Antarctica (17 page)

And so Ernest Shackleton became determined to come back.

Val and Wade were given a ride in a pickup truck down the two hundred yards from Hotel California to the helo pad, even though they were carrying only backpacks for their walk up the Barwick Valley to the S-375 camp. Val watched Wade as they stood around waiting for the loadmaster to wave them over; he was observing the scene with great interest, and listened impassively to the loadie’s unconvinced and unconvincing intro to the helo’s safety features, basically a cranial that was no more protection than a bike helmet, and was mainly there to get an intercom on one’s head. But no smirks or rolled eyes or blanched dismay from Wade; no doubt he had done a lot of helo travel before in his line of work. He stepped up into the pax seats and took the throne, the seat just behind and slightly above the two pilot seats. Val sat behind him, and after that she only had a view of the back of his head, his cranial actually; but as they took off she could see him looking down at McMurdo, then out at Erebus, then down at the sea ice as they crossed over the frozen surface
of McMurdo Sound. He got on twice to ask questions, first about the trash ice, which Val explained was caused by windblown grit from Black Island landing on the ice and melting in, causing a ghastly dark gray pitted badlands, impassable on vehicle or foot; then another about the giant greenish tabular bergs sticking out of the sea ice, which Val explained were pieces of the Ross Ice Shelf that had broken off the previous summer, and were on their way out to sea. The sea ice was studded with these big chunks, even though the ice shelf between Hut Point and White Island was not breaking away at anything like the same speed it was along its broad exposed front east of Ross Island. Wade nodded to indicate that he had heard Val’s explanations over the roar of the engine, and that was it. No excited commentary, no further questions.

They flew over the piedmont glacier lining the coast, and then between the rocky mountain points of Mt. Newell and Mt. Doorly, the last two peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, respectively. Then up the broad bare-walled valley between these ranges; this was Wright Valley, one of the biggest and most famous of the Dry Valleys. The copilot said, “They’ll be calling them the Wet Valleys soon, see how much snow there is on the ground these days? Later in the summer that’ll all melt and run down the Onyx River, that white line there, into Lake Vanda.” Vanda was several feet higher than it had been in years past, its blue cracked surface ringed with a broad band of whiter ice. The copilot fell into his tour guide mode for the still-silent Wade, naming the peaks they passed and the hanging glaciers spilling out of the gaps between the peaks of the Asgaard Range to their left. Wade’s head whipped from left to right to take it all in. Then the pilot cut in on the commentary to tell Val they were picking up a couple of
scientists at Don Juan Pond before taking them on to their drop point. The helicopter veered to the left of the flat-topped island ridge called The Dais, up a side valley to land beside Don Juan Pond, which was small, shallow, brown, and liquid. The pond was liquid because its water was too salty to freeze, the copilot told Wade. The scientists to be picked up were nowhere in sight, so they killed the engine and got out and wandered around the narrow brown valley. The ground around the pond was crusted white with salt crystals. Wade walked right out into the middle of the pond, as it was nowhere more than a few inches deep. Val followed him out, partly to make sure he did not step in a pothole.

“Now why doesn’t it freeze, again?” He was looking at everything very curiously, as if in an art gallery to view an exhibit by an artist he didn’t quite trust.

“It’s too salty.”

“Really?” He reached down and scooped up a handful—the water was perfectly clear and transparent in his hand, as thin as ordinary water—then before Val could say anything he put the handful to his mouth and drank it.

Only to spit it out in an explosive spray. “Acck!” he choked, and began turning red-faced as he hacked away, spitting over and over.

Val took her water bottle from her belt and opened it and handed it to him. “Drink?”

He nodded, still hacking away. He pointed down at the pond: “Poison?” he gasped.

“No. Just salty.”

“Wow.” He drank and spat, drank and spat.
“Really
salty. Like battery acid.”

“I know. I touched a finger of it to my tongue once.”

He nodded, spat out again. “That would be the way. I had no idea.”

The two scientists appeared on the rock-covered glacier up the valley from the pond, and soon they had hiked down to the helicopter. They said hello and apologized for keeping the helo waiting.

“That’s all right,” Val said, “it gave Wade here a chance to drink the water.”

Wade gave Val a quick look, and she grinned at him. The scientists regarded him with raised eyebrows. “Wow,” one said: “What did it taste like?”

“It was salty,” Wade confirmed. His mouth was still puckered into a little knot.

“I’ll say,” the other remarked as they climbed up into the silent helo. “There’s 126 grams of salt per liter in that water. As compared to 3.7 for sea water.”

“It tasted saltier than that,” Wade said.

“It makes for a kind of minimum temperature thermometer. The pond won’t freeze until it reaches fifty-four below zero, and then if it does the ice itself is fresh water and won’t melt until it gets above zero. So we can come out here in the spring and tell whether it got below minus fifty-four the previous winter. Hardly ever does, these days.”

Then they were strapped in and the loadie had unsheathed the blades, and they were off in the helo’s whacking roar again, going up the Don Juan Pond’s valley rather than back down. The copilot explained that they wanted to fly over the Labyrinth. Wade asked what that was, and one of the scientists got on to explain that the maze of intersecting canyons they were now over was probably carved by streams on the underside of a big glacier. “See, the glacier itself is still there, only not as big now.”

And then they were over Wright Upper Glacier, a broad smooth field of bluish ice covering the entire head of the valley, which was a kind of immense box
canyon, walled by a huge shattered semicircle of cliffs. All the walls and promontories of this curved escarpment were layered light and dark, like a cake of alternating vanilla and chocolate layers. The same scientist explained that these were bands of light sandstone and dark dolerite, the dolerite harder and so nearly vertical in the cliffs, the sandstone softer and so sloping down at an angle. Above the cliffs loomed the ice of the great Antarctic polar plateau itself, extending off to the distant southern horizon; and in one place it spilled over the cliffs, like a Niagara Falls frozen in a second to perfect stillness. This was Airdevronsix Icefalls, the copilot said, named after the Navy helo division that had discovered it. The pilot took the helo right up next to the icefall, so that they were looking down just a couple hundred feet at holes in the ice where the banded rock was visible; then they shot up into the clear air over the cliffs, where the vast ice expanse of the plateau ran off to the southerly horizon.

It was an amazing sight, one that Val had never gotten used to, no matter how many times she saw it; and it was a staple of all the Dry Valley treks, of course, so that she had seen it a lot. If it had been back in the world it would have been as famous as Monument Valley or Yosemite or the Matterhorn—a cliché, seen countless times in movies and advertisements. But as it was down here it was still, even with the big surge in adventure tourism, the least-known of the great wonders of the natural world. And all the more thrilling for that, as far as Val was concerned. One of the glories of Ice Planet.

And indeed Wade was leaning down over the pilots’ shoulders to see more out the front, and looking left and right like a puppet head on a spring. But he did not get on the intercom to tell everyone how amazed he
was, like the client who had gotten on to shout “WOW” perhaps fifty times during a similar flight; nor did he become obsessed with photography like so many other clients did, fussing with rolls and exposures until they did not seem to be seeing anything outside at all. On the contrary, Wade seemed thoroughly absorbed. Which was only appropriate; but Val had judged him on their first meeting to be a typical Washington politician, not really interested in the ice itself. She liked it that he seemed impressed. And had tried to drink from Don Juan Pond!

The pilots could have flown up and over the peaks of the Olympus Range directly to their destination, but as the destination was a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a no-fly zone, the whole complex of Balham Valley, McKelvey Valley, the Insel Ridge (another Daislike mid valley ridge), and Barwick Valley was off-limits to normal scientific investigation, all fly-overs, and all adventure treks. This was to try to keep a part of the Dry Valleys as uncontaminated as possible, for baseline comparisons with the other more intensively studied and therefore polluted valleys. The team they were visiting had had to show compelling need to get permission to set a small tent camp in the Barwick Valley for a couple of weeks, and they had been required to walk in carrying a minimum of gear.

So the helo flew back down Wright Valley, over the turquoise and lapis sheet of Lake Vanda, up the white line of the Onyx River, and up more steeply into the windy defile of Bull Pass, a hanging valley connecting Wright to McKelvey Valley. Then they were through the pass and out over the broad barren floor of Victoria Valley, and landing on the sandy dunes upvalley from Lake Vida. This was another cracked frozen lake, looking like something tucked at about twenty-five thousand
feet in mountains anywhere else; in fact they were just over a thousand feet above sea level. But high latitude was the equivalent of high altitude in its effect on landscape, and so Val and Wade climbed out of the helo and moved out from under the loudly spinning main rotor blades, and straightened to stand upright on what seemed the Tibetan plateau, if not the moon itself.

Then the bright red helo was off, loud and fast, downvalley and away, disappearing quickly into Bull Pass, the noise of it receding from their pounding ears much more slowly, until finally they were left alone in the windy but still silence of a vast rockscape, a valley that seemed cut off from—well, from everything. Wade stared around, looking stunned.

“Pretty, isn’t it,” Val remarked out of habit, as if addressing a client.

“I don’t think that’s quite the word I’d choose.”

The gear they were carrying was minimal, and Wade’s backpack in particular was not very heavy; Val had kept it to perhaps fifteen kilos. Still he grunted as he hefted it onto his back, and remarked on the load.

“When I started working down here,” Val said, “your personal kit weighed around a hundred pounds, and was too bulky to be carried anywhere. That’s why that pickup truck took us down to the helo pad this morning; they’re still not used to bag drag being something you can carry yourself.”

“Hmm,” Wade said, as if not convinced they had reached that point even yet.

Val shrugged into her pack (she was carrying about twenty-five kilos), and took off. After walking up Victoria Valley for several minutes she pointed past the prow
of Mount Insel, up Barwick Valley. “They’re up there, see, under that glacier at the head of the valley.”

Wade glanced up and nodded. “There by dinner.”

Val laughed, and Wade stopped and tipped down his sunglasses to have another look. “Longer?”

“Longer. That’s about twenty-five kilometers.”

“Oh wow. I would have guessed about five.”

“That happens a lot down here. There aren’t any trees or buildings to give you a sense of scale, and the mountains are big. And the air is clearer than you’re used to.”

“That’s for sure.”

They walked side by side, as no one way over the sand and rubble underfoot was easier than another. “People make big mistakes in perspective down here,” Val said. “Thinking a snowmobile is a mountain, or a pack of cigarettes a building. Or vice versa.”

“Everything looks big to me.”

“But you thought we were just a short walk from their camp.”

“True.”

The afternoon passed as they walked up and down over low waves of rock. Although in the distance their way looked nearly level, the immediate vicinity was always up and down—twenty feet up a ridge, thirty feet down a saddle crossing an even deeper bowl—forty feet up to get out of the bowl, then twenty down, then a steep staircase—and so on. That local unevenness, and the rough rubble covering the valley floor everywhere, made it hard walking. But Wade slipped through it like a dancer, Val noted, with small neat graceful steps; no complaints; and he kept up a good pace. Val liked this kind of walking very much, but usually she toured these valleys leading trekking groups of up to twenty people, with the tail of the group always stumble-blistering
along and requiring delicate care. So she enjoyed this empty afternoon a good deal; and after a few hours, declared it time to stop and cook a meal.

She found them a nook between two big boulders, in the sunlight and out of the wind, and sat down and broke out the food bag and the stove. Wade sat watching her as she cooked up some soup. She gestured at his pack; “There’s hot chocolate in your thermos.”

He helped himself, but didn’t eat much soup or trail mix. Appetite a bit suppressed, as often happened to people when they started trekking out here. He would be ravenous by the time they reached the Hourglass Lakes, she judged. Although he was not a big man. But walking in the cold burned a lot of calories.

“So this is forbidden ground,” he noted as she cleaned up the site and packed her bag.

“Yes. It’s kind of nice to be able to see it.”

“They must be doing important work to be allowed to come in here.”

“Yes. Actually I’ve heard they’re controversial.”

“Letting them in here?”

“That, and also their work as a whole. If they’re right, then the ice caps might be fairly sensitive to climate changes like the one we’re in. Something like that. You’ll have to ask them about it.”