Knowing it would be warmer sleeping in tents than on the metal floor of the plane, we pitched camp next to the aircraft. While we constructed snow block walls as windbreaks around the tents, the plane's crew dug pits under the wings to bury anchors to tie down the plane. It was midnight, with the Antarctic sun approaching its lowest dip as it circled the horizon—but still well above setting— when we finished dinner and crawled in our sleeping bags.
Bonington was awake at 5:00 A.M., and we were still bathed in sunlight.
“We should get going and take advantage of this good weather,” he said.
Already I could feel the effect of perpetual daylight, a kind of mild disorientation, like jet lag. I crawled outside to help with the cook stove, which we had set up alongside the tent. I bent over the billy and felt the back of my neck glow in the warmth of sun while at the same time my face stung in the cold of shadow. I melted snow, made hot drinks, then prepared a cereal mush mixed with a quarter pound of butter. A mountaineer's diet in the high Arctic or Antarctic is different than at high altitude such as the Himalaya. There the lack of oxygen makes it difficult for your body to digest animal fats. But here, at comparatively lower elevations but even colder temperatures, you crave the energy provided by something like butter, and in the days ahead it would be a staple in our diet.
Following breakfast it took several hours to make final adjustments to our equipment and then load our two sleds with about 250 pounds of gear each. We then harnessed three men already loaded with their own heavy backpacks to each sledge and began the trudge to the base of Vinson. Since the day before when Bonington and I had casually guessed the distance to be a mile or two, Giles had pulled out his chart and, triangulating our position, showed us it was more like five miles. That's when we realized that through the crystalline air distances were deceiving.
Even though it was only a gentle incline, the combination of backpacks and sleds made for tough work.
“This in a small way is what Scott and his men must have gone through,” Bonington said.
Whenever the fiberglass sled caught under the sastrugi we had to bear our full weight against the traces to pull it over, and after five hours our stomach and leg muscles were feeling the strain.
At the head of a shallow cirque between Vinson and neighboring Mount Shinn we set up camp. It took several hours to cut blocks from the brick-hard snow for a windbreak, but we judged the task essential: the potential this land held for extreme weather was a constant background threat that influenced our every decision. I had been to Antarctica once before (on an adventure to the Peninsula in 1979) and I remembered a day returning to camp when a storm suddenly blew in, and before we reached our tent the wind strength forced us to belly crawl the remaining distance. We were almost to the tent when we heard a strange noise, like a giant engine running at top speed about to explode. It was a super gust approaching, and when it hit we had to hold on to the shafts of our ice axes while our bodies flapped like flags on the flat surface.
With the windbreak finished we drank hot soup while we studied the features of a snow and ice gully at the back of the cirque. This was the route we would follow in the “morning,” and both Bonington and I were surprised to see that up close it looked longer and steeper than we had guessed.
“Still, our view from here is foreshortened, so it probably looks steeper than it really is,” Bonington said optimistically.
The sun passed behind the ridge bordering our little cirque, and the temperature instantly dropped to thirty below. After a quick dinner of dehydrated chili mixed with the requisite butter we scrambled to our tents and were in our sleeping bags by midnight. When we woke at 6:00 the cirque was still in shadow and we waited until the sun broke once again into the open before we lazily made breakfast. It was 11:00 by the time we were ready to go.
Our plan was to carry mostly food supplies up the gully, continuing toward the main peak of Vinson until we found a good location for our next camp. There we would cache our loads, go back down and return next day with tents, bags, and stoves to occupy this next camp, which we would call camp 1.
As we left base camp our crampons squeaked in the snow, and in places the flat surface was so hard that even with body weight and full packs, the steel points would only penetrate the wind-hardened snow a quarter inch.
A short distance beyond our tents the slope began to steepen, and soon we were following Bonington's steps as he made a zigzag up the ever-steepening gully. An hour later we could see our tents below like small colored dots decorating the base of the cirque, and I realized if someone were to slip here, and drop their ice axe or otherwise fail to arrest themselves, they probably would be dead by the time they skidded to a halt.
“I must say,” Bonington noted, apparently sharing my thought, “this is a bit steep going, isn't it. Perhaps we should take the extra time to rig a belay.”
Looking down toward Frank and Dick, I agreed heartily. Although Frank's climbing technique was much improved from when we had been on that similarly exposed slope on Aconcagua eleven months before, I could only too vividly imagine him catching his crampon point on a pant leg.
In fact we were all sharing the same thought because about then Frank yelled up, “Don't you think it's time to put a rope on?”
Instead of taking the time to belay each climber we decided it would be faster if we tied our climbing ropes together and Bonington and I took turns leading the length up and fixing it, so the others could follow with their mechanical jumar ascenders. This technique worked well and by 5:00 we were at the top of the gully. It had taken us six hours.
“I’m beginning to realize this mountain may take a bit more time than we first guessed,” Bonington said.
From the top of the gully we surveyed the next stage: a walk across a broad basin, then a climb up a small icefall to gain the col between Vinson and Shinn. We made it across the basin in less than an hour, and on the far side we decided it was time to search out a camp spot.
“It's absolutely essential we find a place to dig a solid bolt hole,” Bonington cautioned.
Bolt hole was British for snowcave, meaning a secure shelter we could bolt to in case a windstorm came up that was too strong for our tents. Usually it's no problem building a snowcave; you simply start digging. But here the snow was so hard it was difficult to cut even with snow saws, and we knew the only way to get a cave without hours of labor was to find a hidden crevasse we could modify into a shelter. A little probing in the area soon revealed what we were looking for. We tunneled in from the side, cached our food in it, then headed back to base camp.
The basin was still in full sun as we hiked toward the top of the gully. We were now high enough to see the great ice cap stretching to the horizon. A small peak in the distance rose like a singular island in an expansive sea; this was Welcome Nunatak, and although it looked close we knew from the maps it was forty miles away. Again, the clear air, the deceptive distances. How far away then was the horizon, which seemed far beyond Welcome Nunatak. One hundred fifty miles? Two hundred fifty? We looked at the long horizontal line, so clear there was a fine distinction between the ice and the sky. So clear that staring at it we realized you could actually tell it curved from one end to the other. We guessed this had to be perhaps the only place on earth where you could see this phenomenon. And we realized that if the ancients had been witness to this view they would have known the earth was round.
We paused a moment to absorb the panorama.
“Kind of hits you when you realize the place doesn't belong to anybody,” I said.
“The last true wilderness on earth,” Frank added.
Even beyond wilderness, it was as close on earth as you can come to being on another planet.
A good adventure needs to combine some risk-taking, some unvisited, untracked, or unexplored territory, and some physical challenge. In Antarctica, we had all three. And we had them to a degree that we couldn't help but compare this to other trips we had been on. Between us, that was quite a ran
ge of territory in nearly every corner of every continent on earth. But looking out over this frozen frontier, we all were in agreement those other places paled in comparison, that for all of us—including the globe-trotting Bonington— this was the most unusual and exciting adventure we'd ever had.
“You two have come a long way toward developing your climbing skills,” Bonington said to Frank and Dick, “but to be seasoned mountaineers, there remains one thing. You must learn to cook.”
Frank moaned. It was the morning after we had returned to base camp, and we were just ready to begin preparing our meal before moving up to occupy camp 1. Bonnington was unaware of Frank's aversion to cooking.
“Now I don't mind cooking,” Dick said, “but Pancho here has told me that because we're paying for this, we shouldn't have to cook if we don't feel like it. And if he isn't going to, I’m not going to cook for him. I’ve been wet-nursing him enough on these climbs.”
“Wait a minute,” Frank retorted. “I never said any such thing. You know we've decided to be equals with the other climbers whether we're paying for it or not.”
“But on McKinley I was going to offer to cook, and you said, ‘No, don't tell anyone that or we'll be cookin’ from here on.’ “
“But I never said I don't have to cook because I’m paying for the trip,” Frank insisted.
“Not in those exact words, but that's what you meant.”
“But it's the crassness of putting it that way.”
“Now that's the trouble with you liberal Democrats,” Dick said. “Never call a spade a spade. Listen, I’m happy to cook, but if you don't, well, I’m paying for this odyssey too, and I don't want to feel like a second-class partner.”
While this latest episode of the Dick and Frank Show was under way, Steve Marts, shaking his head and smiling, had quietly assembled the stove and started cooking.
We ate our morning mush the morning after we returned to base camp while we swapped stories about past and future adventures. Bonington told us his next trip was back to Everest.
“I’m joining a team of Norwegian friends,” he explained, “and this time my goal is to get to the summit myself before I get too old.”
“I can sympathize with that,” Dick said. “I hope I can get a shot at it before I’m over the hill.”
“We'll keep in touch,” Bonington replied. “If you can't get on with that Indian team, there might be a way to get you with this Norwegian group.”
After breakfast, Kershaw made the announcement he was giving up his ambition to climb Vinson, and would return to the plane.
“Chris and I had a long talk about it, and it's clear to me now my responsibilities lie with the safety of the aircraft. As much as I would love to be with you, and love to climb this mountain, we'd all be in deep shit if a storm came up and something happened to that plane.”
As Kershaw disappeared in the distance toward the plane, Bonington said, “One of the things I like best about these trips is meeting new people. I’ve a feeling Giles and I will become good friends.”
Leaving one of our tents at base camp, we loaded our backpacks and set off once more up the gully. Once again Bonington and I fixed the climbing ropes and the others followed. All except for Marts, who, as he often did, was climbing off on his own, at the sides of the gully, to get the best camera angles. He was indefatigable at his task, climbing quickly ahead of everyone, setting up his camera and shooting, then breaking down, packing, and once more scurrying to get ahead, climbing confidently without a rope.
Our two Japanese teammates, Yuichiro Miura and his cameraman Tae Maeda, were also climbing strongly. Miura had perhaps the heaviest pack of anyone, as he was also carrying his downhill ski equipment for his planned descent off the top of Vinson. By now all of us realized how lucky we were to have Miura and Maeda on the trip, for they were both even-tempered, hard-working, and companionable. Fortunately, too, they both spoke good English although Dick was always practicing his traveler's Japanese.
We made better time up the gully, and soon we were across the basin and at the site for camp 1. We pitched tents, then crawled in our snowcave to fetch the food bags cached the previous day. It was 3:00 A.M. in the sunlit Antarctic night when we finally had dinner and brews finished. Before turning in I crawled out to pee, and Bonington called out to ask if I could guess when the sun would break above the ridge crest above camp.
“Looks like a half hour or so.”
Then I realized I was miscalculating the direction the sun was moving. It wasn't really rising and setting, but rather making a sideways crab-crawl above the horizon.
“Make that two or three hours. We won't see sun until it moves sideways into that col over there.”
“Let's get a few hours sleep, then get up and finish the bolt hole,” Bonington said. “There's really no sense going any higher until we see what this sky brings, anyway.”
The faultless clear sky had been replaced by a portentous veneer of thin cirrus, and when we awoke at 10:00 the next morning the sun was backlighting a glitter of sprinkling snow, the kind mountaineers call angel's dust. After breakfast we finished the snowcave, and by mid-afternoon conditions were the same.
“I wish it would either storm or clear,” Bonington said. “This is frustrating.”
“But not so bad,” Miura added. “I think maybe okay to climb to next camp.”
We considered Miura's suggestion. With the comfort of knowing we had a bombproof snowcave in the neighborhood should a storm move in, we agreed it made sense to risk moving up. At six in the evening we were packed and ready to leave. What a great treat it was to be able to ignore the clock and climb at whatever time of the day we felt like moving.
We were all optimistic that in another twenty or thirty hours we would be on top. Our plan now was to carry everything we would need to make the next camp, and there pitch our tents, sleep a few hours, then continue without packs to the summit. That would put us back down to the plane only six days after arriving, not far off our original estimate. There might even be enough time for Bonington and me to attempt Mount Tyree, or perhaps a climb up nearby Epperly Peak, which we guessed to be the highest unclimbed mountain in Antarctica.
Above camp 1 we negotiated a short icefall, scouting a route between several seracs, some the size of small houses. Above this the slope lay back as we approached the broad, flat col between Shinn and Vinson. The sun inched behind Vinson. As we climbed into shadow a slight breeze blew out of the col, and the combination was suddenly numbing. Stopping to put on another layer of clothing, the cold penetrated my torso and I was anxious to keep moving. We now turned and climbed toward Vinson, following a slope that was only moderately angled but riddled with hidden crevasses. I was leading, and it took vigilance to sniff out the crevasses and steer around them. I was getting colder, and it occurred to me that this temperature— at least thirty below—was cold enough to be dangerous. If I were to pop in a crevasse, and had to jumar out, I might freeze up before I could complete a self-rescue. It was a sobering thought, and I was all the more careful to keep a watchful eye for the telltale depressions in the snow's surface that pinpointed the black chasms.
We climbed back into sunlight, and things cheered up. Soon we arrived at an inviting flat bench just below the edge where the slope dropped away down the steep west side of Vinson.
“Good-looking campsite,” I said.
“Except it's bloody exposed if a storm brews up,” Bonington countered.
“Well I think everything's going to be just fine,” Dick said. “The clouds seem to be clearing.”
The worrisome high clouds did seem to be dissipating. By the time we had camp pitched and dinner finished it was 2:00 A.M., and we were all confident we were only hours from success. We awoke at 6:00, and by 9:00 we were off, carrying only extra clothing and a few candy bars. The sky was clear, there was no wind, conditions seemed perfect. We climbed a steepening slope above the tents, and on top we followed the ridgeline that bordered the steep west face
so we had a grand view of the ice cap 8,000 feet below. Behind us we could see the other peaks of the Ellsworth Range running in a line like an island archipelago frozen in an otherworldly icescape. Certainly there could be no similar or comparable vista on earth.
“This has to be the most fantastic day of my whole climbing career,” Bonington said.
Coming from perhaps the most experienced expedition mountaineer alive, that judgment put the austere beauty of Vinson in perspective.
We now left the ridgeline and traversed into a long, open basin that led to the summit pyramid; ahead we could see a notch on the right side of the pyramid from where it appeared we could follow the ridge to the top. The air was cold, but in direct sun, and with no wind, it was warm enough while climbing so that we wore only two thin layers of clothing under our parka shells. I took the lead from Bonington, careful to take a traversing line that would lead us at an even gait into the col. I was confident we would be on top in two or three hours.
Then I felt the first wind. It was only a breath, but enough to give the cold air a biting sting. It calmed for a moment, then puffed again. This time the puff, like an ominous portent, did not die. I raised the hood on my windsuit.
The wind built quickly, and soon we called a halt in order to pull heavy down parkas from our packs, and cover our exposed faces with masks. The gusts were coming at us through the col, hitting twenty, thirty, then forty miles an hour. We hunched over into the headwind, looking up only to verify our course. One gust hit hard, knocking me off balance, and I guessed that it was getting close to fifty miles an hour. We only had a few hundred more yards to the col, but then what? There we would be exposed to the full force of the wind, and if it were to increase any more, we might be forced back. I glanced around at the others and saw their figures blurred through the spindrift now scudding across the hard snow.
Dick was cursing to himself that he hadn't brought his face mask. With the clear skies and calm air of the morning, he hadn't thought to stick it in his pack when we left camp. Now he was forced to climb holding a mittened hand over his nose and mouth, careful not to direct his breath upward where it would instantly ice his goggles. Frank too was having trouble. He had his face mask, but it wasn't adequate to keep the wind from biting his cheeks and nose. He raised his mitten to hold over his face, and realized there was no feeling in his nose. It was the first time this had ever happened to him, and unsure whether it was any cause for alarm, decided not to say anything.
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