Seven Summits (45 page)

Faces that moments before were exuberantly glued to the windows were now intently somber, and I thought once again how the nearest human habitation, the nearest source of support, was 180 miles away across a flat, trackless ice desert. If the plane were to crack up on landing, that would be a helluva long way to ski.

Kershaw made his line-up and came in. Out the window the shadow-lined sastrugi, well defined by the low Antarctic sun, came up to meet us. The plane gently settled, then hit hard. I felt an adrenaline surge as Kershaw applied full throttle and the screaming turbos lifted us up and we went round for another pass.

“Just testing the surface,” Kershaw yelled to us above the turbos.

We again made the same line-up. The peaks of the mountain range—Shinn, Epperly, Tyree, Gardner—rose in a great wall filling the plane's windows. We slowly came back down, gently losing altitude, then made contact. We glided smoothly for a few seconds, then came a heavy whump! as we clipped a sastrugi formation. We rose, came down, bounced hard, rose and came down again. Another bounce, and we had full contact. I stayed tensed, ready to tuck into a survival roll in case the skis tripped. We bounced again, then slowed and came to a stop.

“Aah-eah-eaahhh,” Dick called.

We all cheered, and Kershaw turned with a wide grin and another thumbs-up.

Mason, with the Camel still hanging from his lips, opened the plane door and the cold air rudely swept in.

“What a place,” I said to him. “There's nothing else to compare in the world.”

“Maybe,” he replied. “But when you've seen one piece of ice, you've seen ‘em all.”

Steve Marts was down first to film the rest of us jumping out. Frank was next, then Dick, then Bonington.

“Say something about the climb,” Marts yelled while the camera continued to roll.

“I bet Vinson's only a mile or two away,” Frank said.

“Yes, it seems,” Bonington added. “And I think that left-hand route on the whole is probably best. A bit smoother, and of course the other guys went that way on the first ascent, didn't they?”

With binoculars Bonington scrutinized the route. Everything suggested a straightforward climb, a four- or five-day enterprise. Conditions seemed perfect: no clouds, no wind, daylight twenty-four hours.

Dick, however, was thinking otherwise.

Gazing up at Vinson rising 9,000 feet above our plane, he thought, It might be a walk in the park, but it sure as heck looks like a long and cold one to me.

He was about to say something, but then told himself that those of us who were seasoned climbers were so much more experienced he'd better keep his mouth shut.

It was too bad he didn't speak up, as it might have given Bonington and me pause. For in our exuberance we were overlooking a few key considerations. First, we were forgetting that because the air in Antarctica has no water vapor, no dust, no anything, you can see for hundreds of miles, and consequently distances and sizes are very deceptive. Then, too, we were forgetting that even if the slopes on Vinson were moderate, they were still at an altitude of nearly 17,000 feet at a latitude only 700 miles from the South Pole, and that far south, that altitude—because the atmospheric envelope gets thinner toward the poles—is equal to 20,000 feet in the Himalaya. We were forgetting that, in fact, the summit of Vinson is the highest point on earth at such an extreme latitude.

Knowing it would be warmer sleeping in tents than on the metal floor of the plane, we pitched camp next to the aircraft. While we constructed snow block walls as windbreaks around the tents, the plane's crew dug pits under the wings to bury anchors to tie down the plane. It was midnight, with the Antarctic sun approaching its lowest dip as it circled the horizon—but still well above setting— when we finished dinner and crawled in our sleeping bags.

Bonington was awake at 5:00
A.M.,
and we were still bathed in sunlight.

“We should get going and take advantage of this good weather,” he said.

Already I could feel the effect of perpetual daylight, a kind of mild disorientation, like jet lag. I crawled outside to help with the cook stove, which we had set up alongside the tent. I bent over the billy and felt the back of my neck glow in the warmth of sun while at the same time my face stung in the cold of shadow. I melted snow, made hot drinks, then prepared a cereal mush mixed with a quarter pound of butter. A mountaineer's diet in the high Arctic or Antarctic is different than at high altitude such as the Himalaya. There the lack of oxygen makes it difficult for your body to digest animal fats. But here, at comparatively lower elevations but even colder temperatures, you crave the energy provided by something like butter, and in the days ahead it would be a staple in our diet.

Following breakfast it took several hours to make final adjustments to our equipment and then load our two sleds with about 250 pounds of gear each. We then harnessed three men already loaded with their own heavy backpacks to each sledge and began the trudge to the base of Vinson. Since the day before when Bonington and I had casually guessed the distance to be a mile or two, Giles had pulled out his chart and, triangulating our position, showed us it was more like five miles. That's when we realized that through the crystalline air distances were deceiving.

Even though it was only a gentle incline, the combination of backpacks and sleds made for tough work.

“This in a small way is what Scott and his men must have gone through,” Bonington said.

Whenever the fiberglass sled caught under the sastrugi we had to bear our full weight against the traces to pull it over, and after five hours our stomach and leg muscles were feeling the strain.

At the head of a shallow cirque between Vinson and neighboring Mount Shinn we set up camp. It took several hours to cut blocks from the brick-hard snow for a windbreak, but we judged the task essential: the potential this land held for extreme weather was a constant background threat that influenced our every decision. I had been to Antarctica once before (on an adventure to the Peninsula in 1979) and I remembered a day returning to camp when a storm suddenly blew in, and before we reached our tent the wind strength forced us to belly crawl the remaining distance. We were almost to the tent when we heard a strange noise, like a giant engine running at top speed about to explode. It was a super gust approaching, and when it hit we had to hold on to the shafts of our ice axes while our bodies flapped like flags on the flat surface.

With the windbreak finished we drank hot soup while we studied the features of a snow and ice gully at the back of the cirque. This was the route we would follow in the “morning,” and both Bonington and I were surprised to see that up close it looked longer and steeper than we had guessed.

“Still, our view from here is foreshortened, so it probably looks steeper than it really is,” Bonington said optimistically.

The sun passed behind the ridge bordering our little cirque, and the temperature instantly dropped to thirty below. After a quick dinner of dehydrated chili mixed with the requisite butter we scrambled to our tents and were in our sleeping bags by midnight. When we woke at 6:00 the cirque was still in shadow and we waited until the sun broke once again into the open before we lazily made breakfast. It was 11:00 by the time we were ready to go.

Our plan was to carry mostly food supplies up the gully, continuing toward the main peak of Vinson until we found a good location for our next camp. There we would cache our loads, go back down and return next day with tents, bags, and stoves to occupy this next camp, which we would call camp 1.

As we left base camp our crampons squeaked in the snow, and in places the flat surface was so hard that even with body weight and full packs, the steel points would only penetrate the wind-hardened snow a quarter inch.

A short distance beyond our tents the slope began to steepen, and soon we were following Bonington's steps as he made a zigzag up the ever-steepening gully. An hour later we could see our tents below like small colored dots decorating the base of the cirque, and I realized if someone were to slip here, and drop their ice axe or otherwise fail to arrest themselves, they probably would be dead by the time they skidded to a halt.

“I must say,” Bonington noted, apparently sharing my thought, “this is a bit steep going, isn't it. Perhaps we should take the extra time to rig a belay.”

Looking down toward Frank and Dick, I agreed heartily. Although Frank's climbing technique was much improved from when we had been on that similarly exposed slope on Aconcagua eleven months before, I could only too vividly imagine him catching his crampon point on a pant leg.

In fact we were all sharing the same thought because about then Frank yelled up, “Don't you think it's time to put a rope on?”

Instead of taking the time to belay each climber we decided it would be faster if we tied our climbing ropes together and Bonington and I took turns leading the length up and fixing it, so the others could follow with their mechanical jumar ascenders. This technique worked well and by 5:00 we were at the top of the gully. It had taken us six hours.

“I’m beginning to realize this mountain may take a bit more time than we first guessed,” Bonington said.

From the top of the gully we surveyed the next stage: a walk across a broad basin, then a climb up a small icefall to gain the col between Vinson and Shinn. We made it across the basin in less than an hour, and on the far side we decided it was time to search out a camp spot.

“It's absolutely essential we find a place to dig a solid bolt hole,” Bonington cautioned.

Bolt hole was British for snowcave, meaning a secure shelter we could bolt to in case a windstorm came up that was too strong for our tents. Usually it's no problem building a snowcave; you simply start digging. But here the snow was so hard it was difficult to cut even with snow saws, and we knew the only way to get a cave without hours of labor was to find a hidden crevasse we could modify into a shelter. A little probing in the area soon revealed what we were looking for. We tunneled in from the side, cached our food in it, then headed back to base camp.

The basin was still in full sun as we hiked toward the top of the gully. We were now high enough to see the great ice cap stretching to the horizon. A small peak in the distance rose like a singular island in an expansive sea; this was Welcome Nunatak, and although it looked close we knew from the maps it was forty miles away. Again, the clear air, the deceptive distances. How far away then was the horizon, which seemed far beyond Welcome Nunatak. One hundred fifty miles? Two hundred fifty? We looked at the long horizontal line, so clear there was a fine distinction between the ice and the sky. So clear that staring at it we realized you could actually tell it curved from one end to the other. We guessed this had to be perhaps the only place on earth where you could see this phenomenon. And we realized that if the ancients had been witness to this view they would have known the earth was round.

We paused a moment to absorb the panorama.

“Kind of hits you when you realize the place doesn't belong to anybody,” I said.

“The last true wilderness on earth,” Frank added.

Even beyond wilderness, it was as close on earth as you can come to being on another planet.

A good adventure needs to combine some risk-taking, some unvisited, untracked, or unexplored territory, and some physical challenge. In Antarctica, we had all three. And we had them to a degree that we couldn't help but compare this to other trips we had been on. Between us, that was quite a range of territory in nearly every corner of every continent on earth. But looking out over this frozen frontier, we all were in agreement those other places paled in comparison, that for all of us—including the globe-trotting Bonington— this was the most unusual and exciting adventure we'd ever had.

“You two have come a long way toward developing your climbing skills,” Bonington said to Frank and Dick, “but to be seasoned mountaineers, there remains one thing. You must learn to cook.”

Frank moaned. It was the morning after we had returned to base camp, and we were just ready to begin preparing our meal before moving up to occupy camp 1. Bonnington was unaware of Frank's aversion to cooking.

“Now I don't mind cooking,” Dick said, “but Pancho here has told me that because we're paying for this, we shouldn't have to cook if we don't feel like it. And if he isn't going to, I’m not going to cook for him. I’ve been wet-nursing him enough on these climbs.”

“Wait a minute,” Frank retorted. “I never said any such thing. You know we've decided to be equals with the other climbers whether we're paying for it or not.”

“But on McKinley I was going to offer to cook, and you said, ‘No, don't tell anyone that or we'll be cookin’ from here on.’ “

“But I never said I don't have to cook because I’m paying for the trip,” Frank insisted.

“Not in those exact words, but that's what you meant.”

“But it's the crassness of putting it that way.”

“Now that's the trouble with you liberal Democrats,” Dick said. “Never call a spade a spade. Listen, I’m happy to cook, but if you don't, well, I’m paying for this odyssey too, and I don't want to feel like a second-class partner.”

While this latest episode of the Dick and Frank Show was under way, Steve Marts, shaking his head and smiling, had quietly assembled the stove and started cooking.

We ate our morning mush the morning after we returned to base camp while we swapped stories about past and future adventures. Bonington told us his next trip was back to Everest.

“I’m joining a team of Norwegian friends,” he explained, “and this time my goal is to get to the summit myself before I get too old.”

“I can sympathize with that,” Dick said. “I hope I can get a shot at it before I’m over the hill.”

“We'll keep in touch,” Bonington replied. “If you can't get on with that Indian team, there might be a way to get you with this Norwegian group.”

After breakfast, Kershaw made the announcement he was giving up his ambition to climb Vinson, and would return to the plane.