Blazing Ice (2 page)

Now, 738 miles out of McMurdo, not one human lived between us and there.

Six hundred miles behind us, on the sea-level realms of the Ross Ice Shelf, lay the frozen flesh of four British explorers and their leader. Robert Falcon Scott, known as Scott of the Antarctic, had been the last one to try for the South Pole and back from McMurdo. They went on foot. They died on their return. Now their scurvied bodies drift slowly toward the Ross Sea, buried under nine decades of snow. We drove right by them.

Only fifteen years ago, not far from Scott's body, a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer broke through the snow and fell into a black crevasse. My friend went down with that bulldozer. He lived. But the dozer's steely carcass drifts on in that hole toward its own rendezvous with the Ross Sea.

There were eight of us now. We were equipment operators, mechanics, mountaineers, and engineers. I picked them for their years of Antarctic experience. We respected and liked each other. Together we ran five heavy tractors pulling heavy sled trains. We ran a light scout tractor in front of us, rigged with modern crevasse-detecting radar.

When the last of our tractors topped out we had won our foothold on the Polar Plateau. We planted four flags on the plateau's edge and called that point SPT-18.

This was the final year of our three-year project. Between us and South Pole lay three hundred miles of unexplored ground. We wanted to go, but to get back we needed more fuel than we had. The National Science Foundation could give us that fuel at Pole.

Within our warm bunkroom we waited for word. Then sometime during the “night” we felt our shelter rocking in the wind atop its sled base. We would wake to a blizzard.

In his opening remarks at the May 2002 United States Antarctic Program Annual Planning Conference, headman Erick Chiang from the NSF Office of Polar Programs uttered these words: “The National Science Foundation announces its
full support
for the development of the South Pole Traverse.” His was a simple, declarative statement.

I spent the next four years figuring out what he meant.

Linda
was thirty-three years old
. She might have been good for another twenty years. On Thanksgiving Day, 1990,
Linda
chugged onto the Ross Ice Shelf. The floating, snow-covered sheet of glacial ice reached endlessly ahead. A gray overcast stole the horizon and robbed the Shelf of all its shadows.
Linda
carried her blade high over the snow. She pulled a twenty-ton sled loaded with thirty thousand pounds of dynamite.

Linda
was special, a D8-LGP bulldozer built for Antarctica. Steel spliced into her chopped frame stretched her over twenty feet long. And she was light-footed. Sixty thousand pounds of yellow iron spread over a pair of fifty-four-inch-wide tracks made her a low-ground-pressure machine.

Brian Wheater had just finished his four-hour stretch at
Linda
's stick. He'd brought her from Williams Field skiway that afternoon. Now he sat off to the side in
Linda
's spacious cab while his partner took a turn. A diesel-fired heater at their feet kept them warm.

Working only his second season on the Ice, Brian volunteered for anything. Now he staged explosives for a seismic project to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. This was the glacier that Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackle-ton before him, traversed over the Transantarctic Mountains onto the Polar Plateau. To get to the Beardmore, Brian had to cross four hundred miles of Ross Ice Shelf. It had been decades since the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) sent anybody out this way over the surface. From airfields on the ice, near the stony ground of McMurdo Station on Ross Island, the United States flew supplies to its remote outposts on the continent.

The Ross Ice Shelf was a long way from the jungles of Vietnam for Brian. Nothing green here. Nothing growing, nothing wet, nothing warm. Brian kept his vigil no less keen. He was rock solid, a decorated sergeant of the U.S. Marines. Behind his rigid bearing lay an amazing mix of literary erudition and an often-silly sense of humor. He thought carefully before speaking. He chose his words well. But he rarely spoke. Grim-faced, Brian peered through the blank whiteness outside
Linda
's windows for the other tractors in their caravan.

Linda
's sister
Pam
followed a hundred yards behind.
Pam
pulled another twenty-ton sled of fuel drums. Two mechanics from Williams Field alternated at her controls. A four-tracked Tucker Sno-Cat, one-quarter
Linda
's weight, ran out in front carrying their food, survival gear, and blasting caps. A Kiwi mountaineer ran the Tucker, leading their caravan along the same route explorer Edmund Hillary took in the 1950s.

The orange Tucker disappeared from time to time, and then reappeared. Brian watched it closely, never losing sight of the flag atop its tall whip antenna. He sensed they were on uneven ground, on a lazy ocean of long, slow snow rollers. The Tucker disappeared again. Brian elbowed his partner, pointing. Both stood up, craning for a look. No shadows, no tracks. The last thing Brian saw was the flag on that whip antenna when gravity struck.

Linda
plunged right. Snow exploded through her window. She ricocheted left. Her side door broke in. Snow blasted Brian against his partner, burying them both. Then
Linda
fell, completely vertical, racing straight down, pulling her sled after them.

Linda
crashed against the edge of an ice wall, wedged. Her windshield broke out. The snow that had encased Brian and his partner spewed into the black void below. They hung up on
Linda
's dashboard, waiting for the dynamite sled.

It never fell.

They found the throttle under what snow remained in
Linda
's cab and killed her engine before its fumes killed them. One hundred gallons of diesel from
Linda
's tank had spilled over everything. Brian killed the pilot flame on the cab heater, refusing to burn to death in the icy crevasse.

Neither Brian nor his partner spoke after that. Moments became minutes. Brian checked to see if he was all there and working right. He looked straight up through the broken rear window. A promise of light filtered through a ragged aperture at the surface. The dynamite sled's front skis dangled in space,
held back by a heavy chain. Its deck had rammed across the collapsed snow bridge into the opposite wall of the crevasse.

The dark fissure clouded with their frosty breath. All was silent but for the “tink” of metal on metal shrinking in the intense cold. A scratching sound prompted Brian to dig for their radio. Its red light came on when he pressed transmit. They still had battery. Brian looked at his watch for the first time: 7:45 p.m. He couldn't make out the reply, but he recognized the mechanic's voice.

Russ Magsig had seen
Linda
disappear. He stopped
Pam
. One step at a time, the bearded mechanic in grease-stained overalls plunged a slender eight-foot metal rod into the snow in front of him. A well-dressed mountaineer probed from the opposite direction. Both converged on the twenty-ton sled bridged across the gaping black hole. A half-hour later, Russ reached it first. He lay on his belly, looking into the hole, and shouted.

Brian spotted Russ's silhouette against the vague light. He considered climbing up the dangling chains with the mountaineer's rope around him, but his partner's legs and hip ached. Brian stayed with his partner. The mountaineer had already called for a rescue team. No one else would approach the crevasse until it arrived. Insidious, -55 degree cold penetrated them.

Brian's partner shifted his weight, kicked at some snow and hit something. They found the military thermos they'd filled with coffee before they left Williams Field. The coffee was still hot.

The first of three helicopters flew over. Brian never looked up. He looked at his watch the second time: 9:30. A chunk of snow hit
Linda
: 10:00. Another Kiwi mountaineer hollered that she was coming down. Her rope swung six feet to the side of
Linda
's cab, dangling into the void. She kicked over the edge and rappelled sixty-six feet down to them. In the closed space she smelled the stink of machines, fuel, and human bodies.

They hauled Brian's partner out first. Then Brian roped up and swung over the abyss. He reached the surface at 10:25 p.m., startled by the clear blue sky and bright sunshine.

They'd been in the crevasse for three hours and ten minutes, cold soaked. Brian warmed a bit during the forty-minute flight to McMurdo. When he got there his core temperature was up to 95 degrees. The doctor thought the coffee had saved them.

Linda
stayed in the crevasse. The place where she fell was called the Shear Zone.

Early Sunday morning in the spring of 2002
, I left my mining town home, my wife, and four-year-old son, and drove over Red Mountain Pass for Denver. I'd driven the Pass countless times over the past thirty years—it was one of only two paved roads leading out of the county. Denver, the city, held the corporate offices for the Antarctic Program's principal support contractor. There was a job for me if I wanted it. But I was thinking about bad ground and bad ideas growing in the dark.

A momentary mental picture of Brian in the crevasse floated over the steering wheel of my pickup truck. I'd met Brian earlier in the week, halfway and a long drive for both of us, at the True Grit Café in Ridgway. He said he'd never heard of the Shear Zone until he became a part of it. We spent a couple hours going over
Linda
's fall and the daisy chain of events leading to that.

Now the program wanted to try again, this time going all the way to South Pole and back. It'd asked me to lead that job, and that meant crossing the Shear Zone. While Brian dredged up twelve-year-old memories of
Linda
over burgers, I asked myself what had changed. Brian's story frightened me. It was a complex mistake—the kind that lurked in institutional systems. A popular hubris gave an idea momentum, but no one could imagine the unintended consequences of the idea. I could never get a handle on why mistakes like that happened because nobody wanted them. But I recognized their shadows, and tried to avoid them. When Brian and I parted, our hands clasped, and standing eye to eye, he told me this: “Never turn your back on anything—or anyone—in that place.”

The Pass's snaky twists and turns took me by mines I'd worked in off and on for three decades, and many more mines I'd not. Those holes in the mountainsides turned my thoughts to our third year on the South Pole tunnel project, two years ago. Not a miner among my crew but me, yet we made two spectacular intersections that year. Two tunnels connecting face-to-face at three inches off centerline would've made me happy. I'd never heard stories about hole-throughs like ours: perfect. The crew listened. They learned. When the tunneling machine broke down, we went at the face with chainsaws, picks and shovels.

We stood together at the end of that season by the skiway while they waited for their flight north. When the LC-130 bore them off to McMurdo, sobs of relief, sobs of thanksgiving overcame me; not one of them had been hurt. They were going home intact, happy … and proud. I remembered this, driving across Colorado, seven hours on the road. Not one of them hurt.

Hurt. Through the farm country of Montrose I remembered floating on a litter years before, a crew of raven-haired miners lugging me through a maze of tunnels in New Mexico, beams from their cap lamps bouncing through the darkness like animated spirits. A slab of rock had fallen off the tunnel face just as I finished centering the start of my partner's drill hole while he ran the 125-pound pneumatic drill at the other end of his six-foot-long drill bit. Stepping back to take up my own drill, I found myself lying across his, dazed, hit harder than I'd ever been. I lay there, knowing I was hurt but not yet in pain. My partner grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me back from the tunnel face. He left me lying in a cold puddle of muddy drill water, and then went for help. Alone then, eyes closed, I felt the intense pain in my back.

Riding up the thousand-foot vertical shaft on the metal floor of the cage, lying in the back of that ambulance through the starlit wintery night to the hospital in Taos, I thought,
What've I done? A newborn son in Colorado. A young wife who cares lovingly for him. I have to shelter them. I have to feed them … I have to work. Am I a broken burden to my family now?
I remembered all that, driving to Denver. That was bad ground at that mine. But from the distance of an engineer's office, it all worked out on paper.

Brian got into bad ground. If you draw a line on a map from here to there, do you know what's under that line? They sent
Linda
out. Had anything changed? I'd changed. That cave-in shrunk my backbone an inch. Best I could do now was six-foot-three. My truck's mirror showed me gray hair and gray beard where dark brown used to be.

I topped 11,312 feet at Monarch Pass, hunting more pavement.
The terrain I'll do well with.
I'd made my living for years as a professional geologist. I didn't care for the academic stuff, but give me a project and I was a happy man.
The organization I'll have trouble with.
I've always worked better with the man standing beside me than with the idea of a company. Companies seemed like fictions to me that men personified with phrases like “The Company wants” or “They won't like,” as if companies were flesh-and-blood that you could shake hands with.

I'd long ago bought into the idea of a transcontinental traverse, a safe route over the surface of Antarctica for caravans of tractor trains hauling supplies to South Pole. But for me this mission wasn't about supporting the juggernaut running the program, nor its superstructure. A mission accomplished did that. This mission was about supporting the people on the ground, people who risked their lives.