Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The ramp, however, had turned out not to be a ramp. It had been a big shoulder, around which the broad glacier to the left had curved on its way down. So after intense efforts to climb the rugged shoulder and cross it, they had been left looking down onto the glacier they could have walked right up, and they had had to descend to this glacier and then restart their climb. It had been one of Amundsen’s biggest mistakes; it had cost them days, and a great deal of backbreaking effort; and in retrospect it seemed obvious that the broad curving glacier had been the way. In fact they had had to beat their dogs to get them to start up the shoulder, as the dogs had been all for taking the glacier road to the left. Even the dogs had known better.

  But that was the kind of thing that happened when exploring unknown territory, when struggling through the mountains, of terra incognita for the first time. It was the kind of experience that humanity would never have again, not even on other planets. Of course there were wilderness adventure tours these days being dropped in Alaska or Mongolia or the Himalayas without maps or compasses or GPS or radio, to try to reproduce that experience. But no matter how they tried, Val did not believe what they were doing was really the same. It was impossible to regain that mental state, of wanting to know and not knowing.

  In Amundsen’s case, the mistaken route had been only the beginning of their troubles. By an unhappy twist of fate, the glacier they had chosen to climb, the Axel Heiberg, turned out to be one of the steepest and most broken glacial ramps to the polar plateau in all the Transantarctics. Its upper section rose eight thousand feet in less than twenty miles, in a series of ice cataracts that fell across the glacier from sidewall to sidewall, making them unavoidable. Only the champion skiing of Amundsen’s lead skier Bjaaland—one of the best skiers alive at that time—and the generally superb ice skills of all the Norwegians, had gotten them (and their surefooted dogs!) up the thing.

  So repeating the Amundsen route was hard enough even if you decided to pass on the mistake at the beginning, and stuck to the Axel Heiberg throughout. Most of the previous Footsteps expeditions had taken the glacier route, which had been the Amundsen descent route as well, and so still following in the footsteps (reversed) while saving strength for the difficulties that lay above. It made sense.

  And Val’s group this time was not made up of Norwegian champion skiers and hardened polar explorers. On the contrary, it was a somewhat less skillful group than usual. Not that all five didn’t have many adventure expeditions under their belt; indeed as they wolfed down hors d’oeuvres and cooked their main meal, they were hearing story after story from Jack and Jim about climbing the Seven Summits (meaning the tallest one on each continent), kayaking down the Baltoro, completing the ice hat trick (meaning North Pole, Greenland and South Pole), and so forth. The adventures were endless. But the expertise still seemed thin to Val. The husband-and-wife team, Jorge and Elspeth Royce-Paulo, took photographs and wrote articles for the outdoor magazines and onlines; they were well-known. Jack Michaels and Jim McFeriss were friends from the Bay Area, both lawyers, and had climbed and gone on treks together a few times before. And Ta Shu, although he had spent many years wandering in the Himalayas, was around sixty. He was one of the Woos, a feng shui guru. During the days he wore heavy black sunglasses which contained fiberop cameras and a phone to transmit his narration and three-D video back to a facemask TV audience in China. While hiking his head swiveled about and he talked to this audience almost continuously, but in the tent he kept the glasses off, thankfully. Val’s impression of feng shui was that it was one of those ancient modes of knowledge that was so deep and profound that no one alive could actually explain it, and indeed when she asked him what he made of the landscapes Ta Shu had said very little, usually “This is a good place.” Although it could have been that his English kept him from offering the long version of his analyses; it was limited enough to make Val wonder why he didn’t just give up and use a computer translation program.

  In any case, all these clients were taking on something a little bit harder than most of what they had done before. And so Val was not sure that they should be taking on the mistaken traverse.

  But Jack was. “I think we should follow the original route,” he said as Jorge and Elspeth ladled beef stroganoff into their bowls. “Let’s do it just like they did it, I mean that’s what we came here for.”

  “We already skipped the ice shelf,” Elspeth pointed out.

  “That’s because it’s gone! If it were here we would do it. But this part of the route is just like it was when they came through, and so we should follow them, or else what’s the point?”

  The others sat on their sleeping bags and ground pads, eating and looking at Jack or Val, as if this was going to turn into some kind of confrontation between them. That was the last thing Val wanted, however. She said to them, “It’s your trek. You can do what you want.”

  Jack nodded, lips pursed, as if he had won an argument. Val ignored that and focused on the others. They looked uncertain to her, even Jim, and so she unfolded the USGS topo of the area and traced with a finger the two alternative routes, and then only ate her stroganoff, and listened to them debate the pros and cons. Slowly they began to come down on the side of following the exact route. Either they couldn’t conceptualize the amount of sheer work it would add to the trek, or else they were just into the idea of it. Or else Jack was intimidating them. Group dynamics were such a mess.

  Jack and Jim argued for the mistake; the Royce-Paulos did not seem to care, or were perhaps not enthusiastic, but not willing to say so. Ta Shu was becoming a kind of tie-breaker, unless Val herself got involved. He looked at her, perhaps for guidance. She said, “It’s no worse than the icefalls above. I suppose doing it might get us tuned for the icefalls.”

  He said, “We came to see what Amundsen saw.”

  “Good man,” Jack said with a wink to Jim.

  So the next morning they broke camp and loaded the sledge, and started up the shoulder of Mount Betty, onto the false ramp benching up the side of the Herbert Range.

  Immediately the steepness of the slope began to give them trouble. It was windless, the sun right in their faces, and the snow on the slope pretty soft for Antarctica. Val had everyone switch from skis to snowshoes to gain traction, but even in the cold air it was hot work. And it did not help that the snow concealed frequent crevasses in the ice below. The air was on average ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in Amundsen’s time, and as a result all Antarctic ice was moving downhill a bit more quickly. For the most part this was noticeable only to beakers, but on steeper slopes one saw evidence of fresh ice spills much more often than when Val had first come down.

  As here and now: a fan of blue shatter ice, splayed out over the smooth white tilt they were climbing, the broken ice still sharp-edged. The hyperarid winds would quickly round all exposed edges, and indeed blow away chunks this size in a year or two, so this was clearly a recent spill. Which meant they had to be extra careful when crossing snow bridges over crevasses, or moving under seracs. And on this day they were having to do a lot of both.

  Val’s GPS gave her a detailed map of the slope, which pinpointed their location and all the crevasses out of sight above them. So she did not have to climb ahead of the rest to find a way, as Bjaaland had done continuously for Amundsen. Which meant she was available to help haul their sledge. This was the latest German lightweight wonder, built by the same firm that made the winning sleds and luges in the Olympics, and all the gear and food for all six of them fit into its sleek blue body, and yet it weighed less than three hundred pounds, most of that food; a miracle of all the latest in materials science; but still damned hard to pull up a slope this steep and soft.

  So Val stayed in the lead harness and hauled the sledge, teamed with Jack, then Jim, then Elspeth, then Ta Shu, then Jorge. Up left, then right, then left, switchbacking up steep ramps of snow-covered ice, looking down into cobalt crevasses. Hard work indeed, which on Amundsen’s trek had been done mostly by the d
ogs. Really the problems for the two groups were almost reversed; Val’s group knew the way but had to pull their load, while the Norwegians had had their dogs to pull, but had not known where they were going. Val much preferred her group’s problem; it was hot work, but relatively safe. Heading into unmapped territory with limited food and no chance of rescue; that was a situation she did not envy. Now the problems were more mundane: “Try not to sweat,” Val reminded them after one especially aerobic stomp up a hard snow ramp. “Thermostat yourselves. Even your smartfabrics can’t do it all.”

  “You’d have to be naked not to sweat on a pitch this hard,” Jack called up cheerfully. With a small smirk. His glacier glasses were a glossy gold color, which made him look like a bug. All their sunglasses were at full power, and their solar earbands were the usual prisming metallic blue. Aliens on ice.

  “A naked head is usually enough,” Val advised.

  The sun blazed off the snow. Even with sunglasses at full power, one’s pupils shrank so far down that the brilliant world appeared somehow dark underneath it all. A steepening blue-white hillside, rising shattered above them. They were traversing now across the great shoulder of the Herbert Range, so that their right boots always hit higher and dug deeper than their left boots, which quickly grew tiresome. Traverses were tough.

  Val was enjoying herself. This was where the years of making her living as a professional beast of burden paid off. Oh of course she hadn’t been a pure beast of burden, like the porters in the Himalaya; but a good mountain guide usually ended up carrying a load as heavy as a porter’s, to try to make things easier on the clients. Just a Sherpa with software, as the guide saying went. So no matter how many trips these clients took in a year, or how much they worked out at home, they were still not on their feet humping loads as often as she was, not by miles and miles. Probably they spent an hour a day doing some Stairmasters and thinking that meant they were in good shape. But now, Val thought with a hard little grin, they were on the Stairmaster from hell. They had come up about the height of two World Trade Towers at this point, and had about two Empire State Buildings to go. And they were beginning to suffer. Even Jack was huffing and puffing. Which was one of the many reasons Val had not tried to talk him out of taking this route; she was hauling the sledge by herself now and still pulling ahead, waiting for them to catch up, then taking off again; not a bad lesson for Mr. Jack Michaels to contemplate, she tried not to think consciously. And meanwhile she was able to stomp uphill and look around as she did, relaxed, continuing to enjoy the views in a way that the tiring clients couldn’t.

  And it was easy to take the icescapes down here for granted anyway, because they were so ubiquitous, and so spectacular everywhere, but in a fractal way, self-similar at all scales, so that one lost perspective. It was like becoming an ant and hiking through the ice tray in your refrigerator; there are scores of beautiful ice formations in every refrigerator, but how many people notice? You had to be a connoisseur of ice. And you had to be in good enough shape to be able to pay attention; for you did pay; work hard enough and you would stop paying attention, and it would get easier. It was a very physical aesthetics. But Val was more than up to it, and now she hauled the sledge up step after step, deep in her own rhythms, enjoying the dense cross-cut textures of the dry snow underfoot, and the ice dolmens rearing out of the snow to left and right, each wind-sculpted blue block a work of art, a pulsing and it seemed almost living thing. The squeak of her snowshoes and her breath in her ears were the only sounds, all in rhythm together, like music. She was a dromomaniac, in love with this walking uphill. It was movement as pleasure, movement as the rhythm of her thoughts, movement as meditation. Looking down at the bright microtextures of the snow underfoot, there was a lot of time to think; this kind of walking was measured in hours. Her mind wandered, out of her control. She thought of Steve again, touching each wind-rounded shard of memory without pain. She thought of her grandmother, for the first time without pain there either. They had lived together in her off-seasons for the last five years of her grandmother’s life, from ninety to ninety-five, in the old family house in Wyoming. Annie Kenning, a tough woman with a bright laugh. I was a wild one, Val, you better believe it. I was taller than you before I shrivelled up like this! That strength of yours didn’t come from nowhere! One morning in what turned out to be their last summer together Val had walked out of the old house and found Annie standing on the top step of a stepladder, reaching up into one of the old apple trees to pick a high apple—this just three months after a broken hip sustained in a fall off the front porch, and Annie still unsteady on stairs or even on level ground. Frightened, Val had run over yelling at her, almost scaring her off the ladder, and had helped her down scolding her, what could you be thinking, you could kill yourself, and her lower lip had stuck out and suddenly at the bottom of the ladder she said Shut up! Shut up! I used to climb all over these trees! Don’t you tell me what to do! Once when I was fifteen I jumped from one tree to the next one over! And that was just a couple weeks ago. She had sat down on the grass and Val had sat next to her, an arm around her. Just a couple weeks ago, she insisted. And now I’m ninety-four.

  Beep beep beep! A break in the bright dark snow ahead. Val came back to the present with a start, looked around. The others were behind and below. Val inspected the slope above, whistled, checked her GPS. They had reached a section where knowing the location of the crevasses was no great help, as they were everywhere. That meant crossing snowbridges, which was always chancy, and never more so than in an icefall, where the ice forming the two sides of the crevasse were offset vertically—in this case, the uphill side about ten meters higher than the side she now stood on. And the only snowbridge filling the crevasse had a gap at its upper end. Crouched on the snowbridge, looking down into the depths of the crack, Val sighed. It would be an operation to get up and over it, and there wasn’t a good alternative as far as she could see, by eye or on her GPS. Well, that was ascending an icefall for you. Endless delay, hassle, precaution, despite which a gnawing sensation of danger, as the deep icy cracks underfoot could not be ignored. Also, there was too little to do for those not dealing with the problem directly. So she worked as fast as she could to set a deadman belay, digging the anchor deep in the snow while being sure not to degrade the structural integrity of the bridge. By the time all the others had caught up she was prepared mentally, and she got Jack and Ta Shu to belay her.

  She jumped across the narrow gap and hit the wall of ice with crampon tips and two ice axes, and stuck like a fly. Like Spiderwoman, yes! Then up, one move at a time, always three points stuck in the ice, axe axe, toe toe, axe axe, and quickly up and over the top, onto thin hard snow. Quickly she pounded in a long snow stake, which left her free to walk about and pound in a couple more. Despite her admonitions to the clients, she was sweating. She unzipped her parka and took it off, and as she was now standing in a windless bowl of ice like a big reflecting solar cooker, she took off her sweater and shirt as well, right down to a sky-blue jogging top. The insectile stares of the clients below seemed to convey notions that she was indulging in some Antarctic cold macho; no doubt they were still cold; but they wouldlearn. Now Jack was clipped to the line and jumping across and climbing up, making it look like a lark—as indeed it was, with the rope top-belaying him.

  Against her bare sweaty skin the air was frigid, but she didn’t stay wet for long. She could actually feel the sweat wafting away. Against that evaporative cooling the radiant heat of the sun was a palpable hit, as from an open fire, so distinct that she turned to get the sunlight on her back as well, doing a little rotisserie. The side of her exposed to the sun was hot, the side in the shade of her own body was cold; it felt like there was about sixty degrees difference between the two.

  She got the clients up and over the wall one by one. Then they all pulled the sledge up to them through a jumar, which allowed the rope up but would not let it slip back down—“one, two, three, haul!” After that they sat beside the sled
ge; everyone was now following Val’s example with the thermostatting, and it looked like beach blanket south, for a few minutes anyway. But they were only ten meters higher, and twenty farther on, with several crevasses to go before they could simply slog uphill again. “It’s going to take all day to go the next hundred yards!” Jorge exclaimed.

  “Oh it shouldn’t take quite that long,” Val said cheerfully. “But I guess we’d better get to it.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Not again.”

  “You slavedriver.”

  “Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.” Val put on the sledge harness, then her sungloves. “Come on, let’s go.”

  So they did. Up here the ice proved to be broken in a series of broad ledges, like a giant’s steps. The crevasses were frequent, and the tortured ice gleamed in the wild shear zones walling them in on left and right. The work was unrelenting, and it took careful thermostatting to keep from sweating, then to keep from getting over-chilled after the hot spots. The view changed slowly. While waiting for the others Val looked back and down and out—two thousand feet down, thirty or forty miles out—over the jumbled frozen surface of the Ross Sea, in this month all white all the way to the horizon, the big icebergs scattered like a great fleet of torpedoed aircraft carriers. Mount Betty was now below them; the rest of the Herbert Range still loomed to their right, with a spur running off the range blocking the way ahead of them. To get to that spur they had to cross the bowl at the head of the Sargent Glacier, a little glacier high in its own basin, falling down to the Axel Heiberg on their left.