Blazing Ice by John H. Wright

Author:John H. Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2012-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

January 3 the crew split once again. Russ, Stretch, Judy, and Brad remained in camp. They greased bearings in the sleds’ running gear, replaced turntable pins, and checked cables, turnbuckles, and shackles in the rigging. They left nothing to chance for the climb.

I joined John Penney’s team scouting into the headwall basin itself. We followed the 1995 team’s path. Our radar found many crevasses on a three-mile stretch where they’d climbed over a shoulder and onto a glacial “street.”

“Streets” are elongated ridges of ice, aligned with the flow of the main glacier. They might be a hundred yards to a quarter mile wide, and they might stand ten to fifty feet high. We’d discovered street tops gave us crevasse-free surfaces here. And we’d followed street tops through all their bifurcations from L-00 to our present camp.

This street flowed right out of the basin. Our last two close encounters had found crevasses on street shoulders, just like our radar showed us now. The heavy fleet wouldn’t attempt going over it. But getting into the headwall basin was our next job.

The PistenBully continued along the 1995 path into the basin. We entered an open snowfield at its bottom, a parade ground big enough to hold the Million Mom March. And we found no crevasses there. The Plateau rim now completely embraced our horizon. It lay seven miles away. And the headwall held the steepest slopes we’d face. My evening report to McMurdo contained this message: “Have prospected a course to L-10 … on your map. Have found crevasses. Not insurmountable.”

Under clear skies the next morning, January 4, the fleet advanced four miles, where it stopped and we made coffee.

The prospecting team departed at that point, retracing its path over the shoulder into the Parade Ground. Following up on our hunch, we located a looping crevasse-free detour out of the basin, around the point of the shoulder, and back down to the waiting fleet. With events unfolding rapidly in our favor, we didn’t dwell long over coffee. The heavy fleet advanced along the detour. By midday it arrived at the Parade Grounds and made camp for lunch. The prospecting team set out again to scout a route to the top.

RADARSAT imagery had shown us thousands of crevasses in the basin ahead. Now that we were here, we could see they were not all hidden. Their open blue-ice maws ringed the entire headwall. Yet with uncommon luck, we flagged a crevasse-free path the first four miles to a level bench, halfway up to the rim. From there, we dodged side-slopes and open crevasses, and then we quickly found the last three miles to the top.

From the suddenly expansive panorama, the frigid, white world lay below us. A frozen cascade, as big as Niagara Falls, draped over the plateau’s rim. Down in the valley, the Leverett Glacier flowed placidly around Mt. Beazley. Three years to get to this place, and now we were the horizon.

Enjoying lungs-full of cold Plateau air, we planted four green flags and called that point SPT-18.

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