Blazing Ice (10 page)

Stretch said good-bye in the crowded galley at breakfast. He'd redeploy soon and join his sweetheart waiting in New Zealand. Both had wintered-over in McMurdo. Both looked homeward now.

Stretch had ridden in the PistenBully with me to GAW when we gingerly searched those first twenty-three miles. That was our first trial with the radar. When he entered our project we knew nothing of the Shear Zone except what we imagined. Now he was leaving, before we had it figured out. Thinking of the long road to HFS, I thanked him for helping us get started, for going to school with us.

“Hang in there.” He winked. “You'll get it.”

Stretch caught a plane through another sucker hole. We'd pick up his replacement for our next trip out. Eric rotated back to the fold of mountaineers at McMurdo's Field Safety and Training. We'd take out his replacement, too. This morning “we” were Shaun, Russ, and me.

The three of us went to find Allan Delaney straight away. We'd not met him in New Hampshire because he was attached to a CRREL office in Alaska. He had seen the Shear Zone during the 1995 project. I had heard he was tough as nails; I did not expect a man so deliberately thoughtful and considerate. He was slender, wiry, and wore medium-length sandy brown hair, a trimmed brush mustache, and metal-rimmed glasses. He listened well, and gave you his full attention before he spoke.

At the breakfast table in the now-deserted galley, we briefed each other on our work in the field and his work with Helo-Ops. Allan had seen the device we made for slinging the radar under the helicopter. But he urged that we test it locally before we took it to the field. In the off-season, Helo-Ops was adamant about not fixing a hard external antenna to the skids. A sling-rig was our only choice. But our other mission involved an externally mounted infrared camera.

“And they modified the chopper's cargo basket for that?”

“I saw that, too,” Allan explained. “They have cut a three-inch hole in the bottom of the basket. The camera lens looks through that hole.”

Our radar antenna was housed in a one-footsquare, eight-inch-tall plastic box. It looked straight down. Any metal between it and the snow distorted the radar signal.

“Would they let us cut a larger hole in that basket?”

“They were reluctant to do that,” Allan stated flatly.

“All right,” I decided. “Russ, Shaun, work with Allan to get this sling-rig tested. I'm going to find the infrared guy and see what's up. See you later today.”

Across town from the galley, the wind curled nastily around warehouse-looking buildings. There was no new snow with it, only old stuff beating itself to pieces, pelting my face with tiny ice grains.

The infrared guy, Don Atwood, occupied a cubicle office located in another metal-sided building and was a PhD of something. He was bright-eyed, fair-haired, and boyish with enthusiasm. I'd seen his infrared pictures of crevasses on the Castle Rock hill near McMurdo. Like stripes on a zebra, the snow-covered crevasses stood out in sharp, black contrast to the grays of the unbroken surface. We hoped infrared would show something like that on the Shear Zone flats.

“I take it you are ready to fly?” I asked.

“Just as soon as the weather lets us.” Don had built a spring-damped mount to isolate his camera from helicopter vibrations. He'd tested the apparatus near town.

I briefed Don on our found crevasses and open-access holes, and how the bridge planks and snowmobiles were laid out. Then I found a vacant cubicle and settled in to write electronic reports.

Lunchtime found me back in the galley at an empty table by a window. Outside, the wind blew as stiff as ever. Gazing blankly at the weather forcing our inactivity, I played out endless mental scenarios of crossing the Shear Zone. A young man attached to the National Science Foundation broke my reverie.

“Mind if I join you?” Brian Stone asked, setting his tray on the table.

Years ago Brian performed a memorable Elvis impersonation in McMurdo. Now the tall, dark-haired, and clean-cut fellow worked for NSF's Office of Polar Programs. His open smile showed his interest and enthusiasm. I was delighted to see him again. Naturally, he wanted to know how things were going.

I explained our progress and immediate plans. I also told him my concerns for the drilling. A fifteen-feet-thick bridge did not intimidate me, but a twenty-foot bridge or thicker did. Bench cuts and a mining method called vertical-crater-retreat might work, but all that seemed too complicated for this project. It'd take a lot of time. And it wouldn't be safe.

“Do you have a hot-water drill?” he asked.

“A what?”

“A hot-water drill. The science seismic crews use them for making shot holes.”

I'd seen seismic drilling at Central West Antarctica, a deep field science camp years ago. But those drills were large mechanical devices. I'd never seen a hot-water drill.

“It's small, and it works like a steam cleaner,” Brian explained. “You shovel snow into a tub, a heater melts it. You keep shoveling snow into the hot water and melt more. A pump sends the hot water down a hose. The hot water comes out the end, and you melt a hole in the snow as you lower the hose.”

“How deep does it drill?” I asked, noting Russ approaching our table with his own radar on.

“Well, as long as you're drilling snow, not ice, it'll drill as deep as the hose is long. Maybe a hundred feet.”

Russ searched out the back of his brain: “I think I seen one of them once.”

“To answer your question: no. We don't have a hot-water drill,” I sighed. Russ's shoulders dropped heavily.

“How'd you like to try one?” Brian asked. Russ looked up tentatively.

“What, next year?” I asked.

“I mean right now. I think there's one on station, out at Willy Field.”

“Yeah! That's the one I saw. I knew I'd seen one,” cried Russ. “I think we used it once to make a hot tub!”

The promise of chucking the augers gripped both of us. Brian arranged for a seismic crew, now waiting in town for a flight to the interior, to help us find the drill and get it working. Russ broke off from his work at the helo hangar to join them. Brian may have saved the day in more ways than one. We only looked down forty feet with our radar. If some leviathan were lurking below that, a hundred-foot drill hole might find it.

After more report writing that afternoon, I was back in the galley at dinner time. Russ found us all seated together: me, Shaun, Allan, and Don. Russ danced a jig, singing, “I found it! I found it under a snow drift at Willy! We dug it out and it's on a
sled
! All we got to do is take it out there!”

“Try it out?”

“No. But that's nothing. They showed me how it works. That's all I need. I can make it work. I'll make the bits for your different dynamite tomorrow. We got to round up some glycol. Give me tomorrow to work on it.”

Leaning back in my chair and smiling now, I caught Brian Stone's eye. He sat at a different table but followed the action at ours across the galley floor. I signaled thumbs up. He returned a wink and a smile.

Outside our window, snow devils swirled furiously through town.

The morning of November 11 came clear, cold, and calm. Our chopper departed McMurdo with infrared. Mount Erebus lay off to our left. The twelve-thousand-foot active volcano formed the main mass of Ross Island, and on this day every crevasse on its frozen flanks stood out with uncommon clarity.

The stony ground of White Island, and Minna Bluff beyond it, lay off to our right. These were our landmarks. Some day we might see what lay beyond them. For now, we flew over the ice shelf, following our route to the Shear Zone camp—twenty minutes in flight, three hours in a PistenBully. The storm had wiped out most of our old tracks.

I sat in the rear seat of the helicopter. Don and the pilot sat up front. Just outside the helicopter, a long cargo basket contained the camera. Don held up a small viewing screen attached to a cable that ran through the left side door jamb into the basket.

“I'll be recording everything as a moving video,” Don explained over the intercom. “We'll have a running time and date stamp on the image. We can isolate stills of anything you want when we get back to the office.”

Though we'd reviewed our flight plans back at the hangar, approaching the Shear Zone now at three thousand feet above the ground, the question of what to do first came up. Don wanted to monitor the camera continuously. The pilot looked back, asking, “What do you want to do?”

“Let's hover over the camp area first and see if he sees anything with the camera. We can get our bearings from there,” I suggested.

“Good enough. I got the camp at twelve o'clock,” replied the pilot.

Shortly, Don held up the screen so we could see the bright white images of our Jamesway and camp equipment. He was already pleased the apparatus was working. So was I.

We descended lazily to one thousand feet, targeting the two black drums next to the GAW post. Don picked them up easily.

“HFS looks just like that, three miles due east of GAW,” I explained through the intercom.

We flew over the Shear Zone slowly enough to appreciate all three miles. The pilot easily spotted our black boards against the white snow, and announced
when we passed over them. Don, intently watching the video screen, saw them too, in infrared.

I could do little except gaze out the cockpit window. The snowmobiles parked at Crevasses 4 and 5 marked as far as we had gone with our road. From there it was a long two and a half miles of untracked snow before we flew over the drums at HFS. Since Baby, we'd found crevasses every couple hundred feet. At the rate we were advancing our road, it would be a long time to Home Free.

After our first pass at a thousand feet, we completed two more at five hundred, and then finished off with a low pass at 250. Then we climbed back to three thousand feet and headed for McMurdo.

Back at Don's cubicle we reviewed the infrared images. At Crevasse 2, the long black board looked bright white. It pointed right toward a round, cold, black-as-night access hole fifty feet away. The grayish background of everything else showed no sign of a crevasse beneath it. With a sigh, I thanked Don for his efforts. Both of us were disappointed we'd not found a breakthrough in the crevasse-finding business.

In the galley that evening Russ, Shaun, and Allan found me at a table by a window.

“What'd you see?” they asked.

“A lot of snow in camp. We'll have to dig out first thing. Never saw a crevasse we didn't already know about. How'd you all do?”

“We fly the radar test tomorrow,” Shaun confirmed.

“I need another day with the drill,” Russ added.

With any luck, we'd head back out the day after tomorrow. The dull roar of myriad galley conversations long since replaced the drumming tent skin in camp. Either place, there or here, we waited.

Airborne ground penetrating radar played our last card. It wouldn't give us the map I wanted. But it would show us a line, the flight line, and it'd tell us what it saw under that line in the form of a cross section. It'd show us the kind of image our radar produced when we pushed the antenna over the snow in front of the PistenBully. But the PistenBully weighed ten thousand pounds, and I refused to run it over terra incognita to HFS. If we could fly low and
fly several lines close together, we might infer something of a map between the lines. A weather-window for testing the airborne radar opened up the next afternoon.

That evening I dined quietly with Russ when I spied Allan and Shaun entering the food line across the room. “They're not smiling,” I muttered.

“It was altogether unsatisfactory,” Allan said when he joined our table. I appreciated his economy with language and didn't ask for details of the failure.

“So there's no hope of improving the system?”

“Not the sling.” Then he added, “The chief pilot would consider modifying the cargo basket to accommodate the antenna. He hadn't committed to that when we left him thirty minutes ago.”

“Thanks for trying. Now here's what I want you two to do.” I looked to Shaun and Allan. “Stay in town and work with the folks at the hangar on getting that antenna mounted in the basket, if they're willing. Then test it out. If the test works, fly the mission. The rest of us are going back tomorrow, if we can.”

Our new cat skinner, or heavy-equipment operator, and mountaineer were ready to go. So was the hot water drill. We were looking at digging out camp, and that would take a while, but we did have the bulldozer. The other three of us on shovels would be enough.

If Shaun and Allan were unsuccessful, we'd abandon the helicopter radar reconnaissance. They'd come out to the Shear Zone on snowmobiles, and we'd have no choice but to do it all from the ground as we had been doing.

That was the new plan. But the next day, a big blow socked in McMurdo again and we didn't go anywhere. The day after that we got out of town.

We arrived back at camp through the dregs of the storm with clear skies overhead and ground blizzards obscuring the surface.

Two of us were new to camp. Kim Uhde, the cat skinner, was also new to me. Kim came recommended by other operators in McMurdo as an artist with a blade. I welcomed him. He was a tall fellow, well-built and meaty, with sparkling, eager blue eyes that looked over a spectacular walrus moustache.

Tom Lyman, the other new guy, I'd met during my search for alpine mountaineers. His resume stood out, listing experience in geographical information systems and global positioning systems. That technical complement to
his mountaineering raised intriguing possibilities for the project's future. The fair-haired Montanan had joined our group in New Hampshire for pre-season radar training. He was Shaun's age and stature.

Our camp was lousy with drift snow. Russ fired up the generator and the bulldozer while the newcomers got their briefing.