Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  Katy paused the video. “What do you see?”

  “Look at that,” I pointed to a still image of Ann Bancroft lurching her sled over rough ground. Sastrugi … three, four feet high … The chaotic terrain was full of them. Bancroft’s skis bridged the tops of two, barely marking the sastrugi. Her skis flexed deeply under her weight across the span in air. I marveled they did not break.

  That was my first good look at bad sastrugi.

  Crossing the Ross Ice Shelf and topping out on the Leverett, we never encountered sastrugi like those. In the first hundred miles after crossing the Shear Zone, we ran into something we called dorniks. But dorniks didn’t have wind-scoured ridges, or deeply carved risers. They looked more like smooth-skinned, icy whalebacks breaking a flat surface. Mostly they hid, shallowly submerged under soft snow.

  Near the close of Year Two, George Blaisdell and I recorded our observations of sastrugi fields on the Plateau from the air. Likening them to waves, we estimated their wave lengths crest-to-crest, their angle across our proposed track, and even their height. Since we flew between two thousand and four thousand feet over the Plateau, our height estimates were suspect. But it was a clear day. We had shadows to go on. And we relied on the pilots’ estimates, figuring they had more experience judging sastrugi heights from the air. Our notes recorded “bumpy” terrain over the first 174 miles from Pole. We thought the sastrugi might be two to three feet high and perhaps fifty feet crest-to-crest. Over the next thirty-six miles we noted “moderate” sastrugi with wavelengths from two to four hundred feet. The pilots thought they might be three to five feet high. The next fifty-two miles showed “moderate to light” sastrugi, four hundred feet apart, two to four feet high. From there, to the top of the Leverett, we noted “knobbly” sastrugi, light by comparison to all we’d just flown over.

  Sastrugi covered the entire Plateau section of the route. If legendary giants lurked there, they were in that thirty-six mile stretch. From the air we spied no smooth passage through or around the sastrugi anywhere. Avoiding them was out of the question. We would have to deal with them. That meant bulldozer blades and some form of road building.

  At the start of Year Four, I ran into Anne Dal Vera in Christchurch, New Zealand. We were drawing our cold weather gear at the U.S. Antarctic Center. Anne was another intrepid adventure skier whom I respected enormously. I didn’t know her well, though she lived fifty miles south of me in Colorado. I knew her work and reputation in McMurdo. The husky woman was soft-spoken, sensitive, and a good listener. I asked would she mind giving me a minute of her time.

  “Not at all. What’s on your mind, John?”

  “It’s sastrugi, Anne. I’m thinking about giants I’ve heard about but never seen. I’ve heard tales of some six and eight feet high. Have you run across any of those?”

  “Well, six feet, yes.”

  “On the Plateau?”

  “Yes.”

  We walked to the large map of Antarctica hanging on the foyer wall of the Clothing Distribution Center. It was the same map my children looked at last year. The map showed South Pole positioned in the center, surrounded by the circular form of the continent. Mapping conventions for Antarctic projections typically hold the zeroth meridian from the Pole pointing toward the top of the map. The 180th meridian points toward the bottom. Anne’s finger traced the line she’d skied to the Pole from ten o’clock on the coast. Her line ran close to Sir Vivian Fuchs’s route. Fuchs led the British Commonwealth Transantarctic Expedition in 1957–1958.

  “Where did you run into the big sastrugi on the Plateau?”

  She studied the map before pointing to the 86th parallel. “Somewhere between 86 and 87, maybe farther south.”

  Our route converged on Pole from seven o’clock on the same map. But between 86 and 87, her route and ours were close enough to Pole that if Anne’s giant sastrugi existed as a region, that region could easily extend into our territory.

  “And then you came out of them?”

  “The big ones, yes. Are you thinking about those for your traverse?”

  “I am. I’m thinking of Fuchs’s book, The Crossing of Antarctica. He was forever breaking drawbars and sled hitches in that ground. It must be rough, but I have no feel for that kind of terrain.”

  “It was rough.”

  “My hat’s off to you, Anne. I guess I have some more thinking to do about it.”

  “Crossing the Plateau ought to be a piece of cake, don’t you think?” Dave Bresnahan quizzed me over the phone while I was in the Denver office during the planning season before our team deployed for Year Four.

  He hoped to co-opt my assent to an easy, speedy crossing of the Polar Plateau. From time to time he asked questions like that, and I never knew what was behind them. Something in his office in D.C. Maybe he or somebody else was deciding where to put NSF money. Maybe he’d gone out on a limb and needed some back up. I could never dole out a swaggering, incautious answer like: “Sure, Dave, no problem.”

  Questions like his put me on guard. I always answered honestly. Today I answered, “Sure, Dave. About as easy as crossing the Ross Ice Shelf.”

  Dave cleared his throat on the other end, as if to say “Smart ass!”

  “Dave, you know we don’t know what’s under the red line on the map. There’re sastrugi up there. Big ones from what I can tell. But I haven’t crossed sastrugi, and you haven’t either. The USAP doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with them. But Fuchs did. He had a lot of trouble with them. There’re crevasses up there too. I haven’t even started looking into them. Who knows what else is up there? Not me. I haven’t been there yet.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Dave countered in kind, which made our exchanges fun. We were both thick-skinned enough to deal with hard banter. “How’re you going to deal with the sastrugi?”

  “Blades, and bulldozers or tractors to doze them with, is a good starting point. Make the rough places plain. Build that thing we’re not supposed to say what it is. I don’t know how we’ll do it until we get there, and see what we’re looking at.”

  “You confident you can do it?”

  “Pretty confident. There’s one thing I’m not confident of, though.” I waited until Dave cleared his throat.

  “And that is?”

  “The PistenBully.”

  The PistenBully wouldn’t have a road in front of it. It had to face those sastrugi without any help. The rest of us could follow the D8, and the D8 could drop its blade and do us some good. But the D8 couldn’t go except where the PistenBully went because the PistenBully would be looking for crevasses.

  “Suppose the PistenBully can’t look for crevasses in that rough stuff? The whole project comes to a crashing halt. We don’t want the D8 ahead of the radar. “

  The specter of Linda in the blue depths of a monster crevasse rose silently between us.

  “I hear you. Anything I can do to help?” Dave asked.

  “Yeah. Hustle George to follow up on my questions to those glaciologists.”

  13 Farther South

  Another night of three hours sleep. I awoke ahead of my alarm clock set at 0515, shut it off anyway, stretched out in my sleeping bag, and listened. The blizzard outside screamed soprano. Our living module rocked in the gale. The good folks in Alberta had built such strength into our shelter that it never split open under these winds to leave us cold and naked on the Polar Plateau.

  The whirring microwave in the kitchen stopped with the timer’s high-pitched whine, announcing Stretch’s oatmeal was done. A soft clomping crossed the galley floor. The muffled oven door opened and shut.

  With just my long johns on, I rolled my feet off the bunk and slipped on wool socks and fleece booties. Greg’s bunk across from me, Brad’s above his, and Judy’s above mine still had curtains drawn. I stepped quietly through the bunkroom door.

  “Morning, Stretch.” Stretch sat with his huge bowl in his customary place, way across the three-foot expanse of the comms booth and the great plains of the twelve-fo
ot-long galley.

  “Morning, John,” Stretch whispered.

  Taking my parka off its hook in the vestibule, I poked my face briefly outside the refrigerator door of our shelter. Fine-grained pellets of wind-blasted snow filled my eyes. I retreated. “Jeesh.”

  Shuffling past Stretch to his bunkroom, I opened the door and whispered, “Sleep, fellas. At least a couple more hours. Gather at 0900,” then back across to my own bunkroom: “Sleep. See you at 0900.”

  Zipping up then, I headed for the energy module. Wind grabbed the heavy door as I stepped outside, slamming it shut behind me like an explosion. Damn! I’d been quiet until now.

  Against the swirling blizzard, I picked my way between the modules and the tractors. All the heater cords were still plugged in, their slack lines buried under snow, weighted down under the drifts.

  Thirty feet down the line, I gripped a hand rail, climbed the energy module stairs, and fought the wind for the vestibule door at the top. Inside, all the windows, doors, and skylights were still shut. Fine. I opened the generator room doors. The gen-sets howled back. Fine in here, too. Warm, and no snow.

  I stared into the mirror over the lavatory sink. What are you going to do this morning … besides stay put?

  Ten minutes later, back through the blizzard and back in the galley, Stretch was still the only one up. I wrote a note in red marker on the white board hanging outside the comms booth. “Briefing @ 1000—The Route Ahead.”

  The crew dressed in sweats, t-shirts, and slippers. They’d already coffee-ed and breakfasted. The laptop sat on the galley table.

  “They told me nothing.” I recalled that Brian had snarled when he said those words back at the True Grit Café.

  That will not happen here.

  “Brace yourselves. This is going to be a lecture. For the record, how many of you have been to South Pole before?”

  All but Greg and Tom raised their hands.

  Pole sat in the middle of the Polar Plateau. From Pole, the plateau stretched out in all directions, nothing but snow, flat as a pancake to the horizon. We were on the Plateau now, at elevation 7,400 feet. Elevation at Pole was 9,300 feet. We had a climb. Over three hundred miles, that was not much, but it was not a steady climb. Our route had two summits. The highest one might be 10,000 feet. Russ would be thinking about engine performance at that altitude.

  “We’ll be coming downhill into South Pole. Slightly. Before I show you where those summits are, look at our route map for the Plateau section ahead.”

  The map appeared on our laptop. Judy passed it around the room. It was an older map, based on aerial photography, and it traced three alternate route lines. All lines started at our present position, and all converged on a point fifty miles away. Two long, glacial valleys flanked both sides of the route lines: the Scott Glacier to the west, and the Reedy Glacier to the east. I grabbed a cup of coffee while the map made its rounds.

  “We’ll get to the route lines in a minute. But, let me make this first point: we are not on the Plateau proper. Not like some of you are familiar with at South Pole. We are on a peninsula, or a promontory off the edge of that plateau. The headwaters, so to speak, of the Scott and the Reedy capture all these little tributary glaciers. The headwalls of those form escarpments on the flanks of our peninsula.”

  A route that strayed too close to the edge risked wandering into crevasses in the headwall cirques. Since the ice on our peninsula shed off on both sides, we needed to pick our way along the top of the ice divide between the Scott and the Reedy.

  Tom asked, “Where does the Plateau open up into what you’ve called the plateau proper?”

  “Excellent. Just off the edge of the map, at a point on the blue line labeled Pc. That’s 130 miles from here.”

  I looked to Stretch, and then to Tom. “Okay. Now the route lines”

  There were three of them, each different colors. The green one, an older one, we would not follow. It led over the crevasses George Blaisdell and I spotted from the reconnaissance flight. The green line also turned at a point plotted off an inaccurate coordinate location, an inherited mistake that would have taken us into one of those tributary glaciers I’d just cautioned about.

  “The best chance for us to dance down this divide and get away with it is to link the points this way: start here, at SPT-18, follow the blue line about thirty miles to T-1. That should be where we see our first summit. It’s a thousand-foot rise from here. Then turn southerly on the yellow line to T-2. We have a downhill somewhere in there. At T-3, we join the blue line again and work our way south from there.”

  The crew’s faces registered facts taken in, but not necessarily appreciation for how they were gathered.

  “Two more things on this map,” I said. Eyes turned again to the laptop. “Twenty miles south of T-3, on the blue line, we come to Pb. That’s an old point, common to all three routes. From Pb to Pc, another thirty miles, we have this …”

  Zooming on the painted map enlarged a feature halfway between the two points. The blue line split a “saddle” between two painted areas plotting crevasse fields. The cartographer who made the map had looked at air photos, saw crevasses there, and labeled them. George and I didn’t see these crevasses when we flew the route, but whoever made the map saw them. And if he saw crevasses, then they were open crevasses. That probably meant there were hidden crevasses near them. The distance between those two crevasse fields was only five miles.

  “I’m glad I didn’t tell my wife about that!” John V. spoke up.

  “John, you haven’t been with us since the beginning. But we’ve got pretty darn good at picking our way through crevasse fields with radar. I’m okay with it, as long as we’re careful.”

  I looked particularly at Stretch and said, “This little place here, where we thread the needle, may very well be the place where we turn around. Mother Nature may say no to us. Right there.”

  I took a deep breath, buying time. The sound of my own voice bothered me.

  “All right, here’s the last thing I need to tell you. At Pc, we turn and follow the 132 degree West meridian straight to Pole for another 170 miles. Somewhere in that stretch we’ll find our second summit.”

  I also thought our probability of crevasse hazard from Pc onward was very small, but I didn’t entirely trust my judgement on that. So I’d asked George to get in touch with the glaciologists he officially contacted and refer my question on crevasse hazard probability from Pc onward to them. That was back in August.

  “And?” Tom asked.

  “I haven’t heard back,” I replied flatly. It was December 5.

  “Now I’m finished. Does anybody have any questions?” I asked, relieved that I’d reached the end of my lecture.

  “Yeah … what about sastrugi? Where are they?” Brad asked.

  “I forgot about them,” I sighed, tracing the findings from our recon flight across the same map. “The worst of them were about half way from here to Pole. My notes also say we saw no clear way around them.”

  Brad grimaced.

  “Brad, that’s why we have a blade on Red Rider, and we have that big blade on Stretch’s D8. We’ll find sastrugi out there somewhere, and we’ll just have to figure what we can do with them then.”

  I needed a break. In ten minutes I’d speak to the radar team separately. Greg joined me outside where the blizzard still raged. We took our fresh air through polar fleece mufflers.

  “Greg, look behind us and tell me how many flags you can see,” I asked, thinking of that three-inch stub of bamboo he spotted yesterday.

  “I can’t see any of them,” Greg said apologetically.

  “Me neither. From now on you’re my eyes. You will determine our official visibility. We won’t proceed unless you can see at least two flags behind you. Those of us trailing you won’t have any trouble seeing your red PistenBully, but you need to see at least two flags. If you can’t, you must stop. And we’ll all stop. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.”

&nb
sp; Greg went back inside while I walked around in the blizzard, patrolling our camp and clearing my mind for the next lecture. Even with my back to the storm, peering out of the deep tunnel of my parka’s cowl, frigid blasts of icy pellets still found my face. Snowdrifts had begun to bury our sled skis and spin up in the lee of our tractors. We’d have to move them soon.

  Russ came outside and passed me on his way to the generators. We said nothing. His mind was on something else. Russ dinked around to get away from a crowd.

  I stepped back into the galley after stamping my feet in the vestibule, the last of the snow falling off my boots and pants. Greg, Tom, and John V. were waiting. Stretch had gone back to his bunk to read. Judy sat at the laptop in the comms booth writing a letter to her twin sister. Brad lay back on his bunk playing some hand-held electronic game.

  Stretch’s stool offered a change in perspective. I took his seat, and rested my back against the galley wall. “Fellas, tomorrow your job changes. Six miles ahead we run out of flags.”

  Last year’s prospecting team had started our new line in case NSF said go. Beyond their last flag lay what we’d just talked about. On top of looking for crevasses, Greg’s team would be laying new flag line. They knew this was coming. I’d hoped to free Fritzy as a flagging vehicle for them, but now I needed Fritzy to pull sleds.

  “You’ll use a snowmobile, instead. Your flagger won’t have a warm cab. So Greg, I don’t know how you want to do this, but I expect you’ll rotate your crew. I do, however, want you to obey this one simple rule: Nobody gets cold.”

  My old tunnel rule would serve well on the Plateau. We had all the extreme cold weather gear we could ask for, and we had heated cabs in every tractor. But on an exposed snowmobile, a flagger might push too hard and get dangerously cold.

  “If any one of you gets cold, you must immediately tell Greg. And Greg, you must take immediate steps to get that person warm. Even if it stops everything everybody else is doing. If you are the one who is cold, you must warm yourself. Remember, we are only eight here.”