Traveling in Antarctica: White, cold and eternal

By Frosty Wooldridge 

                                      “Great God, this is an awful place.”

                                                   Robert Falcon Scott, 1912

            When I walked outside the barracks, a 120-mile per hour katabatic wind screamed above the rooftops.  At 80 below zero Fahrenheit, the chill index nearly doubled that mark.  Every breath of air sucked tiny ice crystals deep into my lungs. If I hadn’t been wearing my extreme cold weather gear and goggles, my skin would have turned to ice in seconds and my eyeballs crystallized in their sockets.

            Around noon that day, a low pressure system moved over the ice.  Following it, a raging, swirling windstorm called a “Herbie” raced across the Ross Ice Shelf.  South of McMurdo, two mountain peaks protruding from the ice protruded from the white horizon.  Named Black and White Islands, they became the starting points for what was called, “Herbie Alley.”  In excess of 190 mile per hour winds spawned between those two peaks.  McMurdo Station represented the ten pins at the end of the bowling alley.  Those raging winds slammed their ‘bowling ball’ fury into our tiny outpost for eight hours.  

While working upstairs in the Galley Building, where everyone met for dining, I watched the sky grow progressively worse.  First, the “Herbie” winds kicked up–blowing electrical wires wildly back and forth between their poles.  Flags rippled flat in the blizzard.  The sky, already overcast in its usual battleship gray, brightened as if someone had washed the clouds with laundry detergent.

            Following on the wind’s heels—snow.  Not big flakes, but fine, misty crystal grains like powdered sugar jetted through the air horizontally with no intention of landing.  If they did touch down, like a jet fighter on the deck of an aircraft carrier–they bounced once and headed back into the sky.  Winds blowing 190 miles per hour did not let anything that wasn’t anchored stay on the ground.

            At McMurdo Station, Antarctica, (77 degrees 51’S 166 degrees 40’ E), three weather conditions existed: The calmest, “Condition Three,” meant fair weather, and working outside was allowed.  “Condition Two” meant the temperatures and winds were dangerous enough that people must work in pairs for mutual safety and working outside was discouraged.  During “Condition One,” mandatory confinement to a building applied to everyone.  It was considered so dangerous–they couldn’t walk back to their barracks.  Usually, the visibility was less than 30 feet and temperatures dropped from 50 to 80 below zero Fahrenheit.  Once, it dropped 65 degrees in 12 minutes!

            By two o’clock, I looked out the window into white nothingness.  Buildings only 50 feet away had vanished.  Snow crystals swirled in meaningless, rampaging blasts across the whiteness.  I stared into the face of a cloud, but I stood inside the cloud while remaining on the ground.

            A man entered our office, “We’re going to call a ‘Condition One’ in fifteen minutes…you’re instructed to relocate to your barracks, or you will be forced to remain here.”

            Several people in the room raced toward their jackets.  No one wanted to be caught in the office if the storm lasted for two or more days.  I picked up my parka and “Bugs Bunny Boots” and walked toward the end of the building.  After pulling on my extreme cold weather gear plus my goggles, I grabbed the door handle, similar to the handles that locked down metal hatches on battleships, and twisted it open.  A blast of wind smashed the door against me.  At that moment, the “Herbie” was no silent movie outside my window.

            A howling, vicious, body slamming wind-demon—fully in my face–stalked me like a gunslinger itching for a fight.  Without warning, he shoved his pistol right up my left nostril screaming, “I dare you to come outside.”

            My roommate Jack walked up behind me.

“This is some kind of nasty weather,” he said.

We had a few choice words and lunged out the door.  At the bottom

of the steps, a “blizzard guide rope,” with orange flags attached every 20 feet, lay on the ground.  It vanished 30 feet away in the snow and wind.  The blizzard guide ropes connected every building when a storm approached.  They were the single most important lifelines for every person living at McMurdo and were the only sure means of making it safely from one building to another.

            We grabbed the line and headed toward our barracks 300 feet away.  Within seconds, we moved through a swirling snow tunnel with no beginning and no end.  The wind howled past us in gusts because the buildings, which caused its erratic swirling, had broken it.  It was like being surrounded by four prize fighters hitting us from four different sides.  We kept taking “punches” with no way to defend against them.  We reached hand over hand–grasping our lifeline until we made it to a snow bank in front of our barracks.  We dropped down over the snow bank and climbed the steps.

            The barracks door blew out of my hand when I unlatched it.  Inside the foyer, snow had blown through the cracks in the door and had piled up a foot deep in places.  We climbed the stairs and walked down the hallway to our room.  On the windows, elegant shapes the texture of cotton candy, designed themselves from snow plastered against the glass.

            By 6:00 PM, the winds abated allowing officials to call us for dinner.  We crossed the same 300-foot blizzard line to the Galley.  Hot food never tasted so good.

            Back in my room after dinner, I thought about the time one of my idols had climbed into a pine tree in Yosemite.  He wanted to feel what it was like to climb a tree and ride out a storm.  He lashed himself to the top of it and stayed awake all night as it whipped back and forth in the howling tempest.  The wind blew and the rain fell.  Nature savagely pummeled him.  He discovered what it was like to be a tree.  John Muir nearly died in the process from exposure.  If he could do it in a tree, I could do it in an Antarctic blizzard.

To “taste” the power of the storm, I bundled into my cold weather gear and headed outside.  I grabbed a separate blizzard rope at the back door of my barracks and headed into the storm.  When the rope played out, I pulled out 300-feet of my own parachute cord and looped it onto the main rope.  What I was about to do was strictly forbidden.  But I had to find out what that blizzard felt like.  From where the main blizzard rope ended away from the building, I began releasing my own cord until I couldn’t see my barracks anymore.   A whiteout engulfed me.  I couldn’t see 20 feet.  I walked in the direction I guessed was the edge of the pack ice on McMurdo Sound.

            Essentially, I was living on a fiord at the bottom of the world.  About 37 miles away from where I stood, an active volcano, Mount Erebus (meaning “The Gates of Hell”) belched smoke into the sky.  Across the Sound was the Royal Society Range of mountains topping out at 13,000 feet.   I couldn’t see them through the aspirin purity of the blizzard.

            Looking back along my steps, my barracks had vanished in the swirling snows.  At that moment, I stared into whiteness.  I turned back toward the pack ice of the Sound.  More nothingness and whiteness.

            I stood in a white world.  Cold tugged at me through every frigid breath entering my lungs.  My facemask froze with ice, but the goggles protected my eyes from the stinging wind.  Snow tried to cut through my garments and drift against my cheeks.  It tasted like an ice cube on my tongue.  An unfriendly wind whipped past me as if I was no more than a monument in a cemetery on a cold winter’s day.  Around me, nothing living!  No smells of any kind.  Not a trace of warmth.  Nothing suggesting that where I was standing was meant for humanity.

            Antarctica meant ice and snow–cold winds and howling storms–glaciers and icebergs.  To be there was abnormal.  As I stood knee deep in powdery snow, I realized Antarctica, for all its beauty, could snuff me out in an hour and not even blink its benign, if not cruel eyes, at my passing.  I looked down at my cold weather garments.  Powdered sugar snow coated me into something resembling a moving Pillsbury Doughboy.

            Whatever Muir gleaned while riding out the storm in that tree, I found nothing in that freezing blizzard.  I felt cold, even numb and saw little but what someone might see while staring into a television when the station had gone off the air.

            It was time to return to the warmth and safety of the barracks.  I grabbed the cord and headed back.  For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine why Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Mawson and Amundsen wanted to conquer the frozen continent of Antarctica in 1902.  More intriguing, what were the objectives of the men who swabbed the decks, cleaned the latrines and peeled the potatoes?  The ones who never enjoyed fame or fortune?

            Just before he died on his way back from the South Pole, the great British polar explorer Scott lamented, “Great God!  This is an awful place.”

            Antarctica was white, cold and eternal.  It didn’t care what Scott said a century ago. 

I stood motionless in a similar storm.  I tried to say something but words failed me.  It was horrible, frigid and nothingness everywhere.  Then, I muttered, “This is incredible!”  The storm continued its fury.

Antarctica didn’t care what I said, either!

 ##