Blazing Ice (23 page)

Susan roped us up, tying off to the PistenBully. We looked gingerly into the blackness of the hole behind us. A four-foot-wide crevasse hid beneath a strangely thin, broken bridge.

I called back to camp on the Iridium phone. “Judy, we are turning back for your position. When we get there, we'll break camp and move north a bit.
Pass the word. We'll head your way just as soon as we figure how to get back across this crevasse.”

“Copy all,” Judy acknowledged. But she understood what had happened, adding, “Be careful.”

Still roped up, Susan and I probed the snow with long, thin poles to locate fissure's hidden course. We'd crossed it squarely. A hundred feet to the west it narrowed to two feet. We re-crossed it there.

Once on the camp-side of the crevasse, we turned the radar back onto it as far as the antenna would reach. It showed us an image unlike any we'd seen. It lacked clarity. There was no inverted parabolic shape, no sign of a bridge or sagging surface layers. Yet there
was
an image, and we'd missed calling stop.

Outside the idling PistenBully, Susan and I stretched in what warmth the summer sun offered. We wasted no thoughts on recriminations. We read each other's eyes, gauged each other's breathing. The picturesque horizon spread south of us. When smiles eventually appeared, our adrenaline had run its course and we returned to camp.

“We're not going that way either,” I told the others, gathered in the galley. “We'll talk about what happened tomorrow morning. For now, let's move out. We're going to try something else.” And my message to McMurdo that evening said simply, “There is nothing more for us to do in this place.”

We retreated ten miles from that first faint sign Susan spotted on entering the territory. Ten miles seemed a safe enough margin, and we named the new camp FORK. Behind us, more than two hundred flags marked abandoned trails through the maze of crevasses. Among them was a wooden post, planted at RIS-2, bearing the name “McCabe.” James McCabe from Texas had toiled with us the year before. He was unable to rejoin us this year, and we missed him.

“CHRISTMAS CONTEST—$1,000,000 prize for the best drag design for our purposes.”

The announcement appeared on the white board in our galley the next morning at FORK. A “drag” is a trail-grooming device, dragged behind a tractor or a sled. Our makeshift drags bogged us down. The million dollar prize for a better design got everybody's attention.

“For us to design one, you got to tell us what the purpose of the drag is,” Russ complained.

“Yeah … but the prize is as much for what you
think
our purposes are, as for the design itself.” I left it at that. Russ grumbled. But now we were thinking about something besides crevasses. And the promise of movement today lifted our spirits.

We reached the end of the baseline two days and sixty-four miles later. Since we were already there, I decided to explore the ground south of us. Our whole fleet turned directly toward the base of the Leverett Glacier, a coordinate location for us, since it was still too far off to see. Within five miles we halted at our first crevasse. Prospects of another siege brought us down again.

We explored much as we had near RIS-2. But unlike there, where ten miles revealed a hundred hidden crevasses, here we found twice that number. To test how efficiently we could evaluate crevasse bridges in a single day, we targeted eight, but completed only six. A southern passage here was as futile as ever.

“George, are you seeing any crevasses immediately south of our position?” I asked our McMurdo eyes.

“I see clusters of crevasses perhaps twenty and thirty miles south of your position. But I see none on the ASTER imagery where you are now.” George shuffled un-gridded photo mosaics, a work in progress, around his desktop trying to answer my questions.

“Copy that. We're going to prospect here a little longer,” I signed off.

Outside the living module near
Fritzy
, a droop-shouldered Russ Magsig duck-footed his way over the snow toward me. His head hung down, swinging side to side. He wore a plaintive look. “We can always go back to the Skelton and try it from there.”

The Skelton Glacier, much closer to McMurdo, was the pass Sir Edmund Hillary chose for his historic tractor traverse to Pole in 1957–1958. It was way over there and certainly not for us this year. And, it was riddled with crevasses. Hillary had found plenty. Evans's crew in 1995 went there and found exactly what Hillary found. The Skelton made a distant second choice to the Leverett. The only reason the Skelton had made the list of candidate passes was that Hillary
had
done it. But we sought a safe, repeatable route, not a risky one. And now I saw depression creeping into camp.

At our morning briefing the next day, I laid out our situation: “We are here. Our job for this season is to find a way to the base of the Leverett Glacier.
We are safe, we have plenty of food, we are warm, and we have fuel. We are not going to leave this region until we've exhausted all our efforts, or spent half our fuel, to get to the Leverett base. Consider going back to McMurdo before we've done all we could. Do you really want to go back to McMurdo at all? We're in a mighty fine place, right here in the middle of nowhere. And we have an interesting problem to solve. Maybe we'll find a solution.”

Grim faces nodded in silent assent. Putting it
my
way, not one of us wanted to go back to McMurdo.

Our eyes sent in a detailed description of a route segment on the far side of the crevasse field. As far as ASTER could determine, it was crevasse-free. And it was within reach of the PistenBully so long as we staged extra fuel forward. If we could cross the crevasses in front of us, we could test ASTER's findings. But should anything happen to the radar team, none of the heavy tractors could safely follow us to the rescue.

We made a plan for exploring a triangular loop that crossed the field. The opposite leg of that triangle was the ASTER segment. It might take two or three days to carry out the plan, though my daily reports simply said we were prospecting.

The first day, Judy accompanied Susan, Jim, and me in the PistenBully. Judy ran the radar under Susan's watchful eye. Susan kept tally of the crevasses we crossed. First, we retraced our path toward the base of the Leverett. We'd already identified 214 crevasses on those ten miles. At the end of the line we staged a drum of fuel and called the place DRUM. From DRUM, we turned a westerly course toward one end of that distant, ASTER route segment. Judy called sixty hidden crevasses along the next five miles before we turned back for DRUM, and then camp. As we got out of the PistenBully, she remarked, “This is just like hunting rattlesnakes!”

For the whole prospecting loop, we'd take our two snowmobiles with the PistenBully. The snowmobiles gave us a way to return to camp in an emergency. We didn't plan to run them. But we'd tow them with enough fuel onboard to cover the distance.

Should the PistenBully fall into a crevasse with the snowmobiles towed closely behind, they'd follow it in. So we rigged a two-hundred-foot-long line
of heavy, knotted tow-rope. It hooked to the PistenBully on one end and to a pair of slick plastic sleds on the other. The sleds, lashed side by side, bore the two snowmobiles. A webbing of heavy cargo chain formed the hitch to the sleds. When the PistenBully pulled the sleds, the tow rope and the chains rode taut. But, if the PistenBully stopped, the chains fell slack.

In the safety of our camp circle, we ran the PistenBully at full speed then stopped abruptly. The snowmobile sleds overran the chains as we'd hoped. The chain-brake dragged the whole package, with one passenger on board, to a stop in twenty feet. That satisfied us.

On the clear morning of December 19, we loaded mechanic's tools, emergency medical gear, and spare fuel onto the snowmobile sleds. For our second foray, the party included me, John Penney, Susan, and Jim Lever. Russ, Stretch, Brad, and Judy remained in camp. That division placed one mountaineer, one emergency medical care provider, and one mechanic with each group.

Jim ran the PistenBully. I rode in the back, looking over Susan's shoulder at the radar, and logged the numbers of crevasses. John Penney rode atop the snowmobiles. We refueled at DRUM then turned a new course to the other end of the ASTER segment. Over the next twenty miles we found continuous crevassing. But two miles shy of our target, we ran out of crevasses. The ground was clear. We arrived at the turning point, still no crevasses, and planted four red flags on bamboo poles.

Next, we steered directly along ASTER's route. The radar showed flat, undisturbed snow beneath us over the entire ten-mile course. No crevasses. At the next turning point we planted another four red flags. Then we turned toward DRUM to close the fifty-mile loop.

We ran two more miles before finding another crevasse. From there on, we found them continuously. After refueling at DRUM, we ran the remaining distance into camp.

Russ came out to greet us. He'd been worried.

“Pretty good news,” I told him. “There're a lot of crevasses out there, but we got to the other side and
that
ground is clear.”

We now had
some
solid ground truth for ASTER.

Still, I wasn't going to bring the fleet across that ground, despite the Promised Land we'd just glimpsed on the other side. But ASTER had seen a breach
in the crevasse field some distance back. The evening of the day we saw the Promised Land, I asked our eyes in the sky what ASTER saw due north of that breach. George said it appeared to be clear, but twice we'd camped near crevasse-riddled ground where ASTER saw nothing.

We retreated along our baseline to a point due north of the suspected breach. We called the place CAMP 20 for the date: December 20. Brad scribed that name into the top of a post and, after signing his own name at the bottom, planted the post upright in the snow.

I lay awake contemplating the effect of failure on our third attempt to penetrate the field. The stoic crew had accepted no joy for our every effort over the last weeks. If tomorrow's attempt failed to find a way, then we were all out of ideas. Our return to McMurdo wouldn't be a happy one.

The next morning, Jim, Susan, and I launched a prospecting mission into the breach while the others remained in camp. With each mile forward our hopes swelled. We found no crevasse sign along those first twenty miles, and stopped at a point designated ASTER 2. It lay marginally on the south side of the crevasse field. There we planted four red flags and swept a small camp circle around them. The ground was clear.

Our tracks showed we'd just climbed up a broad ice valley about five miles wide. We hadn't seen that or felt it when we crossed it. Now we stood on high ground, looking back on it, anticipating success.

Then we turned southeastward, toward the ASTER segment we proved two days before. Three miles out we crossed two discreet, deeply buried crevasses. We searched out their courses, and the area around them. No other crevasse sign lay anywhere near.

“Brad, we've done pretty good here,” I called back to camp. Brad was on comms duty. “We only see two crevasses. I need you to prepare the next monument posts. Label them ASTER 2, 3, 4, and 5. We're running low on fuel, and turning back for camp now. See you in a couple of hours.”

Uncertain of my message, Brad asked, “Did you find a way through?”

“You make the posts, Brad. We'll plant them. We're all coming through tomorrow.”

On our arrival back at CAMP 20, Russ once again duck-footed his way over the snow to me. This time he grinned ear to ear, his head down and wagging back and forth in joyous disbelief.

“We just now got lucky,” I told him, shaking hands under a gray sky.

That evening I spoke to George in McMurdo. “We've found two isolated crevasses at ASTER 2 plus 3.5 miles toward ASTER 3. We saw no other crevasses in the area. What does ASTER see?”

George came back. “I see two, very faint crevasse traces, and no other crevasses nearby. They appear a half mile east of the location you gave.”

“What is the date of the ASTER imagery?”

“December 2002 to January 2003.”

That was plausible. Two years, a quarter-mile movement per year, nothing else around it. We'd measured a half-mile a year at SOUTH, well back on the Shelf. We had our second solid ground truth.

On December 22, the heavy fleet lumbered through the gap, halting short of the black flags marking yesterday's finds. Where hundreds of crevasses had stymied us for weeks, now we stopped for two.

Susan, Jim, and Judy captured their images, measured the strength of their snow bridges with the rammsonde, then returned to the living module to reduce the data.

The rest of us dragged out the hot-water drill. Across the first bridge, we drilled a line of five sixty-foot deep holes. They all drilled solid snow to their entire depth. Not one found a void.

Across the second bridge, another five holes in line bottomed at ninety feet. One found void at eighty-eight, but landed in solid snow again two feet later. All the other ones drilled solid to their entire depths.

Now we'd drilled both bridges far deeper than the thicknesses our radar predicted. And we didn't find any great void. Possibly the crevasses had squeezed shut since they first formed, but our task wasn't an academic one. Facts were facts. I didn't wait for Jim's data. I unhitched
Fritzy
from its load and drove the forty-two thousand pound tractor across the crevasses.

“These two have just been proved safe,” I declared. “Let's stow the drill, eat lunch, and get down the trail.”

We broke out over crevasse-free ground toward the red flags we planted days before. Passing those the next day, we made camp at ASTER 7 on Christmas Eve. But for those two isolated crevasses, the entire course from CAMP 20 to ASTER 7 was clear.

That eloquent phrase John Evans wrote in his
Final Report
a decade before came to mind. Had we not found the way, or had we experienced calamity in trying, our project would have met a bureaucratic death, never to be resurrected. We were Evans's Lazarus. I named the enormous crevasse field we'd just breached The Shoals of Intractable Funding.