Blazing Ice Read Online Free PDF

grease-stained Harley-Davidson biker, a half a dozen years older than me. He’d chew me out, so I approached him apologizing for our fix out on the sea ice. I’d blown a hydraulic steering hose.
    He treated me kindly instead. “Yeah,” he grinned. “But you brought it
back
! That means one of us didn’t have to go out and get it!”
    â€œWell, I … I appreciate that. I like this traverse business.” That caught a twinkle in his eye. Emboldened, I asked him casually, “What do you think of a traverse to South Pole? Think it can be done?”
    â€œI ain’t going unless I can take a shower,” he said gruffly, more like the tone I expected in the first place.
    â€œWhat are you talking about, shower?”
    â€œI’ve been traversing with those French at Dumont D’Urville. We dug up an airplane out there. Man, they
never
took showers! You
got
to have a shower, or you can’t live with yourself!” He was speaking of places and times in Antarctica I’d never heard of.
    â€œShowers, huh?” I walked away. On the local traverses, we had showers at both ends of the line: at Marble Point and at McMurdo.
    That conversation was six years old. Only last week Brian had explained this same mechanic was the one who followed
Linda
in
Pam
, the one who probed his way to the edge of the crevasse and first looked down.
    The program later razed the mechanic’s home at Williams Field, ten miles out on the Ice Shelf from McMurdo. I did the blasting on that job. Not liking life in McMurdo the next year, the mechanic found work on an island in the South Pacific. I pictured him in baggy shorts and a t-shirt, standing idly on a rusty World War II dock, staring deeply into the water, working out some intricate mechanic’s dilemma.
    â€œNever turn your back on anything—or anyone—in that place,” Brian had told me. Yet even with a reasonable promise of support, most of the job was up to me and the sweeping scope of it all was intimidating. But as I walked along the footpath I began to understand the job as a series of sequential critical steps that could only be taken one step at a time. Each step headed toward the goal, but each step may or may not succeed and so the ending was uncertain. Now, though, seen in increments, the job became more comprehendible. I’d take the job and see if we could even win the first step: crossing the Shear Zone. The rest of it could wait.
    My walk was over.
    â€œAnybody know how I can get in touch with Russ Magsig?” I asked around the office.
    Russ did not keep a computer, did not have an e-mail address, and rarely answered his phone. Nobody really knew if he had a phone. But he was the one man I knew who had been in the Shear Zone, and who might be willing to go back.
    Sooner or later a phone number appeared on my desk. I called it. “Hello, Russ? This is John Wright … I doubt if you remember me—”
    â€œYes,” said his familiar voice. “You used to do the blasting and the Marble Point runs. What’s up?”
    â€œRuss, I promise there will be showers …”

3 Frontier Attitude
    If we hurt one person … if we killed one person … if we had anything like another
Linda
… there would be no hiatus for this project. We were the South Pole Traverse
Proof-of-Concept
Project (emphasis mine). We asked, was the traverse even feasible? Could we pioneer a route to South Pole and run it safely? Who was “we”?
    NSF had recently hired a defense contractor to run the support job for its U.S. Antarctic Program. At NSF’s urging, the new contractor hired me to pull off the traverse project. The traverse was a dangerous undertaking. How would the new contractor help me do it safely? I got an inkling in the tunnel.
    Since the millennial year of 2000, everybody who got off the plane at South Pole wanted to see the tunnel. Neutrino hunter Bob Stokstad and his crew of