Blazing Ice (31 page)

“No more
Linda
s,” Pete repeated.

“Hey, can you guys look at something else for me before this next Ice season starts?”

A motorized roar crawled up my backbone and passed overhead. Inside
Fritzy
's cab, I ducked. The red-and-white Twin Otter, then its shadow, buzzed low over the length of our caravan.

At 115 miles past SOUTH, our trains closed up and halted. The light ski plane circled overhead. Wherever they might find us today, the probability of crevasses alongside us was nil. When the plane taxied up to the side of the living module, a tall, bewhiskered Irishman stepped out and walked right up to me. These days he was our project's greatest ally.

“I believe you wanted this,” said Dave Bresnahan.

“You bet I want it. We'll be there in a few days. Thank you.”

Dave placed the fruits of space-age technology in my hand. Less than a century ago the likes of Shackleton and Scott strained in their traces across this same stretch of Ice Shelf, man-hauling sleds for weeks.

“I also brought you these. Today was cookie day in McMurdo.”

The others had dismounted their idling tractors and tentatively approached us across the snow. I hollered, “Come on over, gang. Cookies!”

As they gathered around, I explained to Dave, “We'd like to invite you in for coffee, but we're rigged for running and on a record pace.”

Dave graciously bowed. “I'm not one to stand in the way of a record.” But then as an afterthought he added, “Some of your folks in the Chalet gave me these … they said you need to sign them.”

Dave pulled a small sheaf of folded papers from his hip pocket, and handed them to me. The papers spelled out rules for use of the McMurdo information systems. There were three forms, one each for Stretch, Russ, and John V., who had all arrived on Ice in August. They'd signed the forms then. And then the form changed. The crew that arrived in October signed the new form. The other three had signed the old form. They needed to sign the new form. Today's forms came from an intermediate boss that my boss's boss had recently installed between him and my boss. And they came with a threat from the new intermediate boss: “Anyone who does not sign I will happily send home on the next plane north.”

My folks?
The southwestern horizon showed no mountaintops yet. That's where we'd see them first. Here, the flat white sameness surrounded us.

“What could they possibly be thinking… ?” I muttered.

Dave grabbed the papers, and gestured as though he were wiping his butt with them. He handed them back, smiling, and said, “That's what the papers are good for. Just sign 'em.” Dave was getting good at tempering my frustration with the bureaucracy.

We snapped a photograph of the signing: Dave looking on, Stretch signing the papers using my back for a desk, the Twin Otter in the background … at 82 degrees South latitude on the Ross Ice Shelf.

On November 20 we took a long lunch under a warm sun at the 180 degree meridian. The Transantarctic Mountains had just reappeared on our southwestern horizon when we crossed into the western hemisphere.

The next day we passed the monument post at RIS-1, still on good pace. I stopped there only long enough to capture the post position on GPS and to record the snow level. The others showed their respect to our old farthest south by driving right past it. The snow swamps of Year Two had become nothing but a bad, bad memory.

But our idyllic passage broke up toward the end of shift when Stretch radioed, “I got smoke!”

“Traverse, halt! Wait for further,” I grabbed my mike. “Russ, go up and take a look, tell me what you need. Acknowledge, PistenBully.”

“
Wrong Way
copies,” said Greg's voice.

We stretched out over a mile. The PistenBully ranged farther. Russ, whether he heard me or not, would close up on Stretch and look it over. Nobody would get in front of Greg.

Shortly Russ's voice came over the radio, “
Fritzy
, I need the long-handled torque wrench and the 1¾-inch socket.”

“Copy that. Do we need to make camp there?”

“We may just tighten the hub bolts. But it may be something inside.”

When
Wrong Way
moved out again, we had two hours left in our day. But before two miles had passed Stretch radioed, “I've got smoke again! I'm stopping.”

“Traverse halt! Make camp.”

Wrong Way
approached from the south to make the camp circle around Brad. Judy circled Brad, parking the
Elephant Man
's train on his left. I pulled up right of him, unhitched
Fritzy
, and then ran a mile back.

Stretch and Russ stood outside of their tractors, looking over the left rear drive wheel of Stretch's machine. Blistered black paint on its hub exposed rusty, brown metal flakes. Raisin-sized black bits clung to the hub, and lay scattered on the bottom of the track belt. There was no smoke now, no steam, no melting snow. No oil on the snow. The drive wheel was dry as a bone. But it had been hot, and probably was still hot.

“I used the fire extinguisher,” Stretch explained as I walked up to them. I didn't spot residue, but I smelled grease and oil. Not rubber. It was something inside.

“Russ, I take it you don't think we should risk driving this to camp?” I asked.

“Right.”

“Okay. We'll drag it. Plan on tomorrow to work on this.” A day to figure out our situation took pressure off Russ. He'd enjoyed our southern momentum as much as I did, but now he'd feel responsible. I didn't want him to assume that burden.

We unhitched Stretch from his train. When Brad and Greg arrived in
Red Rider
with a pair of the plastic recovery skis, Stretch drove his crippled tractor onto the skis. I listened for metal grinding around his hub, but didn't hear it.

After
Red Rider
towed him away, Russ and I stood alone on the snow. It was a rare moment on the trail when I could pick Russ's brain without an audience. It was the sort of moment I treasured, though the present circumstances were not joyous.

“Russ, you know we're carrying all the spare parts South Pole ordered for that machine?” I opened.

Russ half-laughed. “Yeah, but there's nothing in that small box that'll help us. This is major. It needs parts we don't have, and a shop too.” Russ thought any attempt at a field fix would risk more damage.

The MT865 was deliverable cargo. In our medium of exchange, it represented three flights to Pole. We counted on driving it there and pulling a load with it.

“Run your diagnostics, Russ. Tell me what's wrong and what we need to fix it. I'm going to think about dragging it to Pole and all the stuff that comes of that. Right now I'm casting a larcenous eye on those big plastic sheets under the fuel bladders.”

“I'm thinking the same thing,” Russ said and grinned.

I grinned back. “All right, then. Pull your load up to camp, I'll have Brad come back and retrieve Stretch's.
Fritzy
can't pull it.”

In this last-chance year, the loss of a tractor could mean failure two-thirds of the way across the Ross Ice Shelf. Whether we went forward to Pole or retreated to McMurdo, the remaining tractors would share Stretch's load
and
pull his disabled tractor. We didn't have the drawbar strength to do that without shuttling.

But nobody wanted failure. Eight assessments of our situation brought as many, or more, solutions and partial solutions. That was all good energy for going south. At dinner I made it clear.

“We're not going anywhere right away. We'll stay here tomorrow, relax, and figure out what we
can
do. We can
do
that …” I looked first at Greg, then to the others, and repeated, “We can
do
that because nobody's shooting at us. We've also got a big friend waiting two hundred miles ahead at the base of the Leverett. I'd rather struggle two hundred miles forward than 450 miles back.”

The ultimate solution was as much an enigma to me as to the crew. But they now knew I leaned south.

Russ and John V. reported the Pole tractor had “suffered a bearing failure on the left side drive wheel, induced by a failure of the oil seals and resulting loss of lubrication oil—by burning.” The spare parts we needed were not on the continent.

The choice was simple: either leave the tractor beside the trail and drag it back to McMurdo on our return trip, or drag the deadweight to its new home at Pole.

We'd not tried towing it yet, except on the recovery skis. That was no way to tow it the remaining six hundred miles. Our best chance lay with the twin plastic sheets under the fuel bladders.

Brad tended our fuel inventory this year. He said we now had enough empty capacity in our steel fuel tank sleds to hold the bladder fuel. Greg had rigged the bladder sleds in the first place. He and Brad saw to transferring
their contents. The others helped fold and bind the empty bladders and used
Fritzy
's crane to lift them in
Snow White
's hold.

Russ and Stretch secured the MT on top of the plastic sheets, chaining the tractor to the spreader bar sled that pulled them. The rig worked nicely in trials around camp. But in a sudden stop, the MT and the plastic sheets slid forward, colliding with the spreader bar. We could live with that if we remembered to stop slowly.

To get a leg up, we sidetracked two steel fuel tank sleds, one empty and one full, for our return traverse. Then we redistributed the remaining sleds among our four working tractors. One or two of them would be overloaded. When we logged fifty-four miles the next day, even after rescuing stuck tractors, my damage report went in to Rebecca.

Thanksgiving Day brought a blizzard of heavy, wet snow. We hunkered down, feasted, and sent holiday e-mails around the world. The day after Thanksgiving Russ closed our morning briefing: “Yippee! We get to make a
turn
today!”

Since departing the Shear Zone we'd run a straight course for four hundred miles. When the Transantarctics finally appeared on our southern horizon, they grew ever larger as we approached their fixed panorama. Now we turned left at FORK, striking a parallel course to the mountain fronts, skirting just north of the Shoals at their feet.

We motored past the mouths of deeply carved valleys, some cutting back into the Plateau for two hundred miles. Blue-ice glaciers filled the valley bottoms. Orange and yellow sunlight reflected off their mirrored surfaces with startling beauty.

Greg and Tom prospected ahead in the PistenBully. From what I could see at a distance, they'd got out of their vehicle and were examining the ground ahead of them. My heart sank. Last year, somewhere near here, we'd crossed a quarter-inch-wide crack and traced it for over a mile, but it behaved more like a thin tidal crack than a rip-snorting crevasse.

“John, I think you ought to take a look at this,” Tom radioed.

The fleet pulled up, and we all got out of our tractors to inspect. In front of the PistenBully a long, trough-like track, eight inches wide, crossed our trail. Knife-like gashes marked the snow on both sides of it. Three-point dots, close
together, skipped along the left and the right sides of the trough. The track looked like a giant zipper running across the snow.

Penguin tracks. Adélie penguin by the looks of it. Belly sliding.

How a penguin could have wandered this far “inland” over the ice shelf, let alone survive, mystified us. We were five hundred miles from the nearest open water. Yet here were these tracks headed straight for the Axel Heiberg Glacier.

In 1911 Norwegian Roald Amundsen, whom I regarded as the greatest polar explorer of them all, selected that glacier for his ascent to the Polar Plateau. He became the first man to reach the South Pole. His modern-day countryman Børge Ousland chose the same glacier in 1997 for his descent from the Pole onto the Ross Ice Shelf. When Ousland skied into McMurdo, he became the first man to cross Antarctica alone and unsupported.

I mused aloud, “Amundsen's Ghost. Let's take this as a good omen.”

In fact, we made two turns that day. Our evening brought us to CAMP 20. We turned right at the post and settled down a half-mile past it. Now we pointed directly into the breach of The Shoals of Intractable Funding.

A storm again stalled our advance from CAMP 20. All day driving, wet flakes plastered our tractors and sleds. We made four miles then hunkered down once more. The foot of the Leverett Glacier was only two days away.

We waited impatiently. We had enough visibility to slog it out, flag to flag. But seventeen miles ahead lay the breach. It may or may not be open this year. I wanted all the visibility we could get if we ran into crevasses.

At 1000 hours we crowded into our galley, looking at ASTER imagery of the Shoals on our laptop. Pointing to CAMP 20 on the map, I began pompously: “We are heah.” Then pointing to ASTER 2: “And they are theah.”

Our course cut across the ice flow as it approached the breach. At ASTER 2 our course turned left and headed upstream. Downstream from the turning point lay a shoal of crevasses. ASTER 2 was drifting right for it. I didn't know if the crevasses were moving, too, or if new ones were forming there just waiting for our drifting trail to drop into them.

“This ice is moving two and a half to three feet per day. I think.”

Last year did not allow enough time between measurements to get a reliable figure. We had only proved a hundred-foot-wide swath along the flag line. And the ASTER imagery was now three years old.

“Let's look at what NGA sent.”

The NGA showed us a heavy black line representing our route. It started at CAMP 20, turned left at ASTER 2, ran through the other ASTER points, and terminated at ASTER 6. A light gray field covered both sides of the route to a width of a mile. Steve Wheat had drawn dark blue lines within that gray field wherever he saw a crevasse. A couple of dark blue lines plotted closely downstream from ASTER 2, but they did not yet encroach on our route.