Category: Polar Traversing

The Shear Zone

daveweimer

The most problematic area on the entire traverse route would undoubtedly be the Shear Zone. Just 30 miles from McMurdo the greater Ross Ice Shelf tries to bend its way around Ross Island. When this happens the glacial ice rips apart, forming massive crevasses.  Crossing this area is dangerous. The crevasses must be detected, assessed, and sometimes destroyed if necessary.

A Shear Zone passage can be intimidating, especially if you’ve seen pictures of how large the crevasses can be. A quick observation of the area reveals no indication that there could be a giant void underneath your feet. From the surface it looks completely flat and unthreatening. We must use Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect the crevasses.

All the crevasses are marked with 2X4 posts and some have names. There is Mongo, Strangebrew, Personal Space, Baby, Battery Crack, Baby 2, Juanita, Ten O’clock Break, Snap, Crackle, Pop… just to name a few.  And in the middle of all this chaos, there’s the ‘Miracle Mile’ where for some reason there are no crevasses at all.

Today we blasted the two suspect crevasses. We believe the snow bridging them is too thin to support the weight of our tractors. So we blow them up and then fill the resulting hole with snow.

The explosions were impressive. The first crevasse was relatively small. The second however was quite large- over 100 feet deep and 20 feet wide in places.

This is a NEW crevasse and we got to name it.  We gave it the name…wait for it… Justin Bieber. Yup. I’m not sure why we gave it that name, but Derrick keeps calling it Justin BEAVER and this annoys me.

These giant canyons underneath the snow have never been viewed before. That’s a rare thing this day and age to see something that no one has ever seen. We took the time to repel into the largest one to check it out.

Above: View from inside the crevasse looking up.

Below: A crevasse as seen with Ground Penetrating Radar

 

Sea Level

daveweimer

The ‘South Pole Traverse’ is a tractor-train convoy that hauls fuel across Antarctica, from McMurdo to the South Pole Station.  Below are my photos and journal entries of that venture.

Location:  McMurdo

Elevation: Sea Level

Miles Advanced: No

We picked the Reefer off the sled with a giant crane and put it back on its skis- yeah.  This took a while and when all was said and done we could not find the pins needed to hold it in place.  Had they been misplaced? Stolen?  Or was this something more sinister, like sabotage’.  Could this be the end of the Terry Billings Era?  After pointing fingers for a bit, we did what any good Traverser would do- we stole them from someone else’s sled.  Side Note: The Reefer Unit with all our food weighs about 20,000lbs.  The skis that the Reefer Unit travels on weighs about 20,000lbs. And our food weighs about 1,500lbs. End Note.

Also, we accidently punctured one of our urine barrels.  It seeped reddish-brown pissicles out the side of the drum and onto the sea-ice.  I thought it was an oil stain at first and when I went to shovel it up and then noticed it was rotting urine- I nearly vomited.

Upon getting in to town, McLovin’ went straight to the store and bought three packs of Marlboro cigarettes- his store limit for the day.  He then stood in front of the store and tried to get strangers to buy more cigarettes for him.  I found this amusing since McLovin’ vowed to quit cigarettes as soon as we left for the Traverse.  I bought him two packs, mostly out of pity, the third I kept for myself in case I need to bribe him or something.  McLovin’ is easily manipulated.

Elevation: 216 ft.                                                                                                                                            Weather: 17 Degrees, Partly Cloudy/Wind                                                                                                          Miles Advanced: 100.1

100 miles today in the CORRECT direction!  Nice.  It’s rare in the Traversing world to hit the 100 mile mark but we had light loads and a good trail.  The cab was extremely hot and I drove with the door open most of the time.

I finished one of my audiobooks already- dang.  I only have a few audiobooks and I’m trying to spread them out over what could be a 3 month long traverse.  It was the new Jon Krakauer book- Where Men Win Glory- pretty good, I would recommend it.  At one point in the book Pat Tillman writes about joining the military, he describes in great detail about missing home and his beloved wife. Tears started building in my eyes and I had to snap myself out of it, “DAVE! You’re only 100 miles from McMurdo, you are NOT going to start crying for god sakes?!”

Miles Advanced: 42.6                                                                                                                                     Weather: 18 Degrees, Partly Cloudy

We rounded the steep cliffs of Minna Bluff and are now heading out onto the Ross Ice Shelf proper. At 11:00am we met back up with our cached fuel bladders and other supplies. Surprisingly nothing was buried but someone had left the door open on the Piston Bully. It was just swinging there wide open. Usually when you make that mistake in the Antarctic the winds will pack the vehicle to the brim with snow, or worse, will rip off your door. But we got lucky.

Did my first load of laundry today, it’s a bit early for laundry, I know, but forgot to do it in town. Our machine washes AND dries-it’s pretty cool but slow as hell. Just got to make sure you keep the snowmelter full- god forbid you run out of water.

Had fishsticks for dinner tonight. Not bad, but we couldn’t remember how Robshaw had made that delicious tartar sauce last year.

“I think he added pickles?”

“Pickles?”

“Yea, OK, where would you hide a pickle around here?”

“You don’t put pickles in tartar sauce dude.”

“Robshaw did, I think, and it was good, really good! I mean, pickles bring out the flavor in the fishstick. Ask Rob, he’ll tell you.”

Captain Scott

daveweimer

Miles Advanced: 50.6                                                                                                                                            Weather: 14 Degrees, Overcast                                                                                                                      Elevation: 216 ft.

We are doing well with heavy loads this early in the trip. We got to waypoint ‘Kelly’ and to our surprise we found the trail had moved a half-mile east since last year. That means this area of the Ice Shelf is moving approximately 7 feet a day! That’s mindboggling! In every direction there is nothing but flat white, but far in the distance, beyond the horizon, the gigantic Byrd Glacier plummets off the Polar Plateau and thrusts itself into the Ice Shelf creating a faster moving area of ice known as an ‘Ice Stream’. With all this movement you would expect to find a few crevasses but thankfully there are none in the vicinity of the trail.

We passed the area where Captain Scott and his companions had met their end. They died during the return journey from the Pole in 1912, just 11 miles from One Ton Depot- the resupply cache that may have saved them. In his book ‘Worst Journey in the World’ Cherry Garrard (a would-be rescuer) describes the grizzly scene as he found it.

“Scott had thrown back the flaps of his bag at the end. His left hand was stretched over Wilson , his lifelong friend… near Scott was a lamp formed from a tin and some lamp wick. It had been used to burn the little methylated spirit which remained. I think that Scott had used it to help him to write up to the end. I feel sure that he had died last – and once I had thought that he would not go so far as some of the others. We never realized how strong that man was, mentally and physically, until now.”

Scott’s last words, written in his journal, were: “For God’s sake take care of our people.”

Above: Captain Scott and his men at the South Pole. They all died on the return journey. Scott is in the center of the photograph, his face blackened by frostbite.