“Rick Mason,” Kershaw yelled aft. “Would you please turn on the windshield de-icing. It's starting to get a bit frosty.”
We watched Mason search under the pilot's seat until he produced one of those small scrapers that are made to clear ice from automobile windows. Then, buttoning his parka and putting on his big fur-lined Alaskan mittens, Mason opened the window next to Kershaw, and while Kershaw held him by the belt he wormed out into the freezing air and scraped the front windshield clear.
“Thanks Rick,” Kershaw said when Mason was back in. “That'll do for now. You can turn off de-icing.”
“Sixty-two south,” Kershaw yelled aft. “If the weather was clear you would see the end of the Antarctic Peninsula.”
A glance out the window, however, revealed only clouds. Worse, I noticed a white coating building on the leading edge of the black wing.
“Don't worry,” Rick Mason said. “It'll take several inches before there's danger. Even that won't bring us down.”
“What will?”
“If the engines ice up.”
“How can you tell when that's going to happen?”
“You can't. It just happens.”
Mason smiled, his Camel cigarette hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth. As the plane bucked in the turbulence he braced against a bulkhead while pouring hydraulic fluid into a funnel stuck into an opened line, his head cocked back so his cigarette ash wouldn't fall into the funnel.
“Got a leak somewhere,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as the plane lurched violently.
“Taking her to sixteen,” Giles bellowed.
The plane climbed into blue sky, and at least for the time being the icing stopped. We were now beyond the point of return: too far from Punta Arenas to go back, committed to Rothera and to the assumption it would be clear enough to land.
“Rothera reports broken clouds,” Kershaw said when he made radio contact. “So we should be able to find a hole to get down.”
The view below, however, was solid cloud. Kershaw had the aeronautical chart spread on his lap, transferring to it the coordinates from the inertial navigation.
“Mount Frances should be abeam. It's over 10,000 feet, so I was hoping we could see it.”
We peered through the windows, straining to discern any glacial ice camouflaged in the white and gray clouds.
“I think I see the edge of a peak,” Bonington said. “There.”
It was difficult to tell with certainty. Then a small hole opened, and we saw an unmistakable mix of rock and ice. Forty-five minutes later Kershaw nosed the plane through another hole. Flying low over a berg-choked bay, Kershaw lined up on a saddle along a steep icy ridge rising out of the water. It was hard to figure what he was doing. Then we flew through the saddle only a hundred feet off the ice, and suddenly we were over a long bench of smooth snow. It was the Rothera landing zone, a down-sloping stretch of crevasse-free ice marked with fuel drums painted black. In a second we touched down smoothly and taxied toward a group of tents pitched on the edge of the landing zone. That would be the Chileans’ camp. Nearby were two Twin Otters painted international orange and marked “British Antarctic Survey.” We knew the British base was less than a quarter mile away, and it looked like several of their people, as well as a group of Chileans, were out to greet us.
Mason opened the plane's door, and Frank jumped out onto the Frozen Continent holding his clinched fists skyward as though he had the theme music from Rocky playing in his head. Then Dick hopped out.
“Welcome to Antarctica,” Frank yelled to Dick as he grabbed him in a tight hug.
“I told you not to worry,” Dick said. “We're on a roll, Pancho, and our luck's going to hold all the way to the top of Vinson.”
The Chileans and British walked over to say hello.
“Howdy you all. Name's Bass. Dick Bass. Glad to meet you.”
The Brits invited us to visit their camp, and loading in a snow cat we made the short drive. Rothera Base consisted of five buildings, including a two-story central structure that housed most of the base's thirty or so summertime inhabitants. After a hearty meal we returned to the airstrip and the Chileans’ camp, which was nothing more than a dozen small nylon tents pitched alongside the landing zone. We pitched our own tents nearby, and when we awoke the Chileans were nice enough not only to host us to coffee and breakfast, but also to fire up their French Alouette helicopter and collect the fuel drums that lay scattered in the area where they had descended by parachute from the C-130 drop. Mason oversaw the refueling, using a small gas engine pump to empty each drum. The plane was loaded to capacity, and Kershaw told us the upcoming takeoff, with the plane at maximum weight and the strip coated with wet snow, would probably be the most critical moment during our entire expedition.
But nearly as critical was Kershaw's estimate of weather conditions at Vinson. If we took off and flew to Vinson only to find the mountain socked in—and then have to return to Rothera—there would not be enough fuel to make another attempt. And if we returned to Rothera to find this base also socked in so that we couldn't land, we would be in even bigger trouble as our on-board fuel supply would then be near empty.
The nearest base to Vinson was the American Siple Station, and when we had first arrived Kershaw radioed there and was told the weather was cloudy and uncertain. There was no question but that we wait for better conditions. Now the next morning Siple reported improving but still questionable conditions. Two hours later they reported good weather.
“What say we pack up and get out of here,” Kershaw said in his unruffled manner.
His equanimity was impressive, especially considering his responsibility. He had to judge the weather correctly, he had to make a tricky takeoff, a tricky landing. He had to look after the plane once we were at Vinson, too, and make sure it didn't get damaged if a wind storm were to come up. Besides all this, there were other pressures on him as well. Just by agreeing to fly for our expedition he had burned bridges with the Americans as well as the British, since both were so vehemently opposed to private expeditions in the Antarctic. They would probably refuse Kershaw any future employment as a result of his association. But Kershaw didn't care; he was hopeful, anyway, that if the Chileans did indeed want to charter the Tri-Turbo next season for their Antarctic work, he would fly for them. Then, too, he had already worked a deal with the plane's owner to fly it in the Arctic during its summer sojourn there. For Kershaw, that possibility sounded like a dream come true, flying the Arctic during the northern summer and the Antarctic during the southern summer. But all this assumed he got the airplane back in one piece.
“Yes, I do feel a little pressure,” Kershaw admitted when I asked him. “If I screw up a decision, or make a bad landing, that would be my last chance. I mean, aside from cracking up the plane and losing my future job, or even getting stranded and starving to death, or simply getting killed, what really worries me is cracking up and then having to get rescued. That would be the worst thing. You know, the ignominy of it.”
It's probably accurate to say the rest of us would have gladly chosen ignominy over death, but whatever his motivation we were all glad to have Kershaw behind the plane's controls. I had been curious to learn more of his background, and while in Punta Arenas I had gotten him to tell me some of his personal history, and how he came to spend so much time in the Antarctic.
“I was born on a rubber and tea plantation in southwestern India,” he had said. “It was very remote, and my friends were the servant's kids. Our house was on top of a hill, and about a mile away from a thick jungle, and we could wander there all we wanted as long as we were back for dinner. There were no roads, no fences, no signs telling you where you could and couldn't go. Only the stillness of the jungle, and I loved it.
“One day that stillness was broken by a clattering that steadily grew louder until suddenly appeared a helicopter, there to spray the rubber trees. This was really innovative of my father, as no one else had ever tried it. The chopper pilot
took me for a ride, and then and there I decided that what I wanted to do was fly.
“The helicopter came back every year, and stayed for two weeks. Our plantation was one of the best run in the region, but despite that I knew things weren't going right. I was born in 1949, two years after partition, and I could sense, in the whispered talk around the house, the coming end. Finally it happened, our plantation was expropriated. I was the fifth generation of our family in India, and still we chose to move to England.
“I hated it in England. Everything seemed gray and lifeless compared to India. But I had an uncle who worked at a flying club, and at fourteen I got my first instruction. Eventually I got my license, then my instructor's rating, and one day I answered an ad to fly for the British Antarctic Survey. I’ll never forget that first season on the ice. All of a sudden I was in a place that gave me that same sense of freedom I knew as a kid. In the Antarctic there was no one telling me anything, no control towers, no traffic, no restrictions. It was incredible, like I had found once more that jungle of my childhood.”
Kershaw taxied the DC-3 up the gently inclined snow slope to its very end so he would have maximum takeoff distance. We were all silent. He turned the plane, and for a moment it sat poised like a black and yellow wasp looking down the glacier. Then Kershaw pushed forward on the throttles and the turbos screamed. For a hundred yards the plane lumbered in heavy snow, slowly gaining speed. Halfway down the runway the plane still seemed stuck in the wet snow. We bounced heavily. What had Kershaw chosen as the abort mark? The end of the runway was a fifty-foot ice cliff that dropped into the ocean. We bounced again, went airborne, dropped back to the snow. Kershaw pulled back once more, and the old DC-3 gently lifted off.
“Aah-eah-eaahhh,” Dick yelled, and Kershaw looked aft with a thumbs-up.
We climbed above King George VI Sound, the smooth sea ice veined with leads and channels. Ahead through the cockpit window we saw a small range of jagged peaks. The weather cleared, and under a cloudless sky we approached the great ice cap of the Antarctic proper. There was flat ice as far as we could see, and we could see several hundred miles.
“Whenever I fly this route,” Kershaw told me as I leaned over his shoulder, gazing through the cockpit window, “I think of Lincoln Ellsworth, when he made the first transantarctic flight, more or less over this same terrain. Only then he had no idea what was here. These mountains below, he named them: Faith, Hope, Charity, No one had ever seen them. He had some bad weather, and had to land three times to wait for it to clear. You see, he had no idea what mountains might be in the area. Even if he could have gone to 30,000 feet he wouldn't have been sure there didn't exist some peak higher than Everest. Think about that. I mean really think about it. It was only fifty years ago, and as he flew along he wondered if he would discover a mountain higher than Everest.
“And there they are,” Kershaw said, pointing ahead. “Just like he first saw them. The Ellsworth Mountains.”
Ahead I could make out the jagged interruption on the horizon, the long line of great peaks rising like islands in a frozen sea. Among them was Vinson.
Kershaw gazed ahead with a placid smile that gave his face a confident composure. He was back in his childhood jungle.
13
VINSON: TWO TO GO
“That must be the summit of Vinson there. That peak in the middle of the massif.”
“I think the route goes up the plateau, then follows that right-hand ridge of the actual summit pyramid.”
“Looks like a piece of cake.”
Kershaw piloted the Tri-Turbo above a col between Vinson and its neighboring peak, Shinn, then banked right while we scrambled to the other side of the plane to view the western escarpment. This vantage was dominated by Mount Tyree—at 16,290 feet the second highest peak in Antarctica. Tyree was only 570 feet shorter than Vinson, at least according to the rough field survey done in the early 1960’s, and it was a good thing it wasn't the highest. If Vinson was a moderate slope with few if any technical climbing difficulties, Tyree was something else again, steep and rocky on all sides. Bonington and I had discussed the possibility of attempting to climb it after we knocked off Vinson.
“It's quite impressive, isn't it?” Bonington said with studied understatement. Then, casting aside British reserve he exclaimed, “That West Face has got to be one of the greatest unclimbed faces in the world.”
As he lost altitude Kershaw doubled back toward Vinson. Now our attention changed from mountaineering challenges to the more immediate problem of getting the plane down in one piece. We knew the primary factor Kershaw had to consider in choosing a landing was wind. Not just ground wind, but he had to think about the wind the plane would be exposed to while parked. He knew that if he picked a landing too far from the protection of the mountain's lee the aircraft would be exposed to the full force of the fierce Antarctic winds that blow across the icecap. On the other hand, if he parked too close the plane might be buffeted by gusts coming from unpredictable directions. This latter concern was a very real hazard, as Kershaw knew from the experience of friends of his in the British Antarctic Survey. Two years before, this other group had landed a Twin Otter at a field camp and tied the wings to anchors, with the plane's nose facing into the wind. Then they went in the hut for a rest, and while they were asleep the wind suddenly changed direction, hitting the plane broadside. When they came out they found the plane's wings still tied in place to the anchors, but the fuselage twisted upside down.
In addition to wind Kershaw had to consider the sand dune—shaped formations on the flat ice cap called sastrugi. Standing sometimes two or more feet, these wind-tortured formations can trip a plane's skis when it's landing, sending the aircraft's nose augering into the hard snow. The trick is to determine from the air the direction of the prevailing wind and then land with the lay of the sastrugi.
Kershaw eyed a section of the icecap a few miles from the base of the west side of Vinson. He circled his candidate landing zone, banking the plane while Mason opened the fuselage door and tossed a smoke grenade. On the ice the red smoke rose lazily.
“Negligible ground wind,” Mason said. He lit another Camel then returned forward, got final instructions from Kershaw, and turned back to us.
“Fasten your seat belts. We're bringing this bucket of bolts down.”
Faces that moments before were exuberantly glued to the windows were now intently somber, and I thought once again how the nearest human habitation, the nearest source of support, was 180 miles away across a flat, trackless ice desert. If the plane were to crack up on landing, that would be a helluva long way to ski.
Kershaw made his line-up and came in. Out the window the shadow-lined sastrugi, well defined by the low Antarctic sun, came up to meet us. The plane gently settled, then hit hard. I felt an adrenaline surge as Kershaw applied full throttle and the screaming turbos lifted us up and we went round for another pass.
“Just testing the surface,” Kershaw yelled to us above the turbos.
We again made the same line-up. The peaks of the mountain range—Shinn, Epperly, Tyree, Gardner—rose in a great wall filling the plane's windows. We slowly came back down, gently losing altitude, then made contact. We glided smoothly for a few seconds, then came a heavy whump! as we clipped a sastrugi formation. We rose, came down, bounced hard, rose and came down again. Another bounce, and we had full contact. I stayed tensed, ready to tuck into a survival roll in case the skis tripped. We bounced again, then slowed and came to a stop.
“Aah-eah-eaahhh,” Dick called.
We all cheered, and Kershaw turned with a wide grin and another thumbs-up.
Mason, with the Camel still hanging from his lips, opened the plane door and the cold air rudely swept in.
“What a place,” I said to him. “There's nothing else to compare in the world.”
“Maybe,” he replied. “But when you've seen one piece of ice, you've seen ‘em all.”
Steve Marts was down first to film the rest of us jumpin
g out. Frank was next, then Dick, then Bonington.
“Say something about the climb,” Marts yelled while the camera continued to roll.
“I bet Vinson's only a mile or two away,” Frank said.
“Yes, it seems,” Bonington added. “And I think that left-hand route on the whole is probably best. A bit smoother, and of course the other guys went that way on the first ascent, didn't they?”
With binoculars Bonington scrutinized the route. Everything suggested a straightforward climb, a four- or five-day enterprise. Conditions seemed perfect: no clouds, no wind, daylight twenty-four hours.
Dick, however, was thinking otherwise.
Gazing up at Vinson rising 9,000 feet above our plane, he thought, It might be a walk in the park, but it sure as heck looks like a long and cold one to me.
He was about to say something, but then told himself that those of us who were seasoned climbers were so much more experienced he'd better keep his mouth shut.
It was too bad he didn't speak up, as it might have given Bonington and me pause. For in our exuberance we were overlooking a few key considerations. First, we were forgetting that because the air in Antarctica has no water vapor, no dust, no anything, you can see for hundreds of miles, and consequently distances and sizes are very deceptive. Then, too, we were forgetting that even if the slopes on Vinson were moderate, they were still at an altitude of nearly 17,000 feet at a latitude only 700 miles from the South Pole, and that far south, that altitude—because the atmospheric envelope gets thinner toward the poles—is equal to 20,000 feet in the Himalaya. We were forgetting that, in fact, the summit of Vinson is the highest point on earth at such an extreme latitude.
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