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.)

FIVE DAYS AFTER OUR jaunt to the DC-6, the Twin Otters begin bringing climbers back from Vinson, including the five independents. Alison Levine jumps out, beaming, having knocked off the sixth of her Seven Summits. She says it was "butt cold" in her tent and on Vinson's summit, where temperatures can hit 35 below.

"On every other peak you look forward to dropping into your bag at night," she says. "On Vinson it was so cold that I dreaded it, because I could not stay warm when I wasn't moving."

Meanwhile, two more planeloads of climbers are stranded when the weather again turns foul at Vinson. Three days go by. Finally Main gets an encouraging radio report from base camp. He tells me I'm welcome to fly out to the mountain, but I'll have to wait there with the last group until the second Otter comes in.

"No guarantees," he says as I climb aboard. "You could be stuck there a week."

Flying over Antarctica is much better in a Twin Otter than a Herc. A few minutes after takeoff, we see the great wilderness of the Ellsworths opening before us, the beginning of a jagged rampart that curls right around the edge of the continent. We pass a Matterhorn-like peak called the Minaret, first climbed by Conrad Anker, Alex Lowe, and ANI's Pinfield in December 1997, but beyond that there's almost nothing that's been climbed or named. The sense of desolation is overwhelming—and yet the wide-open beckons, too.

Vinson base camp is a couple of dots on a gentle rise in the Branscombe Glacier, just below a towering face that guards the summit plateau. I can see ski tracks marking the start of the standard route, which wraps left to avoid the face, but that's about it—the weather is already closing in again. Ten minutes after we land, the Otter is back in the air. Nine of us—Hillman and Pinfield, me, the five losers of the get-off-of-Vinson-first lottery, and their guide, Skip Horner—watch the plane until it disappears. Then there's silence, and the realization that the fog line 500 feet down the glacier is slowly creeping upward.

"Oh, God," Horner says. "Not another three days in a cloud."

Vinson now feels like the end of the earth. With everything but the tents packed, we all huddle anxiously in Hillman's Weatherhaven, waiting for the radio to crackle. Finally Main calls, wondering about the flying conditions. "Five hundred feet, good and good," Pinfield says optimistically, referring to ceiling height, general visibility, and horizon definition.

An hour later the Otter threads through a hole in the clouds, lands softly, and pull up by the tent. The light is totally flat; there is no horizon to be seen. The conditions are no longer "good and good".

We load up fast. At takeoff I feel a wave of relief wash over the group. Main nods when I describe the sensation back in camp. "Once they've got it done," he says, "they can't get off the ice fast enough."

Back in camp, the pole-taggers, John Krummell and Stephen Turner, are tired of waiting too, but finally their big day arrives. They leave at noon and come back 14 hours later, looking a bit shell-shocked. There was not, they report, a whole lot to do at the pole. "I don't really know how to describe the feel of the place," says Krummell, the California manufacturer. "It was all dingy and beat-up, like a tavern in the part of town." Turner nods his agreement. "When do you think the next Herc is coming in?" he says.

A few days later the two Dutch Skiers Cornelissen and van Rooijen, roll in. It's a great scene. Everybody spills out of the dining tent to welcome them, and the two men grin wildly as they tow their now-lightened sleds under a little bamboo archway decorated with ribbons and balloons. Yet even the ecstatic van Rooijen is unimpressed with the South Pole.

"In some ways, I hate that place. All these planes flying out empty, it's so stupid. Such American waste. And these pompous adminstrators telling you what is science, what is tourism—that also is stupid. But the workers there, the support staff, they are really wonderful. Everything is official vs. unofficial."

One day on the way back to Patriot Hills, van Rooijen says, a brisk tailwind helped them cover 100 miles. I picture them planing across the ice cap like a sailboat running down the trades. "Maybe that's how it will be someday in Antarctica," I say. "One big iceboating venue."

The Dutchman grins. "What the place was made for," he says.

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