Edmund Stump
Editors’ note: Ed Stump is a professor of geology at Arizona State University and has spent ten seasons in the Antarctic. He has published dozens of scientific papers about the Transantarctic Mountains and written several books about geology, including The Roof at the Bottom of the World, The Ross Orogen of the Transantarctic Mountains, and Geology of Arizona. Here he describes a 1987 trip to the Transantarctic Mountains.
On December 19, 1929, six men mushed dogs across an endless tract of blue ice. Their destination had been the Transantarctic Mountains, a chain of rugged peaks deep within Antarctica where they radioed weather reports to Admiral Byrd during the South Pole’s first flyover. Leader of the ground party and Byrd’s second in command was geologist Lawrence M. Gould. The chief dog handler was 24-year-old Norman Vaughan, who would later have a peak named after him, and would return in 1995 at the age of 88 to climb it.
On that near-solstice day in 1929, the men were so intent on reaching their next landfall they failed to notice they were midway across the mouth of a massive outlet glacier—now known as Scott Glacier. When they finally made camp that night, they stood in awe of the sweeping walls and ragged peaks that lined the icy corridor.
Byrd returned four years later to continue exploring the Antarctic. In an epic journey of crevasses and wind, three members of his team—Quin Blackburn, Stuart Paine, and Richard Russell—sledged with dogs to Gould’s endpoint, then traversed up Scott Glacier to its headreaches. Their goal was to chart the exposed sedimentary layers that cap the Transantarctic Mountains at Mount Weaver. There, the three climbed, surveyed, and collected 67 rock samples, including coal. From the summit of Mount Weaver they discovered Mount Howe, 30 miles to the south, the southernmost outcrop of rock on earth.
In 1969 and 1970 a New Zealand geological party of six used motor toboggans to traverse Scott Glacier, and bagged the first ascent of Mount Pulitzer, via the ice face on the northern side. An account of their sledge trip was published in the 1970 New Zealand Alpine Journal. As with Blackburn’s 1937 account in Geographical Review, the Organ Pipe Peaks were featured in dramatic, stirring photos.
I knew the photos well when in 1971 I flew to Scott Glacier. Along with several other graduate students from Ohio State, I had lucked onto a helicopter-supported geological party working in the Transantarctic Mountains.
I had intended to drop out of school after the trip and travel, but when I finally returned to the world of green, warmth, and night, my unrelenting passion became that alien land. I continued my graduate studies at Ohio State, where I worked obstinately to put together another Antarctic trip.
Three times between 1977 and 1981, I returned to the Scott Glacier area to map and collect geological samples for the National Science Foundation. The NSF has strict policies about not supporting climbing or private expeditions, and for the scientific parties it does support, climbing for climbing’s sake is taboo. My trips were driven by scientific research, but by necessity included mountaineering.
The guide for several of my Antarctic seasons was my brother Mugs. He started the 1970s as defensive halfback for Penn State, then spent a year in semi-pro ball getting his head kicked in before deciding to become a ski bum in the deep powder of Snowbird, Utah. At first, skiing was everything to him; summer was work to turn a coin. But the mountains and their crags caught hold, and soon Mugs was working in the winter and climbing in the Wasatch in the summer.
By the end of the 1970s, Mugs was a top alpinist, having climbed the Emperor Face on Mount Robson and the Super Couloir on Fitzroy. No one was more qualified to serve as field assistant to my 1980–81 Antarctic party, whose goal was to map the La Gorce Mountains in the southeast quadrant of Scott Glacier.
A ski-fitted Hercules C-130 dropped us near Ackerman Ridge. We completed our mapping, then traversed the east side of Scott Glacier to the Gothic Mountains, where we would collect granite samples from the flanks and summits of the peaks.
Protruding into Scott Glacier, Grizzly Peak is the granite watchtower to the Gothic Mountains. Phil Colbert, Mugs, and I tackled its south face, soloing a series of snow-choked cracks and chimneys to a gendarmed ridge and the summit.
On our last day of that season Mugs and I climbed the center spire of the Organ Pipes, a series of toothy towers within the Gothics. The route up the north side was an uncertain series of runnels, snowfields, and mixed terrain. Two pitches into the mixed climbing, the angle slacked to 60-degree snow, and we unroped. We then tacked back and forth, and just before the summit discovered a small, natural bridge that we crawled through. The summit of The Spectre, as we would call it, was a special one for Mugs and me, for we both knew that the climb of one of the world’s most remote and beautiful peaks would not have been possible without each other—I needed Mugs for his climbing expertise, he needed me for the trip.
As kids Mugs and I had tramped the ridges of central Pennsylvania, and climbed the sheer and crumbling walls of Quigley’s limestone quarry. But this season in the Antarctic was our first stretch together as adults. We took a hero shot on the summit for Mom and Dad.
As I lay in my bag that night I gazed across Scott Glacier to the towering walls of the Hays Mountains, over in the last quadrant of Scott Glacier, the one I had yet to study. That vista hung in my mind as the years passed and I did research in other parts of the Transantarctic Mountains. It hung there like the remembrance of a dream recalled so often you can no longer distinguish it from reality.
In 1987 that dream came true. I was back on the Scott Glacier with a New Zealander, Paul Fitzgerald, who was using fission-track dating to chronicle the Transantarctic uplift. Our mission was to collect samples from the highest summits. Mugs was there again, along with Lyle Dean, a second mountain guide.
From our first campsite east of the Medina Peaks, we climbed 20 or so small foothills, then traversed the snowy fringes of the Koerwitz Glacier, toward the dramatic northeast buttress of Mount Griffith. From there, a huge drift led us to the pass between Griffith and Mount Pulitzer. Beyond the pass we entered a stark, medieval-looking world that we named the Dragon’s Lair. To the east was Mount Pulitzer (or The Dragon) and its craggy ridgeline. To the west was Mount Astor, at 12,175 feet the highest peak in the Hays Mountains. Flanking Mount Astor were Mount Vaughan (10,302 feet) and Mount Crockett (11,386 feet). Across Scott Glacier to the southeast we could see the Gothic Mountains.
Our plan was to try the northeast buttress of Griffith by following the snow on its right-hand slope, and then rappel the mixed face so, as Mugs said, “You scientists can collect your spec-ee-mans.”
We woke to the sort of Antarctic silence where you hear the blood pulsing in your ears. Taking advantage of the settled conditions, we drove out for a serious day in the mountains. Caching one snowmobile at the base, we drove the other two up a thousand-foot ramp between a ridge and massive icefall. From there, we started the long slog up the ice.
About midway up the buttress the slope steepened to 50 degrees. We arrived at the top of the buttress in about five hours. The euphoria of exertion soon subsided, so we took a summit rock sample, rappelled two pitches, and downclimbed, picking up a 10-pound rock every 300 feet, collecting 16 samples on what we named the Fission Wall.
The weather was marginal for the next week, but the winds finally abated long enough for us to attempt Griffith’s summit. The 4,000 feet to the top followed a route similar to the one on the Fission Wall: a long, smooth ice slope next to a rocky drop. The summit view from Mount Griffith was unsurpassed and told of earlier polar exploration. For the first time we were able to see west, into the intricate ridge systems of the lower Amundsen Glacier, and beyond to the blocky massifs of Mount Fridtjof Nansen and Mount Don Pedro Christophersen, between which Roald Amundsen had forged his way to the South Pole in 1911.
Our next objective was Heinous Peak, a satellite of Mount Crockett. Aerial photos showed huge walls and ridges of bare rock, but we weren’t certain that there was a feasible route to the top, and back down. On the far side of Forbidden Valley, we found the key to the mountain, a couloir filled with blue ice that met an angling snow gully that terminated at the summit.
It was another five days before the wind dropped enough to attempt the climb, with 7,500 feet of relief, our longest of the season. We front-pointed most of the couloir, and as I exited onto a ramp of mercifully soft, 45-degree snow, I shook with exhaustion. The others had waited, then gotten cold, and started for the top. I trudged up alone, and was soon squinting into three smiling faces masked by sunglasses and hoar frost. I sat, scanned the crest through half-closed eyes, then paid the piper with 18 samples and returned to basecamp after 20 hours in the field.
After our climb of Crockett, we broke camp at the Dragon’s Lair, snowmobiled south along the west side of Scott Glacier, and pitched camp at the foot of a rugged group of granite peaks north of the confluence of the Souchez and Scott Glaciers. After dinner, Mugs and I were out on the moraine behind camp, wondering as we had so often before why no one else was out in the cold, photographing the sastrugi and fractured ice, rapt in the patterns.
As Mugs glassed the north face of Mount Borcik, the highest peak of the group, we played the old themes of climber and geologist. Mugs saw routes, I saw rocks. The next day we followed an icy trough to a faulted cleft that led to mixed ground and Borcik’s summit.
Our final climb was to be Mount Zanuck on the opposite side of Scott Glacier. But for several days, clouds hung less than 300 feet above camp. When the clouds did finally lift, Paul and I ran out and climbed a lesser peak, Altar Peak, to calibrate our altimeters. Weather held, however, so Paul and I loaded up on spaghetti and went out again to finish Zanuck. Mugs and Lyle, who had exhausted themselves reconnoitering the area, opted to rest in camp.
Moderate snow climbing and easy rock took us to within 70 feet of the summit. A light sprinkling of snow rose with us up the slope. We stashed our packs on the summit ridge and scrambled the short distance to the top. The south face of Zanuck dropped away in a sheer sweep. A fog bank on the lower Scott Glacier had crept into Sanctuary Glacier, engulfed camp, and crossed the saddle to Grizzly Peak. Beyond, spotted with cloud, Scott Glacier stretched to Mount Howe.
It was now more than 30 hours since Paul and I had slept, but my feeling of completion overrode that of exhaustion. I’d done the fourth and final quadrant, with closure in the Gothic Mountains. There was no place left on Scott Glacier I wanted to see, no dream left unfulfilled. I also felt a sense of loss, one that accompanies the attainment of a quest. There was a sudden lack of purpose where before there had been a goal. So, it was with mixed feelings that for the last time I bashed loose a sample, shouldered my pack, and carefully began the downclimb that would lead home.