But that was the kind of thing that happened when exploring unknown territory, when struggling through the mountains, of terra incognita for the first time. It was the kind of experience that humanity would never have again, not even on other planets. Of course there were wilderness adventure tours these days being dropped in Alaska or Mongolia or the Himalayas without maps or compasses or GPS or radio, to try to reproduce that experience. But no matter how they tried, Val did not believe what they were doing was really the same. It was impossible to regain that mental state, of wanting to know and not knowing.
In Amundsen’s case, the mistaken route had been only the beginning of their troubles. By an unhappy twist of fate, the glacier they had chosen to climb, the Axel Heiberg, turned out to be one of the steepest and most broken glacial ramps to the polar plateau in all the Transantarctics. Its upper section rose eight thousand feet in less than twenty miles, in a series of ice cataracts that fell across the glacier from sidewall to sidewall, making them unavoidable. Only the champion skiing of Amundsen’s lead skier Bjaaland—one of the best skiers alive at that time—and the generally superb ice skills of all the Norwegians, had gotten them (and their surefooted dogs!) up the thing.
So repeating the Amundsen route was hard enough even if you decided to pass on the mistake at the beginning, and stuck to the Axel Heiberg throughout. Most of the previous Footsteps expeditions had taken the glacier route, which had been the Amundsen descent route as well, and so still following in the footsteps (reversed) while saving strength for the difficulties that lay above. It made sense.
And Val’s group this time was not made up of Norwegian champion skiers and hardened polar explorers. On the contrary, it was a somewhat less skillful group than usual. Not that all five didn’t have many adventure expeditions under their belt; indeed as they wolfed down hors d’oeuvres and cooked their main meal, they were hearing story after story from Jack and Jim about climbing the Seven Summits (meaning the tallest one on each continent), kayaking down the Baltoro, completing the ice hat trick (meaning North Pole, Greenland and South Pole), and so forth. The adventures were endless. But the expertise still seemed thin to Val. The husband-and-wife team, Jorge and Elspeth Royce-Paulo, took photographs and wrote articles for the outdoor magazines and onlines; they were well-known. Jack Michaels and Jim McFeriss were friends from the Bay Area, both lawyers, and had climbed and gone on treks together a few times before. And Ta Shu, although he had spent many years wandering in the Himalayas, was around sixty. He was one of the Woos, a feng shui guru. During the days he wore heavy black sunglasses which contained fiberop cameras and a phone to transmit his narration and three-D video back to a facemask TV audience in China. While hiking his head swiveled about and he talked to this audience almost continuously, but in the tent he kept the glasses off, thankfully. Val’s impression of feng shui was that it was one of those ancient modes of knowledge that was so deep and profound that no one alive could actually explain it, and indeed when she asked him what he made of the landscapes Ta Shu had said very little, usually “This is a good place.” Although it could have been that his English kept him from offering the long version of his analyses; it was limited enough to make Val wonder why he didn’t just give up and use a computer translation program.
In any case, all these clients were taking on something a little bit harder than most of what they had done before. And so Val was not sure that they should be taking on the mistaken traverse.
But Jack was. “I think we should follow the original route,” he said as Jorge and Elspeth ladled beef stroganoff into their bowls. “Let’s do it just like they did it, I mean that’s what we came here for.”
“We already skipped the ice shelf,” Elspeth pointed out.
“That’s because it’s gone! If it were here we would do it. But this part of the route is just like it was when they came through, and so we should follow them, or else what’s the point?”
The others sat on their sleeping bags and ground pads, eating and looking at Jack or Val, as if this was going to turn into some kind of confrontation between them. That was the last thing Val wanted, however. She said to them, “It’s your trek. You can do what you want.”
Jack nodded, lips pursed, as if he had won an argument. Val ignored that and focused on the others. They looked uncertain to her, even Jim, and so she unfolded the USGS topo of the area and traced with a finger the two alternative routes, and then only ate her stroganoff, and listened to them debate the pros and cons. Slowly they began to come down on the side of following the exact route. Either they couldn’t conceptualize the amount of sheer work it would add to the trek, or else they were just into the idea of it. Or else Jack was intimidating them. Group dynamics were such a mess.
Jack and Jim argued for the mistake; the Royce-Paulos did not seem to care, or were perhaps not enthusiastic, but not willing to say so. Ta Shu was becoming a kind of tie-breaker, unless Val herself got involved. He looked at her, perhaps for guidance. She said, “It’s no worse than the icefalls above. I suppose doing it might get us tuned for the icefalls.”
He said, “We came to see what Amundsen saw.”
“Good man,” Jack said with a wink to Jim.
So the next morning they broke camp and loaded the sledge, and started up the shoulder of Mount Betty, onto the false ramp benching up the side of the Herbert Range.
Immediately the steepness of the slope began to give them trouble. It was windless, the sun right in their faces, and the snow on the slope pretty soft for Antarctica. Val had everyone switch from skis to snowshoes to gain traction, but even in the cold air it was hot work. And it did not help that the snow concealed frequent crevasses in the ice below. The air was on average ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than in Amundsen’s time, and as a result all Antarctic ice was moving downhill a bit more quickly. For the most part this was noticeable only to beakers, but on steeper slopes one saw evidence of fresh ice spills much more often than when Val had first come down.
As here and now: a fan of blue shatter ice, splayed out over the smooth white tilt they were climbing, the broken ice still sharp-edged. The hyperarid winds would quickly round all exposed edges, and indeed blow away chunks this size in a year or two, so this was clearly a recent spill. Which meant they had to be extra careful when crossing snow bridges over crevasses, or moving under seracs. And on this day they were having to do a lot of both.
Val’s GPS gave her a detailed map of the slope, which pinpointed their location and all the crevasses out of sight above them. So she did not have to climb ahead of the rest to find a way, as Bjaaland had done continuously for Amundsen. Which meant she was available to help haul their sledge. This was the latest German lightweight wonder, built by the same firm that made the winning sleds and luges in the Olympics, and all the gear and food for all six of them fit into its sleek blue body, and yet it weighed less than three hundred pounds, most of that food; a miracle of all the latest in materials science; but still damned hard to pull up a slope this steep and soft.
So Val stayed in the lead harness and hauled the sledge, teamed with Jack, then Jim, then Elspeth, then Ta Shu, then Jorge. Up left, then right, then left, switchbacking up steep ramps of snow-covered ice, looking down into cobalt crevasses. Hard work indeed, which on Amundsen’s trek had been done mostly by the dogs. Really the problems for the two groups were almost reversed; Val’s group knew the way but had to pull their load, while the Norwegians had had their dogs to pull, but had not known where they were going. Val much preferred her group’s problem; it was hot work, but relatively safe. Heading into unmapped territory with limited food and no chance of rescue; that was a situation she did not envy. Now the problems were more mundane: “Try not to sweat,” Val reminded them after one especially aerobic stomp up a hard snow ramp. “Thermostat yourselves. Even your smartfabrics can’t do it all.”