Blazing Ice
Page 9
Shaun rigged a train of two snowmobiles with a Nansen sled roped between them. Those sleds—named for Fridtjof Nansen, Amundsen’s Norwegian champion—were beautiful relics of bentwood and rawhide lashings. The whole sled measured twelve feet long and two feet wide. They flexed marvelously over any uneven snow surface, offering a stable ride to passenger and cargo alike.
Shaun and Tom had experience running trains like this one. Allan did, too. Russ, Kim, and I were more at home running tens of thousands of pounds of diesel-fueled equipment. I told Shaun, “Show me,” so Shaun manned the lead snowmobile and Tom the rear one while I rode the Nansen as monkey-in-the-middle.
When our train circled the post at HFS, I had been shown. We didn’t know how many crevasses we’d just crossed, nor where they were. We didn’t fall into any of them.
From HFS, we could not see our camp. But standing atop one of the drums next to the post, I did spot it. And from that perch, I studied our tracks highlighting the surface. We’d crossed rolling country, no longer an unmarked white expanse. The rollers might be ten feet high, perhaps a quarter-mile to the crest of the nearest one. That was new knowledge, though I didn’t know what it meant.
Russ and I returned to McMurdo that evening to retrieve Allan. We had him back in camp the next morning. Allan would ride the Nansen sled that afternoon.
After lunch, Kim, Russ, and I dragged the hot-water drill and a load of explosives out to Crevasse 6. Russ rode playfully upon the drill sled, now a well-warmed seat since he’d already fired up the hot water maker.
The snowmobile train started out of camp toward us, swerving to miss the drill we’d set up squarely in the middle of the road. First Shaun steered past us in a raucous yellow-and-black machine. It pushed a makeshift boom bearing the radar antenna. Shaun never took his eyes off the ground ahead. Behind him, a taut cotton rope bounced lightly over the snow. Alongside it, a black signal cable and a slack belay rope slithered by. Then the Nansen sled whispered past. Aboard it, Allan lay covered in wool blankets, his head and upper body shrouded in a cardboard box. Underneath all that he stared at a computer screen. Behind Allan’s Nansen another knotted cotton rope, paired to another belay rope, snaked over the snow. Finally, Tom’s snowmobile buzzed by, bringing up the rear.
“Look at how Allan’s all trussed up … can’t see where he’s going.” Kim remarked.
“Maybe he don’t want to see,” Russ added slyly, as the train disappeared into the east.
The radar survey to HFS came off without incident. The next day, Allan produced color printouts of it. Pages taped end to end made a scroll.
“We haven’t seen images like those,” I commented on the inverted, parabolic forms. Some were hourglass-shaped.
“I’ve changed the radar settings,” Allan explained. “I’m not looking as deeply as you were, and I’ve increased the radar gain for the top five meters.”
He pointed out half a dozen hourglass images that lay near HFS. Working backward, he scrolled through several pages showing flat, undisturbed stratigraphy. “That’s the Miracle Mile,” he explained.
“How about the road we’ve built so far?”
“You’ve gone over some features that I would like to look at more closely.”
“Right. We’ve some questionable areas out there ourselves. But we’ve crossed them with the D8 already.”
“That’s good.”
We shot the slot at Crevasse 6 in the morning, and prospected for a fill-gathering area south of our road. Mindful of Allan’s claim that we were working in the worst of it, we took our time doing this. In the end, our flags and PistenBully tracks marked an irregular snow farm where the bulldozer would have no straight pushes.
I planned to head out with Allan in the PistenBully after lunch, to show him how we searched the area, and to see how he’d changed our radar settings.
“I’d like that very much,” Allan said with a nod.
The bulldozer idled near Crevasse 6 in the clear afternoon. Both snowmobiles and the hot water drill were up with us, and the PistenBully was rigged for radar. For everyone’s benefit, I reviewed the boundaries of the fill-gathering area and the flags and vehicle tracks surrounding it. Tom stayed at 6, spotting for Kim.
Taking a looping route around Crevasse 6, we dragged the drill up to 7 where Shaun and Russ would make holes. Allan and I went on in the Pisten-Bully to fill in the chessboard around 8.
“I am happy you are here,” I told him across the cab.
Allan sat shotgun with the radar. He looked up from the screen for a moment. “And I am happy to be here. This is a great project.”
That brief exchange covered a lot of ground, but I got down to business.
“We’ve been holding our eyes to the bottom-right part of the screen. That’s where we look for our first warning of a crevasse.” Radar imagery scrolled across the screen from right to left. As we moved forward, the image continuously revealed what the radar antenna saw under it. “If we see a reflector down there, we call it out. If we see a vertical black image enter the screen right after that, we call stop. What part of the screen do you watch?”
Allan considered my question. “A reflector in the lower right will give you an early warning of a crevasse. However, I tend to watch the upper right, and mostly the top few meters. If I see the surface layers begin to dip, then I believe I am looking at a sagging crevasse bridge.”
He showed me how to focus the radar on the shallower portions of the snow. We’d not been watching for sagging surface layers since every bit of surface here looked flat. It was flat. And he did not mention black voids.
“I have compressed the image to accentuate sagging if it appears.” His new settings made crevasses far more recognizable on the radar screen. But compressing the image introduced a new variable affecting safe search speeds for the PistenBully.
Until we’d run the helicopter survey, and then completed the snowmobile transect, we’d had no idea what lay out in front of us. I figured our chessboard approach was the safest, most methodical way to enter unexplored ground where crevasses might hide.
“I have never done it that way,” Allan told me. “But I believe your ideas are sound.”
“But now that we can cross the Zone in snowmobiles, I’d like to lay out the green flag line all the way to HFS. If we do that, we can dispense with this chessboard and stick to what’s right on our road. What do you think?”
“I think that is a reasonable approach, too.”
My radio squawked: “Hey, can you come back here and pull this drill up to number 8?”
We spun the PistenBully around and followed our own tracks out of the chessboard, having found several more crevasses off track. As we pulled squarely up to the road, I asked Allan, “Look out the window to your right, will you please? Make sure nobody’s coming.”
Allan looked to his right. “Nobody’s coming.”
I grinned. We were in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica, and he laughed at my fun. I liked this guy.
We dragged the hot-water drill up to Crevasse 8 where I dropped Allan to work with Russ. The drill would be our best friend when were actually probing for voids. I wanted Allan to get a feel for that. We’d shoot the access hole at 7 before quitting time. I wanted him to see that, too.
Shaun went with me to fetch the dynamite, now stored on top of an old navy sled parked near Baby. Heading back, we passed Kim and Tom at 6. They might finish there in another hour.
The next morning brought overcast with no wind to the Shear Zone. Against the indistinct shadows our many colored flags, brightly painted vehicles, and even our own bodies clothed in reds, blues, and blacks resembled a pointillist painting in progress upon a plain white canvas. The soft snow brought an audible hush to the place.
We started our day gathered around the access hole at Crevasse 7. Allan saw how our mountaineers explored the voids and learned how and what hard information we collected from that work. All of us had a role in the exercise. Shaun and Tom descended into th
e crevasse. Russ and Kim tended their ropes. I took notes from information Shaun radioed up. Allan observed. We all hauled the mountaineers out when the job was finished.
Through the rest of the morning we shifted into other jobs. The skies had cleared. Tom spotted for Kim while he finished just a “leetle bit more” work filling Crevasse 6. Russ and Shaun drilled the slot holes at 7. Allan and I prospected past 8 and located Crevasse 9. It was a narrow crack, thinly bridged, just big enough for a man to fall into.
I planned to switch crews in the early afternoon so the mountaineers could get some time with Allan. Russ had finished the slot holes and returned to camp on a snowmobile to work on the generator. Shaun had a bit more work stowing the drill. I told him Allan and I would be right back.
We ran down to the powder sled in the PistenBully. Passing Crevasse 6, I looked out over the fill-gathering area again. Tom had left his spotting post and was down in the borrow pit, pulling perimeter flags out of the snow. I thought that curious.
“You about done dressing it up in there?” I radioed to Kim.
“Yes. I’ll park this thing on the road in a few minutes,” he radioed back.
“Come on up and join us at number 7 then. We’re getting the explosives now.” Then Tom could join Allan for the rest of the afternoon, while Shaun and Kim helped me load and shoot.
At the powder sled, Allan and I started loading fifty-five-pound boxes of dynamite into the rear cab of the PistenBully. Our radio squawked. It was Tom at Crevasse 6. He spoke the words I most feared to hear:
“The D8 has broken through a crevasse and is stuck in it.”
6 Crossing It Right—Year One
“You need to come out here right away.”
Linda! Mechanically, I radioed back to Tom, “Copy that. We’ll be right there. Stay off the radio for now.” Our frequency could be overheard in Mc-Murdo, and we didn’t need folks in town getting spun up just yet.
“Shit! Allan, unload this dynamite.”
From the PistenBully approaching Crevasse 6 we spotted the bulldozer tipped improbably onto its right side down in the borrow pit. Kim and Tom stood upright on high ground, outside the pit.
I parked atop the fill plug and walked slowly toward them, looking back down on the bulldozer. Its right track had broken through a bridge. The dozer had skated sideways before it stopped, blocked against the opposite wall. Had it stopped sliding? The crevasse lay just outside the borrow pit. A few flags remained around the fill-gathering area.
“You guys all right?” My eyes betrayed my flat voice.
“We’re both okay,” Tom said. “I had him jump off. Didn’t want to mess around with ropes.”
With its right side sunk, the bulldozer’s left side reached for the sky. Some jump.
“I rolled a bit,” Kim volunteered.
Questions could come later. Everybody was safe for now.
Shaun was still working by Crevasse 7. I waved, holding up my radio. Over the distance separating us, he couldn’t see into the pit. Either his radio was off, or his batteries were dead. I keyed mine anyway, beckoning at the same time: “Drop what you are doing and walk over here. Now!”
Shaun arrived, taking in the scene with a pair of astonished eyes.
“We all see what has happened here,” I spoke quickly, before anyone else could. “I’ll say it for all of us: this … is … serious. First, none of us is hurt. That is good.” Improvising as fast as I could, I continued, “Now, we’re going to get that bulldozer out of that crevasse. We don’t know how we’re going to do that, yet. But we’re going to figure it out. Shaun, stay here with Tom and Allan. Find out what you can about the nature of this crevasse and the position of the bulldozer in it. Do it safely. Allan, sweep the area with one of them again. See if we can find safe access to the rear of the dozer … not just for us, but for another bulldozer. Take your time. I’ll be back in an hour or so. Kim, come with me on the snowmobile.”
We slowed down by the generator in camp. “Russ, I need you to go out to Crevasse 6 and look over a problem. No great hurry, but please do go.”
“Something broke?” he asked.
“Not exactly … “
Inside the Jamesway, Kim waited awkwardly while I raised the heavy equipment supervisor in McMurdo on the radiophone. “Gerald, we have a situation that requires the use of the other D8R you’ve got, the one with the big winch on it. Can you oblige us?’
Gerald Crist instantly decoded my message. In his always cheerful manner, he replied, “I understand perfectly. We’ll divert that dozer right away. It’s headed out to Pegasus Field now. It’ll be at your location in six to eight hours. I’ll send you an operator you know.”
That was that.
Russ roared out of camp on our other snowmobile. I turned to Kim. “You doing all right?”
“Yeah …” In measured syllables, he asked, “Am I fired?”
“Good heavens, no! I am not going to fire the man who has at this moment gained the most experience of any of us working around these crevasses!”
Kim half-stepped back.
“Look, this is not going to happen again. You’re not going to let it, right?”
“R-right.” Kim nodded slowly, waiting to hear what came next.
“We’ll go over all this tonight. For now, you need to be away from that scene.”
Kim agonized over it all, but were he out there he’d be crawling all over his dozer, trying to figure what to do next. And he’d probably hurt himself. For now, I needed Kim standing by the radio. We had another bulldozer coming. We had a well-flagged route. But the other guy had never traveled it. Kim could help a brother cat skinner. And if there were any change in plan, I needed to know.
“If anybody on that radio asks, tell them all is well. Because all is well. For now.” But if we lost one man, or dropped one piece of equipment down a crevasse, then it was all over. So far we’d done neither.
“Got it.”
“And get over what you’re feeling. Right now, you’re our most valuable player.” My adrenaline was up, but I hoped my tone was reassuring. “While you’re manning the radios, would you prepare the evening meal? We’ll need that, too, please. I’m going back out to see what the fellas have come up with.”
“I understand. And … thank you.”
We had a new job now.
Ralph Horak arrived at camp with the second bulldozer. Next month he’d accompany the French on their six-hundred-mile traverse to Concordia. This evening, we planned out how we’d get past our twenty-fourth mile.
I stood near one end of the long dinner table. Behind me the scene, diagrammed on a whiteboard, hung from the partition separating our bunkroom from the common room. Reconstructing the events showed us that everyone but Russ and Ralph had a hand in the close call.
Shaun, zealous to remove extraneous flags “cluttering” the fill-gathering area, ordered Tom to remove them. The sideline where the dozer had strayed out of bounds wasn’t flagged well enough in the first place. We’d laid down PistenBully tracks along that sideline, settling on those as a boundary. Tom knew the dozer was cutting the sideline close, but failed to caution Kim. I, seeing they were nearly finished, failed to halt the operation when I observed Tom removing flags. I failed at least to question him. Removing the rest of the flags left the fill-gathering area virtually unmarked, except for the PistenBully tracks.
After establishing shared culpability, I faced Kim. “You got greedy, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Yes I did.” Kim stood at the opposite end of the table. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling, replaying his memory. “I was nearly finished, and I just wanted a little bit more snow from my sidewall. I knew I reached out past those tracks.”
“Thank you.” Our eyes met, acknowledging his truth.
I brought the group back into the discussion. “We have learned quite a bit here. Surely no one wanted this to happen. This was an accident. All of us had a hand in it. Now, we’re each going to have a hand getting us out of it.”
“From now on, the removal or placement of any flag in the Shear Zone will only be done with my knowledge and at my direction.”
All nodded. We invented how to pull this job off as we went, but not all of us were equally versed in each other’s professions. Cat skinners were naturally inclined to cut boundaries close. That’s how they showed off their skill. I made another rule.
“We will no longer flag a fill-gathering area by placing a flag on top of a crevasse we happen to find. We will set the flags twenty feet in for margin.”
And generally mountaineers were minimalist, low-impact folks. A Caterpillar D8R and several tons of dynamite were anything but. I made my third rule.
“Dozer operators, do not expect a mountaineer to understand what you’re doing with an eighty-six-thousand-pound machine. Talk to them. Tell them what you’re doing. Remember, they are spotting for you to save your life. Now, let’s brainstorm how we get that Cat out of the trap tomorrow.”
Allan interrupted, “I am not exempt from responsibility in what happened today. I want to share what I have learned.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have learned the interpretation of a radar display showing sagging surface layers over a rising diffraction pattern, and showing no black void, should not be interpreted as no void. I believe I misinterpreted some imagery.”
We’d seen radar images that had the form of a crevasse, but lacked any black void in their interiors. The space where black should have been was filled with chaotic reflections. We supposed those were produced by blocks of collapsed bridge material plugging the void. Now, seeing more crevasses opened for inspection than he ever had seen, Allan said that was not necessarily so. He wasn’t involved in the support contractor’s hierarchy, but he generously bought-in with us.
That evening we worked out our rough solution for rescuing the dozer. As we shuffled to our cots, I approached Kim with an afterthought: “Be careful to walk your dozer out of that hole only under tension from the winch cable. If you slip your tracks at all, you’ll chew up the snow and grind yourself down farther than you are now.”