So this Footsteps of Amundsen expedition, like the twelve before it, was taking turns hauling a single ultralight sledge full of their gear, and therefore traveling more like Scott’s party than Amundsen’s. And they started their trip, as had become traditional, a day’s haul out from land, on the sea ice between the ice tongues from the Strom and Axel Heiberg glaciers. This gave everyone a taste of what it had been like to cross the level white waste of the ice shelf, and then without further ado they made landfall where Amundsen and his men had, on the gentle northern slopes of Mount Betty, named after Amundsen’s childhood nurse. After crossing the tidal cracks in the sea ice at the shoreline, and setting a camp a couple hundred meters up the slope, they were also able to visit the cairn that Amundsen and his men had built, on the exposed ridge of Mount Betty called Bigend Saddle. This cairn had marked the only depot Amundsen had made during his trek to the Pole, and now the chest-high stack of big flat stones was also the sole remaining object left by Amundsen’s team anywhere on the continent, their base camp having calved into the sea soon after their departure.
So this stack of stones was it. Nothing in the century since had disturbed it, for no wind was going to knock it over, and Antarctica had very little in the way of earthquakes. Val’s group stood around it reverently, almost afraid to touch it for fear of accidentally tipping it over. But it had been stacked with the kind of neat skill that marked all Amundsen’s operations, and it would not fall unless someone deliberately dismantled it. And no one who cared enough to visit the site would do that.
It had first been relocated, Val told her group, by members of Admiral Byrd’s expedition, in 1929. In a hollow in the stack of stones they had found a tiny can containing pages torn from Amundsen’s notebook, informing the world, in case they did not survive the return crossing of the ice shelf, that they had in fact reached the Pole.
The five clients shook their heads at this bit of information. Incredible that this little stack of stones, in all the empty thousands of square miles of ice and rock, had been relocated at all, much less by men flying around in a little Fokker aircraft just seventeen years after it had been built. The wreckage of the Fokker could still be visited as well, Val told them; it had been destroyed on the ground in a blizzard in March of 1929, and its crew rescued by men in the plane that a few weeks later made the first flight over the Pole.
All amazing. But it was cold on that exposed ridge, and after a few minutes standing around, the group was ready to get back into the dining tent and eat dinner. It had been a hard day’s haul. No one advocated visiting the wreckage of the Fokker, which was nearly ten kilometers away, and was, when all was said and done, still a plane wreck, never anyone’s favorite subject for archeological tours.
So they headed down for the tent. But as they were leaving the rock of the ridge and stepping onto the snowy slope of Mount Betty, Elspeth exclaimed, “Look there!”
She was pointing at another rock cairn, lower and smaller than Amundsen’s. The others followed her over to look at it. It was a little ring of rock, surrounding a snow-plastered black box and a satellite dish wired to it. Scientific instrumentation of some kind.
“One of the science teams must be doing an experiment of some kind,” Val said. “They’re probably using the Amundsen cairn as a locater.”
“That’s stupid,” Jim said. “I’m surprised they let them disturb a historical site like this.”
The others looked noncommittal. Presumably this ring of stones would be dismantled when the experiment was over; and given the vast view they had of the coastal range and the berg-choked frozen sea, it was hard to argue that the site was too disturbed. Still, Jim continued to complain as they hiked back down to their campsite, and Val promised to look into the matter and see whose experiment it was, and what they were doing so close to the Amundsen cairn.
Then they were at the camp. The big dining tent was still clear on its north side, maximizing its own little greenhouse effect; the fabric would go blue when the temperature inside got to about forty, so that the discrepancy of inner and outer temperatures didn’t get too large. The little sleeping tents were all colorful nylon domes, with snowblock walls protecting them from the possibility of strong downslope winds. The snow here was perfect Antarctic Styrofoam; they had cut it with a big saw into perfect blocks, and lifted them easily for stacking, as the snow was very light, and yet cohered perfectly.
Now they all took off their crampons and hustled into the dining tent, enthusiastically declaring their starvation. And Val followed them in, taking a last look over the jumbled sea ice, thinking So much for the Ross Ice Shelf. A day’s haul. Amundsen’s group had taken three weeks to get here from their base on the Bay of Whales. So nice to have an excuse to pass on that. The old guys had done stuff that was just too hard, no matter how into it you were. You had to tailor the past a little to make it bearable.
Not that she meant to be unfair to her clients. They were skiing or walking three hundred miles across Antarctica, after all, and taking turns hauling the sledge, and hauling it from sea level up to nine thousand feet as well, which was a big up. So a few hundred miles of ice shelf subtracted from the total was not that important, nor were the exact details of the route. It was the spirit that counted.
Except to some people, who came down with the idea of retracing the historic routes precisely. A particular character type, and one of Val’s least favorite. But even that type had to make allowances when it came to Amundsen’s trip. And really, no matter how closely they tried to reproduce the experience—some expeditions had tried wearing the same clothing and using the same gear, with spectacularly unhappy results—it could not truly be done. Because Amundsen and his group had approached a section of the Transantarctics that no one had ever seen before. It was an unknown mountain range that they had to cross somehow, with food supplies so tight that they had not had the luxury of scouting out alternative routes to find the easiest way to the polar cap, which they only knew was there because of Shackleton’s trek three years before. So as they approached the mountains in their crossing of the ice shelf, watching them rear up day after day into a range as big and ferocious as the Alps, Amundsen had not been amused. He made a sketch in his notebook naming the big peaks Mounts A, B, C, D, E and F. Between the peaks the big glaciers that characterized the range spilled down from the polar cap; but which one should they take? In the end Amundsen thought he saw a rampway next to one of the big glacial openings, a ramp that appeared to rise straight up and straight south to the foot of one of the biggest of the inland peaks, where he hoped he would be deposited on the polar cap with little trouble. There was no way of telling until they tried it; and so up the ramp they had climbed, ignoring the broad glacial opening just a few kilometers to their left.
The ramp, however, had turned out not to be a ramp. It had been a big shoulder, around which the broad glacier to the left had curved on its way down. So after intense efforts to climb the rugged shoulder and cross it, they had been left looking down onto the glacier they could have walked right up, and they had had to descend to this glacier and then restart their climb. It had been one of Amundsen’s biggest mistakes; it had cost them days, and a great deal of backbreaking effort; and in retrospect it seemed obvious that the broad curving glacier had been the way. In fact they had had to beat their dogs to get them to start up the shoulder, as the dogs had been all for taking the glacier road to the left. Even the dogs had known better.