Blazing Ice

by John H. Wright

  This foggy morning we weren’t going anywhere. Stretch was already up and at his oatmeal when I rose. After one look outside, I whispered quietly at the bunkroom doors: “Fog. Sleep in.”

  “Odd,” I mentioned softly to Stretch. “Coming down the Leverett last year we ran into fog and big wet flakes. Remember that?”

  Stretch squinted into his memories on the galley ceiling. “Yep. It was foggy then. Real foggy. But it didn’t last, once we got below it.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. We did get below it. There’s something weird about the weather around here that I just don’t get. It’s wet.”

  We’d seen the dry, katabatic dumps off the Plateau up here. But even last year we dragged our way through soggy stuff at the bottom. Those snows came from gyres off the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas and swept along the mountain fronts. This year we got into wet storms at CAMP 20. By the time we got to the base of the Leverett, our surface was crumbly ice, not snow.

  Mike Roberts tipped me off last year to an ephemeral lake of liquid water he’d once seen at the base of the Shackleton Glacier. That was one of the big glaciers we drove past after turning at FORK. Mike’s lake was a shallow ponding of melt water, perched on the ice. He hinted we might find something like that one day at the base of the Leverett. Liquid water in a shallow lake could hide a multitude of crevasses.

  Hidden crevasses may be today’s or tomorrow’s problems. But liquid water around here, even just wet snow, portended something else: warmth. What did that mean for the Ross Ice Shelf? Two-thirds of our route crossed it. In March of 2000 the big B-15 iceberg broke off the Shelf’s edge into the Ross Sea. It corked off McMurdo Sound, and among other things kept us from getting that extra fuel we needed last year. Calving off the seaward margins is the typical way ice shelves shed mass. But in February 2002, over on the Weddell Sea side of the continent, the entire Larsen B Ice Shelf completely disintegrated in three days. Glaciologists called that event rapid ice melt. I guess so. Climate folks were now talking about catastrophic impacts of whole ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melting rapidly.

  If an ice melt was going on here, slow or fast, we’d see it first near the ice shelf margins: at the seaward edge and possibly at the continental shore, such as at the Leverett base. That’d be something, to find an open-water channel at the shore instead of ice. For that matter, I wondered, what good would McMurdo be if Ross Island on which it sat was surrounded by open water? Ross Island lay right at the seaward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. The base of the Leverett might become the next southernmost deepwater port. Our modest effort to cross the Ross Ice Shelf would become a footnoted “so what?”

  Last year’s snow pits at the base of the Leverett had shown us thin lenses of blue ice. Liquid water had been there, but it was all a mystery to me. I called the region the Lake District. The D8R had spent nearly a year in it. I wish it could tell me what that was like.

  I made coffee and posted a note on our whiteboard: “Next weather call at 0900.” Nothing to do but wait. We had a good run up to this point.

  Our return trip over Plateau had gone well. What took an exhausting nineteen days to cover on the outbound leg, took only six coming back. Our road-work through the swamp held up. Fritzy and the Elephant Man wallowed only once. No shuttling. One broken sled: a sastrugi snagged a ski on our spreader bar rig. Picking up the sidetracked tank sleds added no noticeable burden. We hit SPT-18 at the top of the Leverett early enough on the sixth day to bail over the headwall and make camp in the Parade Grounds.

  This morning’s fog arrested our northbound momentum. I resorted to posting weather calls on the galley wall, and at 0900, I asked my eyes to join me for a recon. From thirty paces in the direction in which we thought lay the next green flag, Greg and I turned around to find the big red living module nearly invisible through the pea soup. Turning again to face down the trail, we stood several minutes peering for any sign of a green flag.

  “Not for me. You?” I asked.

  “I see nothing.”

  Our boot prints guided us back to the living module. We barely made those out in the flat light. I erased 0900 on the whiteboard, and replaced it with 1000.

  At 1000 hours and at 1100 hours, our recon brought the same results: no flag, no go. We made an early lunch. If the weather lifted by noon, we stood a good chance getting to Quadzilla that evening.

  Greg brought the binoculars for the noon recon. Again, we followed our boot prints to the end of our beaten path. Then we ventured another hundred feet farther. For five minutes we stared in a promising direction.

  “If we can sneak forward and spot a flag through this stuff, we could lay a track out to it with the PistenBully. We could go flag to flag following the PistenBully tracks,” Greg offered.

  As long as we could spot a flag. A certain track ten feet in front was as good as a flag at a quarter mile. Trying it would break our frustrating idleness. “Good idea,” I agreed. “You see a flag?”

  Greg, the binoculars still at his eyes, said, “I see one out there that comes and goes. Take a look.”

  “Point,” I asked, taking the binoculars.

  For some time I looked in that direction. Then for a brief moment the fog thinned. The washed-out but unmistakable form of a stick of bamboo with a banner dangling from the top appeared.

  “I see it!” Then it was gone again. “Greg, we don’t have any black flags for at least the next mile, so that’s a green one. I’m game. Let’s go back and tell the others to start their engines and hitch up. Good eye.”

  “If you lose sight of the vehicle in front of you, or the tracks you’re following, stop right where you are. Radio the rest of us that you have stopped. We’ll all stop then and wait until you can see. I’m going to ride with Greg in the PistenBully. I know this Leverett route best of any of us.”

  We’d not be steering by GPS. The crevasses we knew about were too close to the road to trust GPS with it usual position errors. We’d be looking for green flags, and they’d be hard enough to spot. Greg and I would make many stops.

  “Brad, don’t run over us, we’re that little red thing in front of you. John V., bring up Fritzy, please. And Judy, you’ll have four pairs of eyes. Have a good time. Now let’s see what we can do.”

  Descending from the Parade Grounds, our fleet proceeded flag to flag, making lots of stops, and some of those lasted as much as ten minutes. Greg and I advanced as far as we dared, never losing sight of the flag behind us. Then we’d stop and wait, until Greg spotted one in front of us through foggy partings. We covered three miles that way, and lost quite a bit of altitude. As we pulled abreast of the next green flag, Greg announced he could see the one past it.

  “Really?” I asked, surprised.

  “Really.” Moments later he said, “I can see two!”

  I still couldn’t see the first one.

  “Are you following our tracks okay?” I radioed back to Brad.

  “No problem,” Brad answered.

  “Take off and lay us some tracks, Greg!”

  The second flag was actually a wooden post marking a turning point. Crevasses lay within two hundred feet of it. Jim Lever found one of them last year in a close encounter.

  “We marked it with several black flags. They’re off to our right. Stop at the post. The green flag line turns left there.”

  Greg stepped out of the PistenBully with the binoculars. The heavy tractors stood at idle behind us. In a minute, Greg popped back into the Pisten-Bully: “Got it!”

  We reached the new flag. From there we spotted the next three. Within a mile the snowy surface stretched out beyond the last flag that even Greg saw. Ten miles and two thousand feet below our start, we broke through the bottom of the fog.

  “Twenty miles to Quadzilla!” I radioed. We’d drop another thousand feet to get there. The fleet picked up speed to seven miles per hour.

  The Leverett opened up, no longer constrained by the narrows at Mount Beazley. The glazed surface that a month before had born
e our year-old tracks we now found covered with blistered snow, flaked into icy slabs half a foot thick. There was no glaze and no sign of our tracks. There had been heat here while we were on the Plateau. A quick freeze had raised the blisters. It looked like scablands. And frost rime was everywhere. Today’s fog had brought that.

  Such heat! One of these days we might really find a lake at the bottom.

  The fog blanket overhead hid the distant crags familiar to us. We spotted a dark dot afloat in the gray where the horizon should be. We arrived minutes later. Quadzilla’s left front rested on a stack of wooden blocks. We’d left it standing straight up. Now it precariously tipped left, no doubt settling under the same heat that blistered the surface.

  A month-old camp circle surrounded Quadzilla. Though we couldn’t see the tracks marking that perimeter, we knew the circle was still safe. Russ wanted the energy module parked within an extension cord length of the disabled tractor, so Greg pulled past it while Brad moved in. Brad unhitched and cleared away the drift snow around Quadzilla with Red Rider’s blade.

  “Interesting day,” I remarked to Greg. “Good job, bringing us through that fog.”

  Before turning in, I wrote Jerry Marty and B. K. that we’d completed the Plateau crossing in good time and without incident. We had plenty of fuel and camped this night within forty miles of our depot at the Leverett base. I thanked them especially for topping our tractors’ tanks before we left. That got us fifty miles down the trail for free. And I thanked them once again for their hospitality.

  Under a cloudless sky in the morning, Russ and Greg went to work on Quadzilla’s drive track. John V. saw to oil changes and maintenance on the other tractors. Stretch and Judy looked after our sleds. Brad, Tom, and I filled in where we could.

  By late afternoon, Russ fired up Quadzilla and paced her around the camp like a high-spirited pony. His grinning thumbs-up through the tractor’s tinted windows proclaimed all was well. We finished the afternoon rearranging our sled trains, allowing now for the resurrected tractor.

  At the evening meal, I remarked, “Thank you all for your good work today. Tomorrow’s an easy day to the depot. But tomorrow is a special day for another reason: It’s Russ’s sixtieth birthday! Last year we celebrated it at the top of this glacier. Tomorrow, we’ll celebrate it at the bottom … on our way back from Pole! That’s a good excuse to sleep in. Breakfast at 0900. Engines on at 1000.”

  But next morning’s weather wouldn’t celebrate with us. Blue skies gave way again to fog and a moody, gray overcast. Our late breakfast satisfied our hunger cravings, but we’d have no sun-basking, and no spectacular views to incite our wonder. It was a day for leaning forward and getting down the trail.

  We covered the downhill in good time, never losing quarter-mile visibility. The foot of the glacier held no lake, not even a puddle. Not this year, anyway. An hour’s stop to gather the depot, then five more miles through the flat light footed us firmly on the Ross Ice Shelf once again. I grilled steaks that evening, John V. prepared shrimp and horseradish sauce, and Judy baked a chocolate birthday cake.

  The Transantarctic Mountains vanished. We knew they were near, but we saw no horizon, and rarely a shadow. Only our green flags, ghosting about in flat light, gave us direction. Days dragged on as if we moved through a dream of uncertain consequence: neither good nor bad, neither joyful nor foreboding. The fog simply existed, and we drifted through it in straight lines.

  Occasionally we passed a post that told us we had come to a turning, yet once we turned onto the new course, we faced again that same pervading white, dotted by dark green flags leading to a vanishing point. Our instruments informed us of record mileages: seventy-five to ninety miles a day. We were closing on McMurdo, fast. But it didn’t feel like it.

  We stopped at a post labeled ASTER 2. There, we quickly reassembled the radar to probe for a shortcut to FORK. If we could cutoff CAMP 20, the shortcut could shave fifteen miles off the whole route. Tom, Stretch, Greg, and I departed the main fleet and prospected the first ten of the shortcut’s miles. We found eight crevasses. The time invested in drilling and certifying them for crossing would cost us two days. I thought that a bad trade for the four hours, two going and two returning, we might shave off the future route. Plus, we had no certainty those eight would prove safe, and there was a high probability of finding more crevasses beyond them.

  I ran the radar on this foray. At ten miles I called it off. The easy shortcut wasn’t there. We returned to the idled fleet at ASTER 2, resumed advance on our proven route, and still posted fifty miles that day.

  January 9 we recovered our last depot of tank sleds where the Pole tractor had broken down, and we moved on through the flat light. By this time the Elephant Man towed the PistenBully behind its train, riding a pair of plastic recovery skis.

  Tom developed what he believed were kidney stones, a painful medical condition. Tom, John V., and I raised the resident doctor in McMurdo by Iridium phone. His remote diagnosis confirmed Tom did have kidney stones, but he advised we make no extraordinary preparations for a medevac. The doctor prescribed medications that we had on hand, urging Tom drink plenty of fluids and get lots of rest.

  The doctor’s reluctance to standby a medevac surprised me. The USAP flew medevacs frequently. But that was a doctor’s call. A medevac, in any event, would be difficult now. No day of the previous six offered weather when a fixed-wing aircraft could make a safe landing at our position. Overcast, low ceilings, total loss of horizon and surface definition … until that changed, an airborne medevac was not possible. We were then fifty miles north of RIS-1, Year Two’s farthest south.

  “We could have Tom back in McMurdo in seventy-two hours,” Stretch offered.

  He was right. Our road was giving us unimagined mobility. We might find the physical reserve to put three days back-to-back and get Tom to the doctor’s care. But no matter how nobly intended, that kind of push heightened risk of injury or accident to the rest of us from shear fatigue. I offered the hurry-up option to the doctor, keeping my concerns for the crew to myself. We could still do it, no matter what.

  “Not necessary. Just keep him as comfortable as possible, and let me know of any change in his condition,” the doctor said.

  “You okay with that?” I asked Tom, who’d overheard the doctor’s advice.

  “Oh yeah. I’ve had them before. You can’t do anything with these stones except wait for them to pass. I can ride in my bunk, or here in the energy module. It won’t be great, but it wouldn’t be any better in McMurdo, either,” Tom explained.

  “John V., you are now our first medical caregiver. Are you okay with traversing?” I asked, thankful to have discovered his emergency medical expertise long after I hired him as mechanic.

  “They both say it’s okay, so I’m okay with it. But like the Doc says,” John V. added, “notify him of any change in condition.”

  Our eyes strained through the flat light, mile after mile. I visited Tom midday and evenings. He suffered stoically.

  On January 11, the weather cleared. A long line of low clouds lay off our southern horizon. That’s where the fog went. Before us to the north, the brilliant blue sky bore a blazing yellow sun. Tom woke that morning, relieved from passing three stones during the night. Color had returned to his face. He smiled delicately at the breakfast table.

  “Tom! You look better!”

  He brightened. “I do feel a little better! I’m sore and I’ve lost a lot of sleep. But better. I still want to ride in my bunk today, though. I don’t feel perfect.”

  “No problem. John V., that is a change in condition. Will you please call the Doc tonight?”

  That evening we passed SOUTH and made camp a hundred miles from the Shear Zone. Tom took a turn for the worse during the day. Different kidney, more stones.

  “John V., let me know what the Doc says. Tell him we’re now in helicopter range from McMurdo. We’ve plenty of aviation-grade fuel with us if he wants to reconsider a medevac.”

&
nbsp; Then I took Greg and Brad, along with Fritzy and Red Rider, a quarter mile back to SOUTH. We dug out the cache of twenty-four fuel drums lashed atop the old navy sled I’d “stolen” from McMurdo last year. The cache insured our five tractors could get to the Shear Zone if we needed the fuel.

  But Tom was ailing. If a medevac had come, here was aviation fuel at the limits of helicopter range. If we’d been another fifty or sixty miles south, a chopper could have refueled here, made the distance, come back and refueled again, and still got back to McMurdo. This depot was going to stay.

  Red Rider pushed up a platform of snow three feet above the natural surface. Tomorrow morning, after that platform had set up and hardened, we’d park the sled on top of Brad’s work. For now, Greg headed back to camp with Brad. I stayed behind for a solitary remembrance of reaching SOUTH that first year, and our wretched sojourn there the second. After a last look at the post, I climbed into Fritzy, turned my back on SOUTH, and gave it not another thought.

  John V. met me outside the living module while I was plugging in. “Tom and I talked to the Doc,” he said, “and we went over the changes … first better, then bad again. The Doc still says we should just bring him in. No medevac.”

  “All right, John. Thank you. How’s Tom doing?”

  “He hurts, but he’s okay and understands.”

  Friday, January 13, was a good day. Tom was still ailing, but we crossed the dorniks and camped within striking distance of McMurdo. Unless something drastic happened, we’d be going in tomorrow. That evening, we off-loaded the PistenBully and rigged it for radar. It would run the last twenty miles to the Shear Zone under its own power.