Blazing Ice (35 page)

“Two more things on this map,” I said. Eyes turned again to the laptop. “Twenty miles south of T-3, on the blue line, we come to Pb. That's an old point, common to all three routes. From Pb to Pc, another thirty miles, we have this …”

Zooming on the painted map enlarged a feature halfway between the two points. The blue line split a “saddle” between two painted areas plotting crevasse fields. The cartographer who made the map had looked at air photos, saw crevasses there, and labeled them. George and I didn't see these crevasses when we flew the route, but whoever made the map saw them. And if he saw crevasses, then they were
open
crevasses. That probably meant there were
hidden
crevasses near them. The distance between those two crevasse fields was only five miles.

“I'm glad I didn't tell my wife about that!” John V. spoke up.

“John, you haven't been with us since the beginning. But we've got pretty darn good at picking our way through crevasse fields with radar. I'm okay with it, as long as we're careful.”

I looked particularly at Stretch and said, “This little place here, where we thread the needle, may very well be the place where we turn around. Mother Nature may say
no
to us. Right there.”

I took a deep breath, buying time. The sound of my own voice bothered me.

“All right, here's the last thing I need to tell you. At Pc, we turn and follow the 132 degree West meridian straight to Pole for another 170 miles. Somewhere in that stretch we'll find our second summit.”

I also thought our probability of crevasse hazard from Pc onward was very small, but I didn't entirely trust my judgement on that. So I'd asked George to get in touch with the glaciologists he officially contacted and refer my question on crevasse hazard probability from Pc onward to them. That was back in August.

“And?” Tom asked.

“I haven't heard back,” I replied flatly. It was December 5.

“Now I'm finished. Does anybody have any questions?” I asked, relieved that I'd reached the end of my lecture.

“Yeah … what about sastrugi? Where are they?” Brad asked.

“I forgot about them,” I sighed, tracing the findings from our recon flight across the same map. “The worst of them were about half way from here to Pole. My notes also say we saw no clear way around them.”

Brad grimaced.

“Brad, that's why we have a blade on
Red Rider
, and we have that big blade on Stretch's D8. We'll find sastrugi out there somewhere, and we'll just have to figure what we
can
do with them then.”

I needed a break. In ten minutes I'd speak to the radar team separately. Greg joined me outside where the blizzard still raged. We took our fresh air through polar fleece mufflers.

“Greg, look behind us and tell me how many flags you can see,” I asked, thinking of that three-inch stub of bamboo he spotted yesterday.

“I can't see any of them,” Greg said apologetically.

“Me neither. From now on you're my eyes. You will determine our official visibility. We won't proceed unless you can see at least two flags behind you. Those of us trailing you won't have any trouble seeing your red PistenBully, but you need to see at least two flags. If you can't, you must stop. And we'll all stop. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

Greg went back inside while I walked around in the blizzard, patrolling our camp and clearing my mind for the next lecture. Even with my back to the storm, peering out of the deep tunnel of my parka's cowl, frigid blasts of icy pellets still found my face. Snowdrifts had begun to bury our sled skis and spin up in the lee of our tractors. We'd have to move them soon.

Russ came outside and passed me on his way to the generators. We said nothing. His mind was on something else. Russ dinked around to get away from a crowd.

I stepped back into the galley after stamping my feet in the vestibule, the last of the snow falling off my boots and pants. Greg, Tom, and John V. were waiting. Stretch had gone back to his bunk to read. Judy sat at the laptop in the comms booth writing a letter to her twin sister. Brad lay back on his bunk playing some hand-held electronic game.

Stretch's stool offered a change in perspective. I took his seat, and rested my back against the galley wall. “Fellas, tomorrow your job changes. Six miles ahead we run out of flags.”

Last year's prospecting team had started our new line in case NSF said go. Beyond their last flag lay what we'd just talked about. On top of looking for crevasses, Greg's team would be laying new flag line. They knew this was coming. I'd hoped to free
Fritzy
as a flagging vehicle for them, but now I needed
Fritzy
to pull sleds.

“You'll use a snowmobile, instead. Your flagger won't have a warm cab. So Greg, I don't know how you want to do this, but I expect you'll rotate your crew. I do, however, want you to obey this one simple rule:
Nobody gets cold
.”

My old tunnel rule would serve well on the Plateau. We had all the extreme cold weather gear we could ask for, and we had heated cabs in every tractor. But on an exposed snowmobile, a flagger might push too hard and get dangerously cold.

“If any one of you gets cold, you must immediately tell Greg. And Greg, you must take immediate steps to get that person warm. Even if it stops everything everybody else is doing. If
you
are the one who is cold, you must warm yourself. Remember, we are only eight here.”

Greg looked straight back at me with no expression. I couldn't read him.

“Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Okay, now let's talk about how to lay out a straight flag line.”

For an hour we discussed savvy won from three years on the trail, an improbable combination finessed from grounded experience and intelligence from orbiting satellites. They'd still make a crooked line to start with, until they figured it out. But the flags told us where the radar went, crooked line or not.

“The three of you are leading the rest of us. We've got to know we're following you into safe ground. If all else fails, we can follow the flags behind us to McMurdo because we know that's safe.”

Silence.

“All right. Tom knows the radar. If Tom goes down, Stretch and I can read it, too. Just so you know.”

Silence, again.

“Fellas, thanks for your time. That's a lot to unload on you. But I can't think of a better way to spend a morning in a blizzard. I'm done talking now.”

“Thanks for
your
time,” Greg said. Tom and John V. added their “yeahs” to Greg's polite remark.

The blizzard still raged next morning. For sport, Greg called Weather Forecaster Bill—“Wx” Bill—in McMurdo over the Iridium phone. The weather office might have something to say about this particular storm. Several of us eavesdropped from the galley.

“Bill, this is Feleppa with South Pole Traverse. We're on the Plateau at the top of the Leverett. We've been in a blizzard for the past twenty-four hours
and want to know how long this system might be with us. Can you help us out?” Greg spoke from the caster chair at the comms booth.

“Yeah, steady thirty to forty knots, blowing snow,” Greg reported.

Greg's eyes rolled back over his shoulder. “Bill says we got wind.”

“No, we're right at the edge of the Polar Plateau … here's our lat-lon.” Greg read our coordinates.

“Visibility maybe two hundred feet,” Greg added after a pause. Then he smiled. “Bill says we're in a system, and we have low visibility, and it might be this way for a while.”

“Ask him to study up on our situation … now that he knows where we are,” I laughed. “Brad, can you be ready with your show after a while?”

Digging out of drifts consumed the rest of our morning. We advanced our camp one hundred feet upwind. Then we hunkered down once more.

I'd asked several folks to bring along a slide show, or prepare a lecture for days like this one. After lunch, Brad entertained us with pictures on living and working at Greenland's Summit Camp.

After Greenland, I kicked back on the galley bench. “Greg, you know that military alphabet for calling out letters … Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta?”

Greg leaned back against the kitchen counter, his arms folded over his muscular chest. “Sure.”

“Steve Wheat at the NGA was working on an alternative alphabet. He had things like
M
as in
mnemonic
, and
P
as in
pneumatic
or
phone
. Had us all in stitches, acting out some hapless dispatcher taking dictation over the radio. Imagine yourself under fire in Iraq, calling in an air strike: ‘No you idiot, that's
A
as in
aisle
!'”

Greg got it. We giggled.

The alphabet on our white board filled up quickly:
C
as in
cue
,
E
as in
ewe
,
S
as in
sea
, and
W
as in
wye
. Others letters came more slowly, but Greg scored big with
O
as in
ouija
. Our alphabet stayed on the board several days. From time to time, others added their own contributions.

At 1430, I asked Greg to place another call to Wx Bill. “Before you do that, tell me how many flags you can see.”

Greg was only outside a moment. “Four flags, Boss. Got some fog and light ground bliz. Three flags for sure.”

Boots hit the floors in both bunkrooms. “Let's get off this damned spot!”

Within three miles the blizzard sat down on us again. We crept flag to flag.

Our fleet speed was now limited to the D8's best. At this altitude we managed three miles per hour, beating down tracks in virgin snow. But
Fritzy
wallowed in once and
Red Rider
twice.

Brad's jaw clenched tight when I met him with my tow strap. The tank sled, the flatbed sled, and
Snow White
were too much for
Red Rider
. Up ahead, Stretch pulled the modules and a tank sled. Both pulled the same gross weight, but the D8 fared better.

“I'm glad we're only going six miles today,” Brad sighed, teetering in the soft snow.

In camp, the mood was more upbeat. We'd moved off the bad luck spot the moment the weather loosened its grip. And we found a message waiting for us at the end of the flag line. Written in duct tape and bamboo poles planted upright in the snow, it spelled: “HI.”

“Welcome to the new farthest south,” I offered encouragingly. “In twenty-two more miles we'll hit that first summit. Stretch, count on this … when we empty that tank you're carrying, we'll drop it and you'll pick up the one Brad's got. Judy, how'd you do today?”

“Oh …” her voiced quavered. “We slipped our tracks a lot. But we didn't go down. Just lucky.”

The ground blizzard still clobbered us the next morning. If it didn't kick snow too high, we could see over the top of it through a tractor's cab. But this morning's blizzard wasn't benign. Snow struck the top of our modules. Though we saw blue sky overhead, we couldn't see one green flag behind us.

By early afternoon Greg could see well enough, and he champed at the bit to get his flagging party going. “Call us when you've made a mile,” I told him.

Twenty minutes later he radioed back, “Four flags set.” Already in our tractors, we started after him.

In a few miles, the blizzard swelled again and stopped us. We waited in our cabs, engines idling for an hour and a half. Then shortly after our second spurt, Brad radioed “And that's all it took.”

We'd just started up the slow rise to the first summit when Brad stuck down hard.

Thanks to that inconstant blizzard and the slight grade, we didn't arrive at the summit until noon of the next day.
Red Rider
and
Fritzy
wallowed several times. Brad finally split his train and shuttled his loads forward. Shuttling so soon alerted me to watch our fuel consumption.

The downhill was short lived. We dropped only four hundred feet in four miles. But Brad could pull his full load, and none of us got stuck. We leveled out on hard dorniks, like those past the Shear Zone and just as rough. Every tractor rocked and jarred its way over each one of them, jerking and slamming us around in our cabs.

After dinner, I penned “23 miles” in my logbook. I'd just written such descriptive terms as “dornikville” and “bad ju-ju,” when Greg squeezed by my chair at the comms booth. He and Tom felt the worst of the rough ground in their dual-track PistenBully.

Judy spotted Greg sliding into our bunkroom. She read the fatigue written all over him. “Do you want to borrow my vibrator?”

Hoots erupted through both bunkrooms.

Judy referred to her electric vibrating hot-pad, a cushioned backrest that extended down to mid-thigh. They were popular among long-haul truckers. When Judy lay down on her bunk above mine and turned on her “vibrator,” my bunk thrummed like she was rocketing to outer space.

“Some other time, Judy. Thank you,” Greg said appreciatively. Then to me, “I think we ought to call that place the
dornikle forest
.”

“Spell
dornikal
.”

“Djibouti, ouija …”

Ground blizzards halted Greg's team intermittently for several days. Under better circumstances, they might range four miles ahead of the lumbering fleet, so long as they maintained radio contact and two-flags visibility. To gain against the ground blizzards they reduced their flagging intervals to one-fifth of a mile.

Meanwhile, the ground got rougher and our daily mileage shorter. I stopped counting immobilizations and recorded them merely as “many.” So much for Dave's prediction that the Polar Plateau would be a piece of cake; we now measured progress in small victories.

Sidetracking Stretch's emptied fuel tank, lightening our load by twelve thousand pounds of steel, was one such victory.