The white world of snow and ice lay below us now. A frozen cascade, big as Niagara Falls and broken by hundreds of gaping crevasses, draped over the plateau’s rim. Downstream, the Leverett Glacier flowed gracefully around the stony buttress of Mount Beazley.
The first of our heavy tractors appeared just below the rim, laboring up the final grade. The place was strangely silent. The snows absorbed all sound. No wind blew.
Finally the tractor topped out. It was a ponderous, stately event.
Today was January 4, 2005. I looked back on the ground we crossed getting here. Seven thousand feet below, icy turbulence had blocked us from the Transantarctic Mountains for a month. Three hundred miles of snow swamp behind that had held us up for a year. And just a day trip out of McMurdo Station, blasting and dozing a path across three miles of hidden crevasses, had taken another year of our lives.
Now, 738 miles out of McMurdo, not one human lived between us and there.
Six hundred miles behind us, on the sea-level realms of the Ross Ice Shelf, lay the frozen flesh of four British explorers and their leader. Robert Falcon Scott, known as Scott of the Antarctic, had been the last one to try for the South Pole and back from McMurdo. They went on foot. They died on their return. Now their scurvied bodies drift slowly toward the Ross Sea, buried under nine decades of snow. We drove right by them.
Only fifteen years ago, not far from Scott’s body, a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer broke through the snow and fell into a black crevasse. My friend went down with that bulldozer. He lived. But the dozer’s steely carcass drifts on in that hole toward its own rendezvous with the Ross Sea.
There were eight of us now. We were equipment operators, mechanics, mountaineers, and engineers. I picked them for their years of Antarctic experience. We respected and liked each other. Together we ran five heavy tractors pulling heavy sled trains. We ran a light scout tractor in front of us, rigged with modern crevasse-detecting radar.
When the last of our tractors topped out we had won our foothold on the Polar Plateau. We planted four flags on the plateau’s edge and called that point SPT-18.
This was the final year of our three-year project. Between us and South Pole lay three hundred miles of unexplored ground. We wanted to go, but to get back we needed more fuel than we had. The National Science Foundation could give us that fuel at Pole.
Within our warm bunkroom we waited for word. Then sometime during the “night” we felt our shelter rocking in the wind atop its sled base. We would wake to a blizzard.
In his opening remarks at the May 2002 United States Antarctic Program Annual Planning Conference, headman Erick Chiang from the NSF Office of Polar Programs uttered these words: “The National Science Foundation announces its full support for the development of the South Pole Traverse.” His was a simple, declarative statement.
I spent the next four years figuring out what he meant.