Greg looked straight back at me with no expression. I couldn’t read him.
“Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Okay, now let’s talk about how to lay out a straight flag line.”
For an hour we discussed savvy won from three years on the trail, an improbable combination finessed from grounded experience and intelligence from orbiting satellites. They’d still make a crooked line to start with, until they figured it out. But the flags told us where the radar went, crooked line or not.
“The three of you are leading the rest of us. We’ve got to know we’re following you into safe ground. If all else fails, we can follow the flags behind us to McMurdo because we know that’s safe.”
Silence.
“All right. Tom knows the radar. If Tom goes down, Stretch and I can read it, too. Just so you know.”
Silence, again.
“Fellas, thanks for your time. That’s a lot to unload on you. But I can’t think of a better way to spend a morning in a blizzard. I’m done talking now.”
“Thanks for your time,” Greg said. Tom and John V. added their “yeahs” to Greg’s polite remark.
The blizzard still raged next morning. For sport, Greg called Weather Forecaster Bill—“Wx” Bill—in McMurdo over the Iridium phone. The weather office might have something to say about this particular storm. Several of us eavesdropped from the galley.
“Bill, this is Feleppa with South Pole Traverse. We’re on the Plateau at the top of the Leverett. We’ve been in a blizzard for the past twenty-four hours and want to know how long this system might be with us. Can you help us out?” Greg spoke from the caster chair at the comms booth.
“Yeah, steady thirty to forty knots, blowing snow,” Greg reported.
Greg’s eyes rolled back over his shoulder. “Bill says we got wind.”
“No, we’re right at the edge of the Polar Plateau … here’s our lat-lon.” Greg read our coordinates.
“Visibility maybe two hundred feet,” Greg added after a pause. Then he smiled. “Bill says we’re in a system, and we have low visibility, and it might be this way for a while.”
“Ask him to study up on our situation … now that he knows where we are,” I laughed. “Brad, can you be ready with your show after a while?”
Digging out of drifts consumed the rest of our morning. We advanced our camp one hundred feet upwind. Then we hunkered down once more.
I’d asked several folks to bring along a slide show, or prepare a lecture for days like this one. After lunch, Brad entertained us with pictures on living and working at Greenland’s Summit Camp.
After Greenland, I kicked back on the galley bench. “Greg, you know that military alphabet for calling out letters … Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta?”
Greg leaned back against the kitchen counter, his arms folded over his muscular chest. “Sure.”
“Steve Wheat at the NGA was working on an alternative alphabet. He had things like M as in mnemonic, and P as in pneumatic or phone. Had us all in stitches, acting out some hapless dispatcher taking dictation over the radio. Imagine yourself under fire in Iraq, calling in an air strike: ‘No you idiot, that’s A as in aisle!’”
Greg got it. We giggled.
The alphabet on our white board filled up quickly: C as in cue, E as in ewe, S as in sea, and W as in wye. Others letters came more slowly, but Greg scored big with O as in ouija. Our alphabet stayed on the board several days. From time to time, others added their own contributions.
At 1430, I asked Greg to place another call to Wx Bill. “Before you do that, tell me how many flags you can see.”
Greg was only outside a moment. “Four flags, Boss. Got some fog and light ground bliz. Three flags for sure.”
Boots hit the floors in both bunkrooms. “Let’s get off this damned spot!”
Within three miles the blizzard sat down on us again. We crept flag to flag.
Our fleet speed was now limited to the D8’s best. At this altitude we managed three miles per hour, beating down tracks in virgin snow. But Fritzy wallowed in once and Red Rider twice.
Brad’s jaw clenched tight when I met him with my tow strap. The tank sled, the flatbed sled, and Snow White were too much for Red Rider. Up ahead, Stretch pulled the modules and a tank sled. Both pulled the same gross weight, but the D8 fared better.
“I’m glad we’re only going six miles today,” Brad sighed, teetering in the soft snow.
In camp, the mood was more upbeat. We’d moved off the bad luck spot the moment the weather loosened its grip. And we found a message waiting for us at the end of the flag line. Written in duct tape and bamboo poles planted upright in the snow, it spelled: “HI.”
“Welcome to the new farthest south,” I offered encouragingly. “In twenty-two more miles we’ll hit that first summit. Stretch, count on this … when we empty that tank you’re carrying, we’ll drop it and you’ll pick up the one Brad’s got. Judy, how’d you do today?”
“Oh …” her voiced quavered. “We slipped our tracks a lot. But we didn’t go down. Just lucky.”
The ground blizzard still clobbered us the next morning. If it didn’t kick snow too high, we could see over the top of it through a tractor’s cab. But this morning’s blizzard wasn’t benign. Snow struck the top of our modules. Though we saw blue sky overhead, we couldn’t see one green flag behind us.
By early afternoon Greg could see well enough, and he champed at the bit to get his flagging party going. “Call us when you’ve made a mile,” I told him.
Twenty minutes later he radioed back, “Four flags set.” Already in our tractors, we started after him.
In a few miles, the blizzard swelled again and stopped us. We waited in our cabs, engines idling for an hour and a half. Then shortly after our second spurt, Brad radioed “And that’s all it took.”
We’d just started up the slow rise to the first summit when Brad stuck down hard.
Thanks to that inconstant blizzard and the slight grade, we didn’t arrive at the summit until noon of the next day. Red Rider and Fritzy wallowed several times. Brad finally split his train and shuttled his loads forward. Shuttling so soon alerted me to watch our fuel consumption.
The downhill was short lived. We dropped only four hundred feet in four miles. But Brad could pull his full load, and none of us got stuck. We leveled out on hard dorniks, like those past the Shear Zone and just as rough. Every tractor rocked and jarred its way over each one of them, jerking and slamming us around in our cabs.
After dinner, I penned “23 miles” in my logbook. I’d just written such descriptive terms as “dornikville” and “bad ju-ju,” when Greg squeezed by my chair at the comms booth. He and Tom felt the worst of the rough ground in their dual-track PistenBully.
Judy spotted Greg sliding into our bunkroom. She read the fatigue written all over him. “Do you want to borrow my vibrator?”
Hoots erupted through both bunkrooms.
Judy referred to her electric vibrating hot-pad, a cushioned backrest that extended down to mid-thigh. They were popular among long-haul truckers. When Judy lay down on her bunk above mine and turned on her “vibrator,” my bunk thrummed like she was rocketing to outer space.
“Some other time, Judy. Thank you,” Greg said appreciatively. Then to me, “I think we ought to call that place the dornikle forest.”
“Spell dornikal.”
“Djibouti, ouija …”
Ground blizzards halted Greg’s team intermittently for several days. Under better circumstances, they might range four miles ahead of the lumbering fleet, so long as they maintained radio contact and two-flags visibility. To gain against the ground blizzards they reduced their flagging intervals to one-fifth of a mile.
Meanwhile, the ground got rougher and our daily mileage shorter. I stopped counting immobilizations and recorded them merely as “many.” So much for Dave’s prediction that the Polar Plateau would be a piece of cake; we now measured progress in small victories.
Sidetracking Stretch’s emptied fuel tank, lightening our load by twelve thousand pounds of steel, was one such victory.
Then, on December 11, we entered sastrugi of legendary size.
Six-foot-tall giants ran out in long ridges of wondrously fluted, wind-sculpted snow. Carved into windy arroyos and coulees, they called to mind the Badlands of South Dakota. Whole armies of Sioux warriors, draped in white camouflage, could be hiding among them not more than a hundred feet away. I’d never see them from the warmth of Fritzy’s jolting cab, behind my sheltering glass.
And they were hard. They’d bend a shovel. In places the D8’s steel tracks barely left a cleat mark on the trail. The flagging crew augered holes before they could plant a flag. Yet, oddly, little drift snow accumulated among them despite the high winds.
Stretch’s big blade took down the tops of some. Our other tractors lined up directly behind him. No need to track-pack a wide road base here. The surface was hard enough already. All the while, the rough ground took an aching toll on each of us and our machinery. It broke lock-downs on our container sleds. It broke Snow White’s axles. When something broke, we all stopped. Pole seemed very far away.
On December 12 we celebrated another victory in passing 87 degrees South, a whole degree since the top of the Leverett. That particular degree-made-good meant we’d successfully sidestepped the crevasse field spotted on the aerial reconnaissance. At the end of this day, I found Greg outside the modules, plugging in his PistenBully. He and his crew had yet another rough one.
“How you doing?” I asked cautiously.
“We ought to name this place Sastrugi National Park,” he declared, offering a more noble handle than Dornikal Forrest.
“Greg, how would you move a platoon of marines over this ground?”
Greg stared thoughtfully across the icy rills, moving imaginary troops.
“Helicopters,” he said finally. “What’s on your mind?”
“That’d be the ticket.” I laughed. I’d expected some twist on amphibious assault vehicles.
But a lot was on my mind. We were getting beat up. What if we needed a medevac? There were no helicopters at Pole. If one of us went down, a Twin Otter wouldn’t have a prayer for a safe landing here. We’d have to retreat a long way to better ground. If we retreated, what more damage might we bring on a victim or the fleet? And there was no telling how far ahead these badlands stretched.
“Greg, until we can get back here with big blades and smooth the rough places in earnest, we’ll have trouble moving ourselves. Right now we don’t have the fuel to spend on grading. We dropped one of four fuel tank sleds. We’re tapping into the second, and we haven’t made it halfway from the Leverett to Pole. I’m thinking fuel for one thing.”
Russ walked up then, his gait shuffling sideways, his shoulders drooping. We were all weary but Russ the more so because he worried about our machines. Even so, Russ mustered a laughing smile. “Whew! This is rough!”
“Yeah it is,” I agreed. “Just get me the next thirty miles to Pc. Can you do that?” That gave Russ a target within reach. Something he could take on.
“Thirty miles, huh? Pc?” Russ walked away, mumbling, “Thirty miles …”
Each of my hands and feet operated different controls in Fritzy’s wildly pitching cab. The small of my back mapped every jolt. While my eyes sought to untangle the chaotic ground, my ears listened keenly to the radio for word from Tom or Greg.
Somewhere during the last two days our single-file line of heavy tractors had shot the five-mile-wide gap. We did it over the roughest ground we’d yet encountered. The radar never found a crevasse. And Russ got us to Pc.
We spent the morning just past Pc repairing things: adjusting the D8’s track tension and fixing our radar antenna. Greg’s team again got the worst of it. They broke their brake line, their steering controller, their antenna boom, and finally the antenna itself. Jostling over the rough ground had broken a wire inside the antenna box.
Once underway, the radar team moved out ahead of the fleet. For an hour and a half we advanced over the sastrugi when Greg radioed, “We’ve broken the antenna boom again and are returning to your position to make repairs.”
Jeez-sus, what next? Two miles! “Copy that,” I acknowledged. “Crew, close up and plug ’em in. I need everybody in the galley at 1100.”
“Our situation is this,” I explained. “One of our radar antennas is broken beyond our ability to repair. We’re using our only spare, and we’ve a good chance that it, too, will break in this ground. We could easily find ourselves without ground penetrating radar.”
We’d passed the last known crevasses between us and South Pole. Crevasses we didn’t know about were, of course, the greater danger. While I felt we had a low probability of crevasses over the next 170 miles, I’d sought the additional opinion of experts on exactly that question. As of today, I had no response.
We were beat up, yet we yearned to move forward. But my issue was not how anyone felt. One of our charges had been to go over every inch between McMurdo and Pole with ground penetrating radar. Now we questioned whether the PistenBully itself, let alone the radar equipment, could hold up in these sastrugi.
“Like it or not, we may lose our ability to detect crevasses. Our choice would be grim: we turn around and go back to McMurdo … over the route we have proved safe.”
Every face displayed abhorrence for that. I was willing to go the remaining distance without radar. But I wasn’t the only one that mattered.
“If we completely lose it, I don’t want to wait for a decision from NSF like we did last year, waiting for no fuel. I’m going to explain our situation to my boss and apprise Dave and George at NSF. Before I do that, I put this question to you because there is risk. Each of you has the right to your say: Are you willing to proceed to Pole without ground penetrating radar?”
No one wished to discuss it. I gave a scrap of paper to each, asking them to mark their answer with a Y for yes or an N for no.
“Take your time. We’re not going anywhere else today. I’ll look these over a bit later.”
The crew placed their scraps into a bowl without hesitation. Then they left the galley to attend to camp chores and to repair the antenna boom once again.
Stepping back into the comms booth, I raised my boss back in McMurdo via Iridium phone. He’d been on the Ice when Linda went down, and the subject of crevasse detection had been particularly sensitive between us. Now, he was vague in his recollections of our agreement. He didn’t object, however, to waiving the radar requirement at my discretion. And I didn’t tell him of our poll, nor of the results, because I had not yet looked.
Next, I wrote an e-mail to Dave and George, informing them of our situation. I begged for one more effort at securing the glaciologists’ opinions. It was another note in a bottle.
Seated in the comms booth, I leaned back in the caster chair with my hands clasped behind my head, gazing at the ceiling, and drew a deep breath. Finally I sagged forward, rocked to my feet, and reached for the bowl. This was my decision: if one paper said “no,” we turned around.
Unfolding seven papers, I found seven Y s and smiled. Then I stepped outside to let the crew know, and to give each my thanks.
With sastrugi everywhere, we might lose radar at any time. But when we got underway the next day, nature seemed to approve of our decision. She gave us a daylong display of sundogs and haloes: otherworldly wonders of the polar atmosphere in geometric patterns of rainbow-like arcs surrounding the sun, filling the sky. A burning sun pillar appeared first on our eastern horizon, circled with the sun north behind us, then finally due west to our right.
At day’s end, Tom approached me as I was plugging in my tractor. “About two miles out this afternoon, just after we got going, the ground got a lot smoother. It was actually pretty benign on the radar. Maybe it’ll stay like this.”
The evening’s e-mail brought a response from glaciologist Gordon Hamilton, forwarded by George: “It
is about as safe as you can get …”
December 16 was the day I mark in hindsight that we came out of Sastrugi National Park, which had delighted our eyes, wrecked our equipment, and rattled our bones.
This was also the day we started counting down the miles to Pole: 149 miles to go.
While watching the snowy surface for signs of more sastrugi from Fritzy’s cab, I mused over the origin of that field of monsters. All of a sudden, I felt a sinking in my tractor seat. I looked right, then left. My tracks spun faster than the snow went by me. My slip gauge registered 30 percent. Too much. Fritzy sank, slip at 100 percent. I shifted to neutral, cursed, throttled back to idle, and then grabbed the radio.
“Brad …” One word did it.
“I see you. Coming up on your right.”
My feet sank sideways into the soft stuff when I got to the bottom of the ladder, and I fell. Through a face full of snow, I saw exactly what I expected: Fritzy, down on her belly pan, wallowed in.
In a too-familiar drill, I rolled to my chest, shoved my mittened hands down, worked my knees under me, staggered up in the soft snow, and grabbed my shovel and tow strap. Up front, I got down on my knees again and dug out the big shackle attached to Fritzy’s undercarriage. One loop through the shackle, stand up. Unroll the strap. Wait for Brad.
Brad stopped on my right, got out, unhitched Red Rider, got back in, pulled ahead, then backed up to me. I slipped the free loop around his hitch pin, stumbled back to Fritzy, and climbed in. Brad pulled ahead again, taking slack, and looked back through his windshield. We nodded “ready.” He raised three fingers on his left hand. Two. One.
The strap stretched, Fritzy spun her tracks, and lurched forward. We arced up, out, leveled, and ran forward under tow until we footed on firm snow. Resurrected, we finished the drill. Stop the tractor. Get out of the cab. Stagger around the snow. Unhook the tow strap, coil it, exchange a few words, climb back in cab, and try again.
I always felt apologetic to my rescuer. But sooner or later, everybody helped everyone else. Coiling my tow strap, I met Brad between tractors, and said simply, “Thank you.”
Blazing Ice Page 27