Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now. (Cont'd.)

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now. (Cont'd.)

EVERY DAY AT PATRIOT HILLS the sun spirals a little lower in the sky. It never sets, but toward 3 A.M. it reaches its lowest point, and a yellowish twilight envelops the camp for an hour or two. The Weatherhaven I'm sharing with the two South Pole sightseers—John Krummell, a southern California manufacturer, and Stephen Turner, a high-tech guy from Oregon—is reasonably warm. Still, on our second summer "morning" I find a skin of ice on my water bottle.

In the dining tent, I share breakfast with the five independent Vinson climbers, part of the group scheduled to fly out on the last Otter. Unfortunately, the weather had deteriorated as the first two planes unloaded, so the group was stuck in Patriot Hills overnight, and are still waiting for conditions to improve on Vinson. One of the five, Alison Levine, the San Francisco investment adviser, tells me she's already climbed five of the Seven Summits, everything except Vinson and Everest. "It's something that just kind of happens," she says, sounding vaguely embarrassed. "You climb a few, and then suddenly you find yourself filling in the blanks.

"You should have seen me on Carstenz," she adds, referring to Indonesia's Carstenz Pyramid. "They told me to bring jumars [ascenders], so I went out and bought them. Then when I showed up they were like, 'OK, but where are the slings for the jumars?' I was like, 'Slings? Nobody told me about slings.'" She laughs. "And then I wind up on the summit, with no clue about how you're supposed to downclimb."

"So what did you do?"

"I slid down on my butt."

If I worry a bit about how this group will fare on Vinson, no one else does. "The standard route is barely technical," Hillman, the ANI guide, tells me. "There's only one place you really need to use a rope. The success rate is 95 percent. You can't beat that."

As I learn after breakfast, when I wander over to the radio tent, the real spectator sport at Patriot Hills is following the progress not of the Vinson climbers or the South Pole "taggers," but of the "manhaulers," men and women who ski across the ice cap towing food and gear in a sled behind them, à la Robert Scott. It's an incredible test of endurance, and it seems to get a little more popular every year. This summer ANI is tracking seven long-distance parties, three more than the year before. Skiers check in at set times on shortwave radio or a satellite beacon; if they push the panic button, or just don't respond for two days running, ANI sends out a search plane. This tracking service, which costs $5,000 per trip, is a mandatory part of an expedition's package with ANI, along with an insurance bond for emergency evac and flights to, from, and in Antarctica—and a major reason why skiing to the South Pole costs $100,000 per expedition.

On a whiteboard, Jamie Main notes the coordinates of the latest group to call in. Then he turns to a map showing each party's progress, singling out a pair of Dutch adventurers, Marc Cornelissen and Wilco van Rooijen, who are attempting a 1,381-mile round-trip between Patriot Hills and the pole.

"They're pretty solid," Main says. "They got up to the pole in 42 days, and now they're headed back, but at a much faster pace." Sure enough, the map shows the two advancing at a steady 12 to 15 miles a day on the outbound leg. On the return, they're averaging twice that.

"How is that possible?"

"Kites," Main explains. "It's uphill and a headwind all the way to the pole, but when you turn around it's suddenly a tailwind. You put the thing up, hitch it to your harness, and you can fly."

Of the six teams on the ice, Main confides, two worry him. The first, about two-thirds of the way to the pole, is a Swedish couple in their thirties, Tom and Tina Sjogren. Around camp, they're known as the Robo-Cops because they're toting so much of their sponsor's ultra-high-tech communications equipment.

Then there's Liv Arnesen and Ann Bancroft, polar veterans in their forties who are trying to pull off the Big One: a 2,400-mile traverse from Queen Maud Land—the part of Antarctica due south of South Africa—all the way to McMurdo Station. They're well equipped, but a two-week flight delay put them seriously behind schedule.

There's one team I don't hear about until later: two Norwegian skiers, Eirik Sønneland and Rolf Bae. Rather than fly in with ANI, they spent the winter working as support staff at Troll, the Norwegian base in Queen Maud Land. When spring came, they made a break for the pole. Since their communications are spotty and they have no established plans for getting out, everyone at Patriot Hills calls them the Stealth Expedition. It's hard not to admire their pluck, but I wonder what they'll do when they reach the pole. Throw themselves at the mercy of the NSF, whose official policy is to offer visitors a cup of coffee, period? Or will they somehow come up with $50,000 to get the NSF to fly them out?

Once the morning's round of radio calls is complete, Main and Stephen Pinfield, a 47-year-old ANI field guide, propose a picnic at Patriot Hills's biggest tourist attraction, the wreck of an old DC-6 about six miles outside camp. When we reach it, after a 45-minute run on the snowcat, the only part of the plane that's visible is the tail, protruding out of the snow like the fin of some primordial fish.

Shovel in hand, Pinfield paces off 75 feet directly in front of the tail, then starts digging. Ten minutes later, we're crawling through the cockpit windshield and into the main cabin, which smells heavily of gas. Though we're under eight feet of snow, an eerie blue light filters through the windows, and you can make out the dim outlines of a dozen fuel barrels and large dog carriers.

The plane—flown by a would-be ANI competitor—went down in a whiteout in 1993. Chartered by Colonel Norman Vaughan—an 87-year-old polar veteran who had run sled dogs for Admiral Richard E. Byrd—it was carrying fuel and dogs, preliminary supplies for a later attempt Vaughan hoped to make on a mountain Byrd had named for him. No one died in the wreck, but one man, the expedition's veterinarian, was seriously hurt when one of the propellers pierced the wall of the fuselage. In the confusion, four of the dogs ran off and were never seen again.

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