Somewhere on the Polar Plateau lurked sastrugi of mythical proportions. I’d never heard of sastrugi before I came to Antarctica, yet old Ice hands spoke respectfully of them as “bad” sastrugi or “big” sastrugi.
“What’s a sastrugi?”
One old-timer, exasperated with my newness, offered this terse explanation: “They’re these weird wind-carved forms in the snow. They make a rough surface.”
“Is that a sastrugi?” I asked, pointing to a four-inch-tall ridge of snow running across the flat sea ice near McMurdo.
“Sure, but that’s nothing. Sastrugi get huge … six feet high, maybe more.”
I stepped on the little ridge and crushed it. “Do you ever see any big ones around here?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen big ones?”
“No. But I’ve heard stories about them.”
I never saw official sastrugi around McMurdo. I never saw them at Central West Antarctica. I never saw them at Shackleton Base Camp, around Oliver Bluffs, or the Beardmore Glacier.
I saw my first official sastrugi when I got to South Pole on the tunnel job. Long walks took me outside the station’s inhabited perimeter, onto the virgin snows, away from tractors, heavy equipment, airplanes, skiways, and the groomed surfaces of the station campus. I found acres without end of fantastically wind-sculpted snow. Mesmerizing, beautiful in fact, they were not at all intimidating. They looked like free-form stairsteps, wind-carved into graceful curves and risers a foot and a half high. Their undercut snouts pointed directly upwind—useful to know if one came into a new area on a dead calm day.
I stepped onto the edges of these risers and they again collapsed under my weight. What is the big deal with sastrugi?
The Dictionary of Geological Terms published by the American Geological Institute offers this definition:
(Russian) Plural form of sastruga. 1) The minor inequalities of the snow surface as determined by the wind blowing over the inland ice have been mentioned more or less persistently by all Arctic travelers, since upon the character of this surface depends the celerity of movement in sledge journeys. All minor hummocks and ridges of this nature are included under the general term sastrugi. 2) Irregularities or wave formations caused by persistent winds on a snow surface. They vary in size according to the force and duration of the wind and the state of the snow surface in which they are formed.
Mobility, ease of travel, speed over the land … all are affected by surface roughness. Potholes on a paved road, washboards on a dirt road: these reduce the celerity of movement. Smooth the roughness and maintain it, mobility improves. Sastrugi at South Pole made a rough-looking surface, but they yielded easily underfoot or to a passing tractor.
Adventurers Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft skied into Pole one year, crossing the continent from near the Weddell Sea coast of Antarctica. They met enthusiastic reception from the station inhabitants.
I’d just got the night shift started on the tunnel and drifted back to the old station galley for hot cocoa before turning in. Inside, I spotted the two women seated at the far end of the room with station manager Katy Jensen. A dozen of the station’s female workers crowded their table. They sought autographs, listened to adventure stories, and admired the great ladies holding forth. The two skiers radiated health and vitality, irresistibly attracting all souls.
They attracted my attention. But seeing the exercised patience with which they took time to speak to each of their admirers, I reckoned they did not need one more body hovering around them. I took my cocoa to the other side of the room.
Katy approached me to ask about taking the skiers through the tunnel.
“Need to get them away from the crowd?”
Katy nodded.
Touring the tunnel turned out to be sheer play for all of us. Arnesen and Bancroft enjoyed watching the tunnel-boring machine at work. Then, leaving the crew to their shift, we walked down another long reach of tunnel into the darkness. The ladies thrilled to touch the tunnel walls, to feel the harder, denser snow lying well below the softer surfaces they skied upon.
When we reached the end of the dark tunnel, I asked them, “Where under the station do you think we are now?”
Arnesen answered in accents of Norway: “Well, I have no idea.”
“Then shall we find out?” I suggested, taking our sole mine light to the bottom of a wooden ladder.
The ladder ran improbably up from the tunnel floor into the darkness of a perfectly round, three-foot-diameter hole. One by one, we climbed the fifty-foot ladder, gathering together again in a small, dark plywood shelter built around the ladder’s top. I opened an overhead hatch in the chamber roof, and invited them to have a look outside. Dazzling sunlight flooded through the hatch as they climbed out the shelter, three feet above the snows of the South Pole antenna field, nearly a half mile from the old station where we started.
Katy, Liv, and Ann found footing on the snow. With half of me still in the plywood shelter, the other half sticking out of the hatch, I announced, “This is where I leave you.”
“You want to join us?” Katy asked.
“I’d love to. But I need to go back and let the crew know you’re out of the tunnel.” I looked both to Liv and Ann: “I wish you both the best on the rest of your journey.” Then I disappeared from their sight, and they from mine, as I lowered myself back into the darkness.
Arnesen and Bancroft started north from the Pole a few days later. From the top of a pile of snow bulldozed up near the tunnel entrance, I watched them go. Huge blue sails unfurled in the wind, pulling them along on their skis. The skiers in turn pulled modern one-man cargo sleds behind them.
They left a videodisc with Katy. One evening we watched moving pictures of the first part of Arnesen’s and Bancroft’s journey.
“Freeze that picture, Katy. Please!” I interjected.
Katy paused the video. “What do you see?”
“Look at that,” I pointed to a still image of Ann Bancroft lurching her sled over rough ground. Sastrugi … three, four feet high … The chaotic terrain was full of them. Bancroft’s skis bridged the tops of two, barely marking the sastrugi. Her skis flexed deeply under her weight across the span in air. I marveled they did not break.
That was my first good look at bad sastrugi.
Crossing the Ross Ice Shelf and topping out on the Leverett, we never encountered sastrugi like those. In the first hundred miles after crossing the Shear Zone, we ran into something we called dorniks. But dorniks didn’t have wind-scoured ridges, or deeply carved risers. They looked more like smooth-skinned, icy whalebacks breaking a flat surface. Mostly they hid, shallowly submerged under soft snow.
Near the close of Year Two, George Blaisdell and I recorded our observations of sastrugi fields on the Plateau from the air. Likening them to waves, we estimated their wave lengths crest-to-crest, their angle across our proposed track, and even their height. Since we flew between two thousand and four thousand feet over the Plateau, our height estimates were suspect. But it was a clear day. We had shadows to go on. And we relied on the pilots’ estimates, figuring they had more experience judging sastrugi heights from the air. Our notes recorded “bumpy” terrain over the first 174 miles from Pole. We thought the sastrugi might be two to three feet high and perhaps fifty feet crest-to-crest. Over the next thirty-six miles we noted “moderate” sastrugi with wavelengths from two to four hundred feet. The pilots thought they might be three to five feet high. The next fifty-two miles showed “moderate to light” sastrugi, four hundred feet apart, two to four feet high. From there, to the top of the Leverett, we noted “knobbly” sastrugi, light by comparison to all we’d just flown over.
Sastrugi covered the entire Plateau section of the route. If legendary giants lurked there, they were in that thirty-six mile stretch. From the air we spied no smooth passage through or around the sastrugi anywhere. Avoiding them was out of the question. We would have to deal with them. That meant bulldozer blades and some form of road building.
At the start of Year Four, I ran into Anne Dal Vera in Christchurch, New Zealand. We were drawing our cold weather gear at the U.S. Antarctic Center. Anne was another intrepid adventure skier whom I respected enormously. I didn’t know her well, though she lived fifty miles south of me in Colorado. I knew her work and reputation in McMurdo. The husky woman was soft-spoken, sensitive, and a good listener. I asked would she mind giving me a minute of her time.
“Not at all. What’s on your mind, John?”
“It’s sastrugi, Anne. I’m thinking about giants I’ve heard about but never seen. I’ve heard tales of some six and eight feet high. Have you run across any of those?”
“Well, six feet, yes.”
“On the Plateau?”
“Yes.”
We walked to the large map of Antarctica hanging on the foyer wall of the Clothing Distribution Center. It was the same map my children looked at last year. The map showed South Pole positioned in the center, surrounded by the circular form of the continent. Mapping conventions for Antarctic projections typically hold the zeroth meridian from the Pole pointing toward the top of the map. The 180th meridian points toward the bottom. Anne’s finger traced the line she’d skied to the Pole from ten o’clock on the coast. Her line ran close to Sir Vivian Fuchs’s route. Fuchs led the British Commonwealth Transantarctic Expedition in 1957–1958.
“Where did you run into the big sastrugi on the Plateau?”
She studied the map before pointing to the 86th parallel. “Somewhere between 86 and 87, maybe farther south.”
Our route converged on Pole from seven o’clock on the same map. But between 86 and 87, her route and ours were close enough to Pole that if Anne’s giant sastrugi existed as a region, that region could easily extend into our territory.
“And then you came out of them?”
“The big ones, yes. Are you thinking about those for your traverse?”
“I am. I’m thinking of Fuchs’s book, The Crossing of Antarctica. He was forever breaking drawbars and sled hitches in that ground. It must be rough, but I have no feel for that kind of terrain.”
“My hat’s off to you, Anne. I guess I have some more thinking to do about it.”
“Crossing the Plateau ought to be a piece of cake, don’t you think?” Dave Bresnahan quizzed me over the phone while I was in the Denver office during the planning season before our team deployed for Year Four.
He hoped to co-opt my assent to an easy, speedy crossing of the Polar Plateau. From time to time he asked questions like that, and I never knew what was behind them. Something in his office in D.C. Maybe he or somebody else was deciding where to put NSF money. Maybe he’d gone out on a limb and needed some back up. I could never dole out a swaggering, incautious answer like: “Sure, Dave, no problem.”
Questions like his put me on guard. I always answered honestly. Today I answered, “Sure, Dave. About as easy as crossing the Ross Ice Shelf.”
Dave cleared his throat on the other end, as if to say “Smart ass!”
“Dave, you know we don’t know what’s under the red line on the map. There’re sastrugi up there. Big ones from what I can tell. But I haven’t crossed sastrugi, and you haven’t either. The USAP doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with them. But Fuchs did. He had a lot of trouble with them. There’re crevasses up there too. I haven’t even started looking into them. Who knows what else is up there? Not me. I haven’t been there yet.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Dave countered in kind, which made our exchanges fun. We were both thick-skinned enough to deal with hard banter. “How’re you going to deal with the sastrugi?”
“Blades, and bulldozers or tractors to doze them with, is a good starting point. Make the rough places plain. Build that thing we’re not supposed to say what it is. I don’t know how we’ll do it until we get there, and see what we’re looking at.”
“You confident you can do it?”
“Pretty confident. There’s one thing I’m not confident of, though.” I waited until Dave cleared his throat.
“And that is?”
“The PistenBully.”
The PistenBully wouldn’t have a road in front of it. It had to face those sastrugi without any help. The rest of us could follow the D8, and the D8 could drop its blade and do us some good. But the D8 couldn’t go except where the PistenBully went because the PistenBully would be looking for crevasses.
“Suppose the PistenBully can’t look for crevasses in that rough stuff? The whole project comes to a crashing halt. We don’t want the D8 ahead of the radar. “
The specter of Linda in the blue depths of a monster crevasse rose silently between us.
“I hear you. Anything I can do to help?” Dave asked.
“Yeah. Hustle George to follow up on my questions to those glaciologists.”