverett had the steepest gradient of them all.

  “It ought to be roaring through here like a freight train. But it’s hardly moving. Now let’s look at an image of the headwall cirque.”

  A RADARSAT image flashed onto our laptop. Others had seen it, but Tom, Greg, and John V. had not. The 1997 image showed the basin ringed by myriad white gashes against a dark background, each gash a crevasse. A thin red line superimposed our route onto the image. The red line strayed close to many of those gashes.

  “Wo-oww,” John V. exclaimed. Tom studied the image. Greg remained silent, serious.

  “Some of you have seen these crevasses. You’ll remember many are open. When I flew over here a couple years ago, I looked down on them in living color. It looked just like on this image, jillions of them. But if our route’s not moving much, it ought to be like we remember it from last year.”

  While they took turns studying the image again, the wind abated with a crash of calm. The basin brimmed with still, cold air under a clear blue sky.

  “Greg, you and Tom in the PistenBully. Lay us a track right down the old flag line, if you can find the flags. Most of them will have been whipped to death in these winds. There might not be any standing at all.”

  Greg acknowledged.

  “Stretch, ride with me in Fritzy. We’ll re-flag the track.”

  “Want to take a load up, as long as we’re taking Fritzy?” Stretch suggested.

  “Good idea. Let’s drag the MT. The rest of you think about going up later this afternoon. Do whatever you have to do to get us ready for that. Judy, you’re on comms. I think we’ll do fine by radio, but we’ll take an Iridium just in case.”

  Wrong Way started up the first grade, climbing onto a stair step bench of snow. Fritzy followed its tracks. A quarter mile along Stretch asked, “You going to put in a flag here?”

  “What?” I stopped.

  “You’re right next to it,” he said.

  Stretch sat on my left. I leaned across him and looked down through the glass door. A bamboo nub with a green rag wrapped around it poked out of the snow no more than three inches. “Now how do you suppose Greg saw that?”

  “Young eyes.” Stretch got out of the cab to plant a new flag beside the remnant.

  “And eight feet of snow since last year.”

  “Worst I’ve ever seen it,” Stretch laughed.

  We planted new flags all the way to the top. Though some of last year’s stuck out as much as two feet, it all seemed oddly familiar. When Fritzy broke over the rim, the PistenBully was lining on a dark object on the snow a mile ahead. Our cache at farthest south: three hundred flags stood like a bamboo menhir at SPT-18.

  I half-expected the cache would’ve moved over the plateau rim into the headwall basin, yet, when we pulled up to SPT-18, my GPS said I was six feet off of last year’s position. Out Fritzy’s window to my right, the bundles of upright flags stood six feet away. I showed Stretch the GPS. “SPT-18 hasn’t moved.”

  Our old route up the stair step pitches was still good. In seven miles up from the Parade Grounds, Tom hadn’t seen a single crevasse on his radar. Stretch and I unhitched the Pole tractor then followed the PistenBully back down the headwall. Greg and Tom ran a hundred feet offset from their outbound track, and again found no crevasses.

  Halfway down the slopes, I radioed to camp, “Warm up the tractors. I’ll just want a few minutes with everybody in the galley when we get down.”

  “Copy that.” Judy’s voice sounded pure delight.

  A skiff of snow scudded no higher than our ankles. Red Rider, the D8, and the Elephant Man idled, hitched to their loads. I climbed the stairs into the galley.

  “Last year’s route is still good. To your left, you’ve got all new flags next to the old ones. To your right, you’ve got the tracks we made coming down. Stay between them. Neither track found any crevasses under it, but you’ll pass by some open ones. There’s a lot of drift snow. You’re not going to find any road under you. We’ll make camp at SPT-18 where we camped last year. There’s enough new snow up there we can use the top two feet safely for our snow-melter.” Seeing no questions, I shook my head with disbelief. “SPT-18 did not move at all.”

  Stretch had made it last year pulling the modules without any help. “Did you see anything today that makes you think you couldn’t do it again?” I asked.

  “Nnnope. I think we’ll do just fine.”

  Judy thought she’d get stuck right away and wisely asked for a tow. “Hell, it’s only seven miles to camp.”

  “I’ll leave my load here then, and pull you with Fritzy,” I volunteered. “Brad, see what you can do with Red Rider. If you get stuck, I’ll come back after Judy’s on top.”

  Brad nodded.

  “G
reg and Tom, hang back with the heavy tractors. If any of them get in trouble near the sidelines, you may have to do some prospecting out of bounds.”

  “Right, Boss.”

  “It’s John. Okay. Let’s go.”

  Cupboards slammed, kitchenware clattered in the sink, and boots shuffled out the door.

  Judy and I followed Stretch onto a long, flat bench two miles above the Parade Grounds. Brad radioed, “I’m stuck. Halfway up the first grade.” He couldn’t see us over the rise.

  Judy had judged right. The Elephant Man would’ve stuck several times without Fritzy’s help. As soon as we topped the rim, I cut her loose. John V. dismounted to help.

  “It’s pretty neat up here. And cold, too!” He approached me cheerfully.

  “Welcome to the Polar Plateau, John. You’re on top of the world now.” I spoke in haste, but with a smile. He’d take his own time with the views after I split off. Stretch was up ahead with our warm camp at SPT-18. Judy had a mile to go on flatter ground. Brad and his load, and my load, were still below. The sky started graying-over.

  John V. coiled my heavy tow strap and secured it to my side deck. I spun Fritzy around and started back down.

  Brad hadn’t made it far. My load in camp sat just four flags below him. When I backed up to Brad’s wallow on the slope, we got out of our tractors and met halfway. Brad took an end of my tow strap. The air was calm down here, but above us snow dust started curling over the rim again.

  “It’s cold up there, Brad. And the wind’s picking up. Hey, Brad,” I asked in a moment’s realization, “haven’t we been here before?”

  Brad smiled. Last year he and I had been the last to top out. We took turns even then towing each other. When the last of our loads reached the top, we stopped on the rim and unhitched. Brad had looked back over the Ross Ice Shelf below us and beamed, surprising me with an exuberant embrace. I remembered that, now. Brad and me. Last to top out again this year, we shared a warm handshake now and finished hitching our tractors together.

  Topping the first stairstep onto the bench, we called out RPMs, gears, and speeds to each other on the radio, adjusting to each other’s performance. We set an all-traverse speed record for climbing the headwall.

  Just over the top with a mile to go, we unhitched and turned immediately back down. The wind rose. Our visibility was dropping. The growing overcast would flatten our light.

  Brad reached the Parade Grounds with a half-mile lead, and hitched Red Rider to my load. I caught up, spun right around, and backed up to him. He already had his tow strap waiting for me. I watched out my rear window. Brad fit the tow strap around Fritzy’s hitch pin then signed thumbs up. I nodded. He climbed back aboard Red Rider and we started up the headwall again.

  Along the gentle bench in the midsection of our climb, we passed below open crevasses tens of feet to our left. I’d spotted them a couple years ago from the office with our GIS lady, Kelly Brunt, on her computer. We plotted a course correction there in Denver. Above me now were those same gashes; it was strange that they did not fill up with all that snow curling over the rim.

  Today Kelly’s point bore a post scribed SPT-16. We turned left there and started up the last, steep grade. Two miles farther, we topped out with ease. I took Fritzy to the other load where we’d left it, and stepped out of my cab for a word with Brad at the back of my tractor.

  Wind blew bitterly against our faces. We had everything on top, all souls intact, and all deliverable cargo. Three hundred miles of unknown ground before we saw Pole. Yet Pole was only halfway for us. I shook Brad’s hand once again, and said what I had to say: “Thank you.”

  Brad ran that last mile ahead of me. The light completely flattened and the ground blizzard swelled to cab height. The events that brought us to this place exactly eleven months ago replayed themselves. Three years culminating in profound disappointment. Another year getting back, despite two crippled tractors. The place still had a “high” feeling to it. But, it didn’t bring the same breathtaking accomplishment we’d felt when we first established our foothold here.

  Now I wanted only to get off of the spot.

  12 Sastrugi

  Somewhere on the Polar Plateau lurked sastrugi of mythical proportions. I’d never heard of sastrugi before I came to Antarctica, yet old Ice hands spoke respectfully of them as “bad” sastrugi or “big” sastrugi.

  “What’s a sastrugi?”

  One old-timer, exasperated with my newness, offered this terse explanation: “They’re these weird wind-carved forms in the snow. They make a rough surface.”

  “Is that a sastrugi?” I asked, pointing to a four-inch-tall ridge of snow running across the flat sea ice near McMurdo.

  “Sure, but that’s nothing. Sastrugi get huge … six feet high, maybe more.”

  I stepped on the little ridge and crushed it. “Do you ever see any big ones around here?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen big ones?”

  “No. But I’ve heard stories about them.”

  I never saw official sastrugi around McMurdo. I never saw them at Central West Antarctica. I never saw them at Shackleton Base Camp, around Oliver Bluffs, or the Beardmore Glacier.

  I saw my first official sastrugi when I got to South Pole on the tunnel job. Long walks took me outside the station’s inhabited perimeter, onto the virgin snows, away from tractors, heavy equipment, airplanes, skiways, and the groomed surfaces of the station campus. I found acres without end of fantastically wind-sculpted snow. Mesmerizing, beautiful in fact, they were not at all intimidating. They looked like free-form stairsteps, wind-carved into graceful curves and risers a foot and a half high. Their undercut snouts pointed directly upwind—useful to know if one came into a new area on a dead calm day.

  I stepped onto the edges of these risers and they again collapsed under my weight. What is the big deal with sastrugi?

  The Dictionary of Geological Terms published by the American Geological Institute offers this definition:

  (Russian) Plural form of sastruga. 1) The minor inequalities of the snow surface as determined by the wind blowing over the inland ice have been mentioned more or less persistently by all Arctic travelers, since upon the character of this surface depends the celerity of movement in sledge journeys. All minor hummocks and ridges of this nature are included under the general term sastrugi. 2) Irregularities or wave formations caused by persistent winds on a snow surface. They vary in size according to the force and duration of the wind and the state of the snow surface in which they are formed.

  Mobility, ease of travel, speed over the land … all are affected by surface roughness. Potholes on a paved road, washboards on a dirt road: these reduce the celerity of movement. Smooth the roughness and maintain it, mobility improves. Sastrugi at South Pole made a rough-looking surface, but they yielded easily underfoot or to a passing tractor.

  Adventurers Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft skied into Pole one year, crossing the continent from near the Weddell Sea coast of Antarctica. They met enthusiastic reception from the station inhabitants.

  I’d just got the night shift started on the tunnel and drifted back to the old station galley for hot cocoa before turning in. Inside, I spotted the two women seated at the far end of the room with station manager Katy Jensen. A dozen of the station’s female workers crowded their table. They sought autographs, listened to adventure stories, and admired the great ladies holding forth. The two skiers radiated health and vitality, irresistibly attracting all souls.

  They attracted my attention. But seeing the exercised patience with which they took time to speak to each of their admirers, I reckoned they did not need one more body hovering around them. I took my cocoa to the other side of the room.

  Katy approached me to ask about taking the skiers through the tunnel.

  “Need to get them away from the crowd?”

  Katy nodded.

  Touring the tunnel turned out to be sheer play for all of us. Arnesen and Bancroft enjoyed watchin
g the tunnel-boring machine at work. Then, leaving the crew to their shift, we walked down another long reach of tunnel into the darkness. The ladies thrilled to touch the tunnel walls, to feel the harder, denser snow lying well below the softer surfaces they skied upon.

  When we reached the end of the dark tunnel, I asked them, “Where under the station do you think we are now?”

  Arnesen answered in accents of Norway: “Well, I have no idea.”

  “Then shall we find out?” I suggested, taking our sole mine light to the bottom of a wooden ladder.

  The ladder ran improbably up from the tunnel floor into the darkness of a perfectly round, three-foot-diameter hole. One by one, we climbed the fifty-foot ladder, gathering together again in a small, dark plywood shelter built around the ladder’s top. I opened an overhead hatch in the chamber roof, and invited them to have a look outside. Dazzling sunlight flooded through the hatch as they climbed out the shelter, three feet above the snows of the South Pole antenna field, nearly a half mile from the old station where we started.

  Katy, Liv, and Ann found footing on the snow. With half of me still in the plywood shelter, the other half sticking out of the hatch, I announced, “This is where I leave you.”

  “You want to join us?” Katy asked.

  “I’d love to. But I need to go back and let the crew know you’re out of the tunnel.” I looked both to Liv and Ann: “I wish you both the best on the rest of your journey.” Then I disappeared from their sight, and they from mine, as I lowered myself back into the darkness.

  Arnesen and Bancroft started north from the Pole a few days later. From the top of a pile of snow bulldozed up near the tunnel entrance, I watched them go. Huge blue sails unfurled in the wind, pulling them along on their skis. The skiers in turn pulled modern one-man cargo sleds behind them.

  They left a videodisc with Katy. One evening we watched moving pictures of the first part of Arnesen’s and Bancroft’s journey.

  “Freeze that picture, Katy. Please!” I interjected.