Seven Summits (43 page)
Giles Kershaw told Frank not to worry. “We won't let something like this stop us. We're taking off tomorrow regardless, and if by the time we get there we still don't have clearance I’ll refuel in Ecuador and fly out to sea around the place.”
This solution was typical Kershaw. After eight continuous seasons flying in the Antarctic he was used to operating with no international boundaries, no traffic control towers, no flight clearances. Antarctica was the last true land frontier on earth and Giles Kershaw was in every sense one of its pioneers, a man used to surviving by his wits, not by the strictures of bureaucrats.
Shortly before midnight on November 7, Kershaw, co-pilot Sandy Bredin, engineer Rick Mason, and Beverly Johnson—a well-known climber and adventurer hitching a ride to Patagonia—took off from Van Nuys airport near Los Angeles and shuttled to Palm Springs where they waited for dawn. On a crisp morning under clear skies over the California high desert they took off on a five-day trip that would average 130 miles an hour. Their hopscotching itinerary included stops in Texas and the tiny Caribbean island of San Andres. Then Panama and Guayaquil. There they learned they had gained clearance to fly over Peru, and after a short stop in Lima they made it to Arica, then Antofagasto. In several places they made short layovers to spread their sleeping bags in the fuselage and get a few hours sleep.
Meanwhile Frank caught a Pan Am flight to Santiago to press the generals on the question of the fuel drop. During the last phone call before he left his contact in Chile said the drop was still questionable, but added he was nevertheless optimistic. When Frank arrived, his contact, General Lopotegui, met him at the airport.
“Things look good,” the General said. “The C-130 should make the airdrop in two or three days.”
“We just may pull this thing off yet,” Frank said in a weary voice, tired but relieved.
Next day the Tri-Turbo arrived, and by the following day all team members were in Santiago. I flew down with Dick. Bonington, who had arrived the day before from London, met us at the airport. From there we shuttled to a nearby military airport where the Tri-Turbo was parked. We found Frank and Steve Marts at the officer's club, eating lunch on a veranda overlooking a palm-lined swimming pool.
“Here's the plan,” Frank said. “The Tri-Turbo leaves for Punta Arenas day after tomorrow. Any of us can go down on it, or catch a commercial flight, your choice. Right now we're organizing climbing gear in the hangar, so we'll finish that and load the plane tomorrow.”
Frank introduced us to a Chilean air force officer, Captain Frias, who had been appointed to accompany us on the expedition. As we walked toward the hangar Frank explained that the Chileans were interested in the possibility of chartering the Tri-Turbo in the future for their own Antarctic operations, and as part of the deal to give us a fuel drop they asked we take Captain Frias, who would file a report on the plane's performance.
“What an irony,” Sandy Bredin said, “spending three weeks parked in subzero weather at the base of Vinson with some Latin American military air jock named Captain Cold.”
In the hangar I met Yuichiro Miura and his cameraman Tae Maeda. Miura was sorting his gear, which was spread around the hangar. He had extremely well-muscled legs and a handsome, sun-weathered face. He looked in his late thirties, perhaps early forties. (I was impressed to learn later he was fifty.) With the austral summer temperature in the mid-eighties, he was bare-chested and wore jogging trunks and, incongruously, large leather climbing boots.
“New boots,” he said smiling. “Better to break them in early.”
His cameraman filmed while he sorted his gear, adjusted his ski bindings, and packed his rucksack. Miura's plan was still to ski from the top of Vinson, and to complete a one and a half hour show on the adventure for Japanese television. Miura was a modern-day samurai, unflinchingly facing danger on skis; a folk hero so well known in Japan that he had once been besieged in a Tokyo restaurant by a gang of young women who ripped his shirt off and wrote their names with marker pens on his chest.
I sorted my gear, then went to work mounting the traces on our sledges. Before leaving, Frank had put me in charge of food and equipment, but with a hectic schedule I; had had little time to take care of it all so now I wanted to double-check to make sure we had everything. A quick survey revealed we were short two ropes, but there was a store in town that sold mountaineering gear.
“How about the first aid kit?” Bonington asked.
“First aid?” I had forgotten all about it.
“The plane has one,” Giles said. “Let's see what's in it.”
We pulled it from under a seat and opened it: Band-Aids, tape, compresses, and several sacks that looked like bean bags.
“What are those?”
“Says here, ‘Chemical Ice Packs.’”
“Hmm, wouldn't want to go to Antarctica without plenty of those.”
I spent the next morning shopping for first aid supplies while the others readied the plane. Frank, dressed conservatively in dark suit and tie, waited for a delegation of Chilean air force brass who wanted to inspect the plane, as part of their interest in it for their own Antarctic operations. Several colonels arrived, and while they waited for the commanding general, Frank chatted with them; they all spoke reasonably good English. Steve Marts was standing by to film the scene. The general's car appeared on the tarmac, and when he spotted it Frank yelled over to Marts, “Get ready to shoot the general.” Two of the colonels suddenly whipped around, reached for their pistols, and started toward Marts.
“No, no,” Frank said, raising his arms to stop the colonels. “I mean
film
the general. You know, shoot film.”
With the colonels called off, the inspection was completed, and shortly after midday we took off. It was a clear day, and the snow peaks of the Andes extended north and south like backbone vertebrae of some mesozoic creature. Two hours south we approached the white cone of Osorno volcano, the Fuji of Chile. Kershaw flew directly toward it until the cockpit window filled side to side with crevasses and snow fields; he banked right, corrected, then dipped sharply left under the smoking summit, all the while wearing a mischievous grin. Over Patagonia the prevailing westerlies packed clouds against the peaks, smothering them from our view, and we climbed to 17,000 to insure we were well above the highest of them, Fitzroy. With no cabin pressurization we were all feeling giddy, and our Chilean friend Captain Frias was turning an odd shade of pale blue.
“We've got some oxygen up here for us to sniff,” Kershaw yelled aft, “but I’m afraid you mountaineering types will just have to get some preacclimatization.”
Captain Cold had the queasy countenance indicative of imminent nausea, when a half hour from Punta Arenas we entered a rare calm. The clouds disappeared, Kershaw brought the plane down to 10,000, and ahead we could see the fabled spires of the Torres de Paine.
“I’ve flown by here maybe twenty times,” Kershaw said, “and never seen it this clear. Let's take a close peek.”
With that same mischievous grin Kershaw banked the plane sharply. We were glued to the windows. We winged by 4,000-foot granite towers orange in the golden light of a low afternoon sun. Cameras clicked like the paparazzi's. Kershaw flew between two spires so that out every window of the plane all we could see was orange granite. The sharp tip of the great Central Tower passed by; our own Chris Bonington had been the first to climb it, twenty years before, and only two parties since had ever done the same.
Kershaw banked sharply again, and we bounced in an updraft.
“Okay, Giles,” Frank yelled forward, “we've had our show.”
Kershaw looked aft and winked. “One more pass,” he said, and the Tri-Turbo banked again while the rest of us gaped as the great sheets of granite sped by.
We corrected and resumed course toward Punta Arenas. The sharp peaks gave way to low hills carpeted with dense southern beech. Areas of open range marked the great sheep estancias of Patagonia, and to the west the afternoon sun glistened off deep-fingered fjords. Through the cockpit we could see a stretch of water cutting the land east to west. this was the Straits of Magellan, and on its shore, the city of Punta Arenas.
When Bonington was here twenty years before, Punta Arenas had been a small town, but now an oil boom supported several hotels, a supermarket, a fleet of taxis, and at least one whorehouse. After landing and buttoning down the plane, we took a taxi in and chose one of the modern hotels near downtown.
Our original plan was to overnight here and next day cross the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula, but now several things developed to cause at least an extra day layover. One of the plane's radios went down, and there was a delay with the C-130 scheduled to airdrop our fuel cache. Even if these things had been in order, a low pressure system now moving across the Drake sealed any chance of immediate departure.
The next day Bonington and I purchased perishables such as butter and cheese, then caught a taxi to the airport where the crew was busy fixing the radio. We loaded the supplies into the open fuselage, adding them to a long pile of gear that we then secured with cargo straps. The inside of the Tri-Turbo was all business. This cargo section took up two thirds of the plane, and the only passenger accommodation was a stateroom aft of the cockpit with four seats on one side and a bolted-down couch on the other that looked like a refugee from a Volunteers of America thrift store. There were hydraulic lines and wires exposed everywhere so that the plane looked like a cross between an auto repair shop and a warehouse. I was reminded of the hotrods I used to build in high school, and I also remembered how often my jalopies used to break down. But an engine konk-out on the Golden State between L.A. and Santa Ana is a little different than one over the Drake between Cape Horn and Antarctica.
Kershaw was in the cockpit at the radio controls while Mason, the engineer, was buried in the instrument rack adjusting the electronics.
“Try it now,” Mason said.
“Still nothing.”
“We'll get it right,” Kershaw said to me. “If not, the Chilean air force here may have a spare. Besides, we're really not losing time anyway, since we can't leave until the weather report from the Peninsula is better.”
“Because you need clear skies for the landing?”
“That's part of it. But more important, we don't have any de-icing equipment.”
“I thought this plane was made to fly in the Arctic.”
“It is. But up there conditions are dry-cold, so icing's not a problem. Actually, it's the same in the Antarctic, but not over the Drake. There it's wet-cold, the worst.”
Kershaw must have noticed my furrowed brow.
“But don't worry,” he said. “This plane is superb, and it would take a hell of a lot of ice to force it down.”
He gave the bulkhead a good whap, and following his hand I noticed a greening I.D. plaque that read: “Douglas DC-3, built March 1942.”
Seven years older than me, I thought, and I’m not feeling so hot myself.
Back at the hotel, Frank reported the C-130 was ready to parachute our fuel drums into Rothera. The radio was fixed, and Giles confirmed the weather was improving, so with luck we might get away the following day.
The morning weather report indicated a high center moving across the Drake, so we quickly checked out of the hotel. Crossing the airport tarmac to the plane, we had to lean into the ubiquitous Patagonian wind, but apparently it was no indication of conditions over the Drake; Kershaw told us it was a “go.”
“Before we take off, though, I’d better give you instructions on using the life raft,” he said. We all gathered aft as he muscled the raft into position.
“It inflates automatically when you pull this cord. It has a canopy, a few survival rations and whatnot, but there is one problem. It only holds eight, and there are eleven of us on the flight. So if we should go down, just remember to stay calm, and follow me out the door.”
Kershaw started the engines and we buckled into our seats, such as they were. We taxied into position for takeoff.
“I bet the weather comes in and forces us to land at Marsh, the Chilean base on the northern end of the Peninsula,” Frank said. “We probably won't even get to Rothera.”
“Damn it, Pancho,” Dick said, “there you go again, being pessimistic.”
“Something will go wrong, you just watch. This whole thing has been so incredibly complicated, it's just about taken the fun out of it.”
Frank spoke quickly, with a curtness that revealed not only exhaustion from all the work he put into this project to get to this moment, but also a tension how that the moment had arrived. Dick leaned back in his seat, staring out the window as the tarmac sped by and we lifted off. Although he didn't indicate it, Dick was nervous too. It was Kershaw's life raft joke that had done it, that had made him fully realize what a dangerous adventure this really was.
Through breaks in clouds we glimpsed the glaciers on the islands of Tierra del Fuego. The clouds thinned and below we spotted the final land's end, Cape Horn. Beyond was open ocean, and even from 10,000 feet we could see the pitched graybeards whitecap under the howl of the Furious Fifties. Kershaw, wearing his pear-shaped aviator sunglasses, took the plane to 15,000 to fly above the building clouds, and once leveled-out turned aft to give us a thumbs-up.
Kershaw was deceptively at ease. I would learn later (in talking to him) that while he had made this flight too many times to be nervous, he was also too smart to be complacent. He had developed his easy-going style because he knew that was the best way to inspire calm in both crew and passengers. He knew the worst thing on a plane is a captain with a furrowed brow nervously shuffling charts, twisting dials, tapping gauges.
“Rick Mason,” Kershaw yelled aft. “Would you please turn on the windshield de-icing. It's starting to get a bit frosty.”
We watched Mason search under the pilot's seat until he produced one of those small scrapers that are made to clear ice from automobile windows. Then, buttoning his parka and putting on his big fur-lined Alaskan mittens, Mason opened the window next to Kershaw, and while Kershaw held him by the belt he wormed out into the freezing air and scraped the front windshield clear.