Blazing Ice Read online

  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.

  2 Denver

  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.

  I had negotiated a week’s worth of work in Denver, without commitment to accept the overall job, in order to consider the proposition and decide for myself. Crossing the high plains of South Park, watching for antelope in the distance, I found my resolve: I will not lead, or be a party to, any plan that puts one person’s life at risk.

  Monday morning I found my boss-to-be. An affable fellow with white-gray hair, he’d hired me for my first job on the Ice nine years before this, but he’d stepped out of the program the next year to deal with a death in his family. Now he was back. I was glad to see him. He showed me to a cubicle desk, dead center in a sea of cubicles. It came equipped with a phone, a computer, an ergonomic chair, and two sets of drawers. The cubicle’s four-foot-high walls supported an empty bookshelf. The desktop was bare. There was no drafting table, nor wall space for maps.

  “This will be yours. It’s a manager’s desk,” he said.

  A skinny, pony-tailed fellow stepped up with an armfull of reports and plunked them down on the manager’s desk. “I knew you were coming. I took the liberty of collecting these for your review. Welcome aboard,” he said cheerfully. “I’m here to help.” The fellow would be my part-time support man.

  “
Thank you,” I returned. I recognized him from my first year on the Ice, too, when he worked for the field support group. He was energetic and brimmed with enthusiasm. But I was cautious about the whole business. “I’m only here for a week. Perhaps longer, depending on what’s in this stuff.”

  Brian had never heard of the Shear Zone before setting out in Linda. The mountaineer told him nothing about the route. He was never issued a map and compass like he always had been in Vietnam. His boss simply asked if he wanted to take a bulldozer across the Ross Ice Shelf. His partner, with seven years on the Ice, thought they might be out six days. All they had to do was drive out past Minna Bluff and turn south. Brian told me that when he and his partner went for their briefing, all they got was “what to do with human waste.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding?”

  “No, really, John. The guy said ‘You won’t need to haul back your waste,’” and Brian laughed, though he barely cracked a smile.

  That was funny. But a familiar shadow lurked in Brian’s story: the assumption that everyone knew what they were getting into. What Brian knew in advance was a measure of what the system knew before allowing them to come into harm’s way. But Brian’s brain worked differently from mine. Faced with an unfamiliar problem, Brian gave orders. Facing the same problem, I asked: how did things come to be this way?

  I looked at the reports, anxious to review them here, on the basement level of the office building. But my boss spoke up. “Before you get started, you need to go to human resources and sign some papers.” He led me over pathways and up stairs to the third and highest floor of the building. “They’re in here.”

  I found my desk an hour later and picked the thickest report from the stack. The McMurdo to South Pole Traverse Development Project—Final Report was the legacy of a predecessor project from the mid-1990s, five years after Linda. I’d only heard rumors about why that project ended. The U.S. Navy was phasing out of the Support Force Antarctica business. The New York Air National Guard (NYANG) was phasing in. The Guard promised higher cargo delivery to South Pole than the U.S. Navy had provided.

  Resupplying South Pole, anticipating massive material requirements for building a new station there, provided the pretext for developing a surface traverse. But the NYANG’s—I loved that acronym—promise of increased cargo delivery ruled against spending for traverse development. A divided camp at NSF saw one group sided with the established airlift, expensive but proven. The other sided with surface traverse, at least as an auxiliary capability. Airplanes won out, and the South Pole Investigative Traverse—SPIT—foundered.

  The fat binder held dividers, map pockets, and pages of text. It collected “deliverable” reports provided by institutions of higher learning in support of the overarching project. A loose-leaf introductory letter fell from the front of the binder as my hands grappled with the weight of the assembly.

  The SPIT project manager wrote that letter. I knew John Evans—not well at the time, but I respected him from a distance. My eyes lingered on his last sentence: “I have tried to summarize the project from its conception to its demise on the shoals of intractable funding [emphasis mine] and timing difficulties.” If Evans was still working in the program, I needed to find him. Maybe he was in this office.

  Evans’s report would take some time to work through. I set it aside, and turned to another collection of reports. These dealt with ground penetrating radar (GPR) and detecting hidden crevasses. Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) authors were names I’d heard on the Ice but no one I really knew. The reports indicated a technical capability for locating hidden crevasses did exist, but how to adapt that to a moving traverse on ice shelves and glaciers, which were themselves moving, was not clear.

  One of the CRREL authors wrote, “the ground penetrating radar never misled us.” That report covered some testing in the Shear Zone. Its engineered language applied to what they saw, not to what they might have missed without knowing, and not to anyplace where they did not look. Though radar offered a promise of Superman-like x-ray vision, I’d have to see it for myself.

  Did we need a CRREL expert with us all the time? Could we train our own specialists—a mechanic, or a mountaineer, or an equipment operator?

  I met my boss again that afternoon. “Were you around when Linda went in?”

  “I remember it well,” he answered.

  “Did you go out there?”

  “No. I was in town when it happened. “He described the incident with phrases like “poor planning,” “should never have happened,” and “ill-prepared.”

  We turned the discussion to ground penetrating radar. He asked if it really worked.

  “These reports say it should. But they don’t deal with traversing, or with building a road across the Shear Zone. There is this.” I showed him: “‘never misled us.’”

  His eyes opened wide at reading the claim. “What do you think?”

  “Those guys never had to look somebody in the eyes and tell them ‘You go out there with that D8.’ It’s a technical report. ‘Never misled us’ can mislead you into thinking the radar will never mislead you.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  The boss’s cubicle was one in a cluster of four. Over their partitions, cubicles vanished to the horizon; an office, not a sea of white. We’d try the radar, but I needed to know more about it. The whole project depended on reliably detecting hidden crevasses. We’d not go where somebody said there were no crevasses just on their say.

  “If it works,” I said, “we should go over every step of the thousand miles with it before we ever bring a tractor onto the same ground.”

  “I’d favor every inch.”

  We shook on that. If the radar worked, I promised to radar every inch of the way between McMurdo and South Pole before a traverse fleet crossed that same inch. If the radar didn’t work, we wouldn’t go.

  “And I will support that,” my boss declared. We had a pact.

  I revisited Evans’s tome and the rest of the stack throughout the week.

  A paper dated 2000 contained a colorful map of the proposed route. It plotted a straight line from the Shear Zone across the Ross Ice Shelf to a specific pass over the Transantarctic Mountains. Curiously, the line passed directly over a well-known crevasse zone isolated in the middle of the Shelf: the Crary Ice Rise. The line then followed a zigzag path over the mountains, ultimately connecting to another straight-line reach over the high Polar Plateau to the Pole. The map looked like a show-and-tell exhibit rather than a carefully rendered navigational tool.

  But straight lines suggested uniform terrain. They implied ground without difficulty or hazard or variation. “Straight” also meant nobody had really looked at it. I wanted more information about the Crary Ice Rise.

  A CRREL paper dated 2001 gave a list of coordinates fixing the turning points on the colorful map. The list included eighteen points labeled “L” for a route segment on the Leverett Glacier. The SPIT work targeted the Leverett as the leading candidate for passage over the mountains. I didn’t know much about that glacier yet. Why did they select any of those points?

  I’d often worked with hundred-year-old field notes of mining claim surveys recorded by U.S. Deputy Mineral Surveyors, filed then with the General Land Office, and archived today by the Bureau of Land Management. The notes invariably led me to rediscover original claim corners, perhaps a blaze on a spruce tree, then twelve-inches in diameter, bearing letters and numbers carved just so according to their instructions. Were the CRREL notes as reliable? Lives could depend on it.

  One report in Evans’s tome outlined the basis for choosing the Leverett. A sieve-like process screened twenty or so candidate glaciers, rating them from “excellent” to “forget-about-it.” The sieve caught the Leverett on top, the only one to win a “good” rating. All the other candidates fell through. The next highest was rated “poor.” That was the Skelton Glacier, the one Hillary used in 1957.

  The SPIT team landed on both the Lev
erett and the Skelton in 1995. After scooting over their surfaces on snowmobiles, their verdict lay squarely with the Leverett.

  Getting to the Leverett was another matter. There was the Shear Zone, only a few miles out of McMurdo. The SPIT team had been there, too. And they had radar.

  The proposed route covered more than a thousand miles one way. Evans’s team examined only 10 percent of it. They focused on “problematic” spots. Problematic meant what one perceived as a problem. If one did not perceive a problem that did not mean no problem was there. Nevertheless, I saw clearly where Evans left off and where I might take up his trail. I could accept or disagree with any of the proposed route.

  The other 90 percent had not been traveled by anyone, ever. But many others’ tracks had crossed the proposed route: Shackleton’s, Scott’s, and Roald Amundsen’s. What did they have to say about the land around those intersections?

  Albert Crary, the American glaciologist, circumnavigated the Ross Ice Shelf in the late 1950s. Sir Edmund Hillary made his run up the Skelton to Pole the year before. Our route would cut across the middle of the Shelf, ground neither of them had traveled.

  I located both Hillary’s book recounting his 1957 tractor traverse to Pole, No Latitude for Error, and Crary’s technical report Glaciological Studies of the Ross Ice Shelf, 1957–1960.

  Hillary described encounters with crevasses radiating off Minna Bluff and White Island, lands visible from McMurdo. Apparently he thought the crevasses formed where the Shelf ice impinged on those two points of land. When he set off in his Massey Ferguson from Scott Base, he swung deliberately wide of the landmarks to avoid those crevasses. He succeeded in reaching the Ross Ice Shelf after a tense, though uneventful, passage.

  Crary’s work there showed a belt of crevasses in contrast to a radiating pattern. The belt ran seventy-five miles long from the point of Minna Bluff to the tip of Cape Crozier, the easternmost point of Ross Island. Yet even Crary had crossed the belt a couple times in a Tucker Sno-Cat, and he likewise reported no incident.