Blazing Ice (18 page)

Following Amundsen's lead, we cached two thousand green trail flags and sixteen long wooden posts the same way for next year's use. The half-dozen bundles of bamboo poles and posts resembled the plinths of Stonehenge. Scooter called it “Boo-henge.” One of the posts we held back, planting it at RIS-1. We stood beside it for the photo.

On December 30 we turned our backs to the mountains and headed north. We'd been forty-two days getting to RIS-1. If it took that long to get back, we'd have just enough time to winterize our fleet before we caught a plane ride home.

Northbound we made forty-six miles one day, thirty-three miles another, then forty-three miles, thirty-three miles, and thirty-eight miles … unthinkable daily distances for the southbound traverse. Every shuttle mission had packed and groomed our trail surface. The snow had set up into a proper road. Now we flew down that road, and the scene was thrilling. I rode with Norbert one day in the PistenBully, off-track, just watching the heavy fleet running down the flag line. Our four tractors and their sled trains packed up like coursing hounds bounding down the trail, each one keenly looking after the other.

By January 5 we'd gathered up enough of our sidetracked sleds that we started shuttling again. Two days later we camped thirty-two miles shy of SOUTH. That night our Iridium phone connected with two CRREL engineers in McMurdo waiting to join us on the next Twin Otter flight. Jim Lever and Russ Alger had come back, planning to conduct crevasse bridge studies with us in the Leverett region.

“Jim, we won't be getting anywhere near there this year. It hasn't been pretty in this snow swamp. We're heading back to McMurdo now. We know what a lot of our problems are. We need you guys to characterize this snow and put the engineering touch on our mobility issues. Can you shift gears and do that for us?”

“Yes, we can. When would you like us to do this?” Jim had caught wind of our difficulties in McMurdo. Perhaps he thought he and Alger might wait for us there.

“Immediately. We'll wait for you at our present location.”

The Twin Otter arrived the next day. Jim Lever, Russ Alger, and mountaineer Matthew Szundy climbed out. Norbert and Scooter climbed in and went home.

“Bresnahan tells me NSF doesn't place a lot of stock in our anecdotal information,” I explained to Jim. “We need you guys to legitimize our findings with hard engineering data. Let me show you the kind of things we're talking about.”

Stretch took
Fritzy
and a train of four tank sleds around in a circle. Jim rode in the cab with Stretch and watched. When the sleds swung inside the broad circle, their skis rose out of the tractor tracks onto virgin snow. The train pulled easily. When Stretch pulled straight, the skis plowed deeply into the tracked snow and bogged
Fritzy
down.

“Jim,” I continued, “we saw this during the pre-launch exercises in Mc-Murdo. Blaisdell was there. Herb Setz, too. It was counterintuitive for sure, but it was plain: we had to get the skis out of the tractor ruts! Herb and I hit on some design changes to pull that off. It was too late then to do us any good this year. But after this season, we'll be fighting just to have a next year. You can help.”

Lever and Alger rigged a V-shaped yoke of two long, heavy-duty towing straps. We hitched the four-sled train at the vertex, and two tractors, one each at the wide ends of the V. Placing a load-sensing device at the vertex, they directly measured the towing resistance of the sled load. The tractors took off, separating enough to draw the sled train through the virgin snow between them. The measurements indicated the towing resistance was 50 percent, exactly half the resistance of the sled train when towed in the tractor tracks.

“Jeez, I knew it was easier, Jim. But I didn't know it was
that
easier!” I exclaimed. That was exactly the kind of information we needed.

“Now try this: as you can see, we can't pull everything we've got down the trail. That's why we're shuttling. When our engine-load monitors in the cab show 80 percent to 95 percent, we get high traction slip and we're going down. At our slow speeds, we have no reserve power to blast through the bog. When our engine loads run 65 percent to 70 percent, we rarely get stuck, and we have plenty reserve.”

Through a complex analysis, the CRREL engineers elucidated the mechanisms of our immobility. They produced a new load planning tool that resulted in zero “immobilizations.” The new tool targeted 65 percent available draw bar pull on virgin snow.

We now spent half of our return time to McMurdo conducting CRREL's expedient tests. We were exhausted, but the CRREL boys were courteous enough to hold their freshness in check while we limped back. Once, they witnessed us repair a broken sled. John Penney unhitched
Fritzy
and backed it into position next to the sled. Stretch grabbed the ladder and secured the heavy chain to the top of the container. Russ fetched the parts, James grabbed the hand tools, and I ran
Fritzy
's crane. No one said a word. From damage detection to back on the road, the whole process took only thirty minutes.

Lever apologized, “We should never have sent you out at 90 percent draw bar.”

“Jim, it was a lot of things. Not just draw bar,” I allowed. “We could always drop sleds. Mainly it's this three year rush … just not enough time to be thoughtful. You pay for that one way or another. And you have got to be that much more vigilant for each other's safety. Three years is a dangerous pace.”

On January 17 the traverse arrived back at the Shear Zone camp. We'd collected all our sidetracked sleds and trailers along the way. Over the next five days, we continued mobility testing in the camp while some shuttled partial loads into Williams Field. We were still operating on the “night” shift.

On January 22 we collected the remaining sleds at the Shear Zone camp and went in together.

“Mac-Ops, Mac-Ops. South Pole Traverse,” I radioed.

“Go ahead, South Pole Traverse. This is Mac-Ops.”

“Mac-Ops, South Pole Traverse has arrived back at McMurdo with all souls, tractors, and sleds.”

After sixty-six days in the field, we arrived back in McMurdo deeply fatigued. We'd take two days off, rest up, and then demobilize and winterize the fleet.

An accounting for our less-than-hoped-for performance had been ordered, and I prepared for the captain's mast. The matter was postponed several times and later deferred all together. It'd resurface when I sought funding for next year.

This year we advanced the face of the trail 425 miles from McMurdo. We returned with three thousand gallons of fuel. Counting shuttling, we covered 1,485 miles all together. That is equivalent to the distance from McMurdo to South Pole, and half way back, with enough fuel to complete the round trip.

It was
all
there. But we could not get
all
of it going south at the same time.

On February 7, 2004, I boarded an LC-130 in McMurdo bound for Pole. At Pole, I met George Blaisdell. George now worked full time with NSF and was in a position to arrange an aerial reconnaissance. Together we boarded another LC-130 and flew over the entire proposed route from Pole back to McMurdo. Once airborne, we took observer positions in the cockpit.

We flew over a vast region of patterned snow on the Polar Plateau: sastrugi, elongated ridge-like features carved in the surface by wind and blowing snow. Sastrugi are generally hard, sharp angled, and make for rough travel by foot, ski, or tractor. We'd seen mild sastrugi down on the Ross Ice Shelf, at most a foot high, but ski-adventurers told of monstrous sastrugi on the Plateau. From the cockpit three thousand feet above them, I thought I saw some monsters.

Farther along the Plateau, as we neared the headwall of the Leverett Glacier, a field of open crevasses bore directly off the port side of the airplane.

“How far would you estimate those crevasses are?” I asked the pilot, figuring him a better judge of distance from his airplane than me.

“About seven miles.”

“Copy seven. Would you capture our present position by GPS, please sir?” I asked the navigator.

The navigator read off our coordinates. Later in McMurdo I combined those two pieces of information and plotted the crevasse field on our route
map. The plot fell exactly on a proposed turning point.
That
was a point to avoid, not a place to go.

Circling the headwall of the Leverett Glacier and then descending to one thousand feet above surface, we identified many crevasses in the headwall cirque that I'd seen earlier in RADARSAT imagery available from the Canadian Space Agency. There were no unpleasant surprises here, just lots of unpleasant crevasses. Our planned route up the headwall still looked like the best one.

Swooping down the Leverett, again I saw no surprises: glazed, icy, windblown surfaces, but no blue ice fields that'd give us new kinds of traction problems. Our predecessors in the mid-nineties who'd targeted the Leverett, had selected well.

Toward the bottom of the glacier a low cloudbank obscured the Leverett's confluence with the Ross Ice Shelf. The cloudbank forced us to climb. From our new height we saw the cloudbank nestled along a broad sweep of the Transantarctic Mountain fronts. It extended well out over the Ross Ice Shelf, but it broke up in the area of RIS-1, our farthest point south.

There were our tracks, where we'd turned around, and where we'd gathered up for camps, all this against the expanse of the snow swamp. We'd taken that ground and held it. And now I was proud of us.

But the cloudbank … My official report of the Airborne LC-130 Reconnaissance reads:

The same cloudbank that thwarted effective visual reconnaissance of the lower Leverett region also obscured the Transantarctic Mountain front and the proposed traverse route from L00 to RIS-5 through RIS-2. There is nothing to add to route-planning knowledge for that segment from this reconnaissance flight.

Underneath that cloudbank hid ground that nearly stopped the whole project. It was the ground we later named “The Shoals of Intractable Funding.”

The
word
came down in a phone call
during the northern summer a year earlier following our first season's success in crossing the Shear Zone. Its impact carried over through the entire project, and waxed especially acute the year of our disappointing advance across the Ross Ice Shelf. The
word
denied the very nature of our project.

I had been seated at my manager's cubicle in the Denver office and reached for the handset, glancing first at the “Caller ID.”

“John Wright speaking. That you, George?”

My phone offered a choice of several ringtones. I'd selected a woman's voice that mechanically but pleasantly asked, “Are you there? Are you there?” I usually caught myself at the last second, amused, before answering, “Yes, I am here.” Thus, most of my phone conversations began with a smile on my end.

“Good morning,” came the familiar and cheerful voice of George Blaisdell in Washington, D.C.

After an exchange of pleasantries, George came to the point, “John, we need you, along with all of us, to refrain from using the word ‘road' in connection with the South Pole Traverse Project.”

A telltale tik-tik-tik-ing of a computer keyboard sounded in the background of my earpiece. George was multitasking. I was bewildered.

“What's up? We built a road across the Shear Zone, and we're going to build a road to the South Pole.”

The National Science Foundation was crafting the environmental documentation for future traverses. The word had New Zealand and Australian
environmental coalitions spun up about a highway cutting across the continent. “Road” conjured images of traffic. It misdirected attention from the numbers of LC-130 turboprop flights we might save. Attention that would be better focused on the fuel savings and emissions reductions for cargo delivered by a surface traverse.

Yet a photo of our D8R Caterpillar loading onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 in New Zealand appeared in the Christchurch newspaper last year. Its caption proclaimed: “
THE ROAD TO THE POLE!
” I thought that language came from the NSF. I thought it expressed high-level, programmatic brio.

“George, the French have been running a traverse for years. The Russians run from Mirny to Vostok. The Australians, the Germans, and for all I know the Japanese and the Chinese programs all run traverses. Is this opposition directed at their programs, too?”

“No … it's pretty much directed at us. We're the biggest kid on the block, and people like taking shots at the United States.”

George was an engineer with a specialty in snow and ice pavements. We were making a road, a road made of snow. And we were going to traverse it with tractors and sleds, just like those other programs did. I couldn't imagine someone of George's background
not
calling a road “a road.” Now he pressed me in the unique way a program officer at NSF could lean on a contract worker.

“I need your cooperation to not use the word ‘
road
.'”

“What word shall we use in place of ‘
road
'?” I chortled, an edge to my voice.

“We don't have one for that. ‘Traverse' works. ‘Route.' ‘Trail.' All I can say is: In
this
office we will not use
that word
in connection with the project.”

“George, you're a messenger here, right?”

“That's right,” he allowed, gratefully.

I gripped the phone, feeling my jaw tense. “Message delivered. This is big. I need to think about what it means. Talk later?”

“Any time,” George agreed.

I hung up and, leaning way back in my chair, stared at the office ceiling.
No more frontier attitude … don't want any cowboys … don't call it a road … What does it mean?