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Authors: John H. Wright
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broke when Patrice suffered a mishap on the trail. I cheered when they commissioned Concordia Station at Dome C. Patriceâs traverse delivered all that material.
On our own trail, I often wondered, âHow would the French handle this particular problem?â Sometimes I found an answer.
PART II.
CREVASSES, SWAMPS, AND DISAPPOINTMENT
5 Crossing the Shear ZoneâYear One
October 31, 2002 . Five souls stood on the snow beside a ten-foot-tall wooden post. Two upright fifty-five gallon drums flanked the post. Carved deeply into its top were the letters G, A, and W.
âGAWâ stood for Grid A West, a theoretical relic of the SPIT work. Three miles east of GAW stood another post with two more black drums next to it. That was HFS. Home Free South. Two weeks before, a helicopter flew us out from McMurdo to plant these posts. The helicopter jumped us safely over the ground between them.
Between GAW and HFS lay the McMurdo Shear Zone: badlands of hidden crevasses wide enough to swallow a bulldozer.
Linda
went down in one of them twelve years before.
The ground toward HFS looked identical to the ground weâd crossed getting to GAW: a featureless plain of white, flat as a pancake. From the helicopter, we saw no gaping fissures in its unbroken surface. The crevasses, if they were there, were bridged over with snow.
Weâd flagged a twenty-three-mile route from McMurdoâs Williams Field skiway to GAW. That was easy. Our radar never saw a crevasse. We staged our gear over the route many times. We radared a safe perimeter just short of GAW, flagged it off, and built our tent camp within it.
In the still, cold air of a day when the sun simply would not set, we stood on the snow looking east at our job. Build a road across this place. Build it twenty feet wide. Make it safe for tractors and sleds. Search all ground in front with ground penetrating radar. If it detected a void lurking under a bridge,stop. Blow up the bridge. Bulldoze snow into the slot. Fill it. Pack it. Drive over it. Look for the next crevasse. Search and destroy.
There were four others besides me. Richard âStretchâ Vaitonis, a tall Wisconsin corn farmer, would run the new D8R bulldozer. Shaun Norman, a world-class mountaineer from New Zealand, and American mountaineer Eric Barnes knew alpine crevasses well. Russ Magsig, the mechanic, was the only one among us who had seen the Shear Zone.
CRREL radar experts were scheduled to join us, but the programâs ponderous deployment process delayed their arrival. Weâd trained with them in New Hampshire months earlier. Everything in New England then was green. Working in leafy woods, we practiced finding bedrock cracks in abandoned quarries. We studied printed radar images of hidden crevasses.
At McMurdo early in October, we cobbled a vehicle-mounted radar platform to a PistenBully. This was a light, ten-thousand-pound snow crawler borrowed from the science fleet. Painted red and black, it looked like a lady bug on tracks. Its cab sat two. Behind the cab, a passenger box could hold four. A twenty-foot-long radio tower from McMurdoâs scrap yards became a prod we pushed in front of the PistenBully. The radar antenna fit to the front of the prod, cushioned off the ground by an inflated inner tube. A cable ran back from the antenna into the cab. It connected to the smart part of the radar device where a computer screen displayed what the antenna saw.
In tests over known crevasses near McMurdo, one of us drove the Pisten-Bully while another monitored the radar. At seven miles per hour we could detect a crevasse under the antenna and stop the vehicle before it overran the crevasse edge.
Five days earlier, the McMurdo surveyor came to our Shear Zone camp and planted a line of red flags on bamboo poles. The flags pointed past GAW toward HFS over the horizon. We couldnât see HFS, even with binoculars. High ground, perhaps a snowdrift or an ice rise, hid our target. But the
On our own trail, I often wondered, âHow would the French handle this particular problem?â Sometimes I found an answer.
PART II.
CREVASSES, SWAMPS, AND DISAPPOINTMENT
5 Crossing the Shear ZoneâYear One
October 31, 2002 . Five souls stood on the snow beside a ten-foot-tall wooden post. Two upright fifty-five gallon drums flanked the post. Carved deeply into its top were the letters G, A, and W.
âGAWâ stood for Grid A West, a theoretical relic of the SPIT work. Three miles east of GAW stood another post with two more black drums next to it. That was HFS. Home Free South. Two weeks before, a helicopter flew us out from McMurdo to plant these posts. The helicopter jumped us safely over the ground between them.
Between GAW and HFS lay the McMurdo Shear Zone: badlands of hidden crevasses wide enough to swallow a bulldozer.
Linda
went down in one of them twelve years before.
The ground toward HFS looked identical to the ground weâd crossed getting to GAW: a featureless plain of white, flat as a pancake. From the helicopter, we saw no gaping fissures in its unbroken surface. The crevasses, if they were there, were bridged over with snow.
Weâd flagged a twenty-three-mile route from McMurdoâs Williams Field skiway to GAW. That was easy. Our radar never saw a crevasse. We staged our gear over the route many times. We radared a safe perimeter just short of GAW, flagged it off, and built our tent camp within it.
In the still, cold air of a day when the sun simply would not set, we stood on the snow looking east at our job. Build a road across this place. Build it twenty feet wide. Make it safe for tractors and sleds. Search all ground in front with ground penetrating radar. If it detected a void lurking under a bridge,stop. Blow up the bridge. Bulldoze snow into the slot. Fill it. Pack it. Drive over it. Look for the next crevasse. Search and destroy.
There were four others besides me. Richard âStretchâ Vaitonis, a tall Wisconsin corn farmer, would run the new D8R bulldozer. Shaun Norman, a world-class mountaineer from New Zealand, and American mountaineer Eric Barnes knew alpine crevasses well. Russ Magsig, the mechanic, was the only one among us who had seen the Shear Zone.
CRREL radar experts were scheduled to join us, but the programâs ponderous deployment process delayed their arrival. Weâd trained with them in New Hampshire months earlier. Everything in New England then was green. Working in leafy woods, we practiced finding bedrock cracks in abandoned quarries. We studied printed radar images of hidden crevasses.
At McMurdo early in October, we cobbled a vehicle-mounted radar platform to a PistenBully. This was a light, ten-thousand-pound snow crawler borrowed from the science fleet. Painted red and black, it looked like a lady bug on tracks. Its cab sat two. Behind the cab, a passenger box could hold four. A twenty-foot-long radio tower from McMurdoâs scrap yards became a prod we pushed in front of the PistenBully. The radar antenna fit to the front of the prod, cushioned off the ground by an inflated inner tube. A cable ran back from the antenna into the cab. It connected to the smart part of the radar device where a computer screen displayed what the antenna saw.
In tests over known crevasses near McMurdo, one of us drove the Pisten-Bully while another monitored the radar. At seven miles per hour we could detect a crevasse under the antenna and stop the vehicle before it overran the crevasse edge.
Five days earlier, the McMurdo surveyor came to our Shear Zone camp and planted a line of red flags on bamboo poles. The flags pointed past GAW toward HFS over the horizon. We couldnât see HFS, even with binoculars. High ground, perhaps a snowdrift or an ice rise, hid our target. But the
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