Schralptastic in the Rockies and Roger's Pass

Dylan Taylor, Ben Mitchell, Cece Mortenson and I are busy preparing for a ski mountaineering expedition to the northeast corner of Afghanistan where the Hindu Kush and Pamir Mountains meet. Planning the trip is still giving us lots of surprises but we are plugging along. We'll only know how it goes once the trip is over. There are so many unknowns. What we do have for certain is a solid team of committed friends with a good plan and intentions.

This is an image from the guidebook to the Wakhan, "Peaks of Silver and Jade"

In the meantime I'm taking my ski mountaineering exam with the American Mountain Guide's Association. Its my last guide's exam and I'm very excited to pass this and be finished with the guide's training process so I can move on with real life. With that goal in mind I'm up in Canada skiing as much as I can with good friends and other folks who are also taking exams.

Heading up to Pope's Peak through the larch forest in the Rockies

Skiing down from Pope's Col. 

The next day Mike Madden and I skied the Young's Peak traverse, a Roger's Pass classic.

 Mike Madden 

Skiing out the Asulkan Valley underneath tree triangle

Tortured rocks and the vast yonder

Recently I returned from another fantastic season working in Antarctica. Our team consisted, at any one time, of three geologists and two mountain guides. Tim Burton, with almost a decade of Antarctic experience and bottomless well of "dad jokes" was the default lead mountaineer on the trip, and I was his humble second.

G097 Team: Mike, Tim, Chris, Christine, Fawna, Tim, and myself

Our area of study was the formidable and notorious Fosdick Mountains which are a sub-range of the Ford Ranges, which all lie within Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica. We five were the only humans in a land area the size of the state of Washington. We lived self-supported out of three Scott tents, an Endurance kitchen tent, and a bathroom tent. All of our travel was accomplished on Skandic 550 skidoos that we used to traverse over 800 miles each in transit to and from mountainsides and for camp moves.

Tim traversing in front of Mt Lockhart's icefall

To say this was an experience of a lifetime is an understatement. It was an absolute privilege to be a part of this amazing geologic research. The geologists, Christine Siddoway, Fawna Korhonen, Mike Brown, Chris Yakymchuk, and Tim Ivanic, come from a fairly specialized type of geologic background and their interests were twofold: uncovering the igneous and metamorphic petrological history of the Fosdicks, and also of correlating the structural history of the range with the geochemistry to create a higher resolution framework of how the Fosdicks formed.

Chris and Tim investigating the rocks

Chris considers the migmatite at Mt. Iphigene

That is a mouthful, but here is my layman's explanation. The Fosdicks are composed of metamorphic rock, which is rock that was originally something else and was subsequently heated and/or squeezed enough by the pressure of overlying rock or the compression/extension/faulting of the Earth that the original rock became altered to its present form. The fancy term for what the Fosdicks are made of is "migmatite," or more specifically, a "migmatite core complex." Simply put, migmatite means rock that was melted. This melting can occur because of either or both heating or structural deformation (stretching, compression, ect). What the rocks look like today is a result partly of what they were originally composed and how the original rock's chemistry was altered by the mechanical and temperature forces enacted upon it by the tectonic-scale action that it experiened.

Tim, Fawna, and Chris look at some paragneiss on Bird Bluff South

Our team of geologists are a heavy-hitting "dream team" of their specific kind of Earth science. The entire project is funded by the National Science Foundation (thanks U.S. taxpayers, myself included!) and these grants are given only to those at the top of their field and who have demonstrated a long history of being able to get it done, scientifically.

Co-PI Christine has spent a dozen seasons working in Antarctica, ten of those in Marie Byrd Land, and five in the Fosdicks. She has probably spent more time in Marie Byrd Land than any other human, alive or dead. So for me it was a great opportunity to learn from her experience and to hear all sorts of crazy strories like the time one of the grad students fell into a 60 foot deep crevasse unwittingly and got pulled out unscathed. Or when the Air National Guard used to open the back hatch of the LC-130 and let her hang out the back on a harness to get better pictures of the rock outcrops while they buzzed the mountain at close proximity. For better or worse the US Antarctic program, like American society in general, has become much more conservative and a lot of the independence that groups used to enjoy is harder to come by now.

Hmmm...mystery tea!

The trend in recent years is for larger projects, staffed camps, in other words, less of the do-it-yourself kind of Antarctic science that typifies the smaller programs and the old school Antarctic scientists. That said there are a number of projects each year that get dropped off with a few thousand pounds of gear, a satellite phone and HF radio, and then picked up two months later. We were one of those groups.

Building camp at Mt. Lockhart next to the icefall.

2006 was the last time anyone visited the Fosdicks for an attempt at a full field season and a now-infamous storm destroyed their camp, and has been the fodder of myth and legend for the years following. So Tim and I certainly had our work cut out for us in terms of keeping everyone safe and building a solid camp in a good location.

The Endurance tent

Tim is impossible to summarize, at once a proper British gentleman, a trickster, and ultra-talented camp chef and baker, a sewer of suites, and a million other things. It would be impossible to work with a finer person and I look forward to any adventures with him.

Tim and the jacket he handmade from an old Scott Tent.

The story of our season can be told from many angles, but it would be pretty uninteresting to go through facts of the season. What is more inspiring perhaps is to communicate what it felt like to live in such a truly alien and remote place, in the company of the best individuals I could hope for, and in the midst terrain as stunning as exists on the planet.

Bird Bluff and lake. Note people in foreground for scale.

Last year G097 (our team's "event number") had planned for a five-week season in the field in the Fosdicks, but through bad weather, bad scheduling, plain bad luck, they never were deposited in the field and had only a few day trips via Twin Otter airplane to check out the mountains and do some science. They spent forty days at Siple Dome, a.k.a. "Simple Doom," which is the closest thing in Antarctica to a small regional airport. No actual science happens there. There are two staff there who groom a skiway that Hercs and other skiplanes land on. But it is in a completely flat, white place, entirely unsuitable for studying large metamorphic mountains. Last year was a bust in terms of field work. This year was G097's comeback and our plan of getting out the Fosdicks, always the crux, was different.

Chris and Carlysle at Siple Dome while the Basler refuels

The emotional roller coaster we all went through in the planning and deployment phase of the season was pretty unreal. Fixed-wing operations, who are partly responsible for coming up with a plan of getting us out there, came up with the following plan: Chris Yakymchuck and myself would land in the Fosdicks with basic survival gear in a small Basler aircraft, and with us would be traveling the US Air National Guard (ANG) pilot would get out, drive up and down the proposed section of glacier that he was planning to land his much larger, Hercules LC-130 on, then the pilot and the airplane would depart, leaving Dr. Kakymchukky and myself alone and desolate until a later point in time when the said Herc pilot would gallantly come back and deposit the remaining team members and 13,000 pounds of remaining gear.

Basler Boy's camp

As is said, plan for the worst, hope for the best. Chris and I packed roughly a month's worth of survival rations, some books, and not much else aside from our tent and a skidoo to drive the Herc Pilot on. 

Reversing time for a second here, our team arrivedon October 17th in McMurdo Station, Antarctica, the rough launching point for some of the most famous and infamous Antarctic expeditions, such as Robert Falcon Scott's fated South Polar Journey in 1911 and Shakleton as well. McMurdo is the largest base on the continent and exists solely to support science for the US Antarctic program. It is a 5-8 hour flight due south of Christchurch, New Zealand, which is, and has been, the launching point for many a Antarctic expedition.

Our team of Fawna, Tim, Tim, Chris, and I rendezvous in Christchurch then head to the "ice" on October 17th. We land and pack 10-12 hours a day for 9 strait days after which all of our gear is handed over to the cargo department and our only remaining job is to think of things we forgot and to wait for good weather that the airplane can use to fly Chris and me into the Fosdicks. The rule rather than the exception is for flights to be delayed, especially early season, especially to the Fosdicks. Over a week went by where Chris and I awoke at 5 am to get on the flight only to have our pager go off and say that the flight was cancelled due to weather.

Icefall Camp at Mt. Lockhart

We then came up with the plan that if we were unprepared Murphy's law would ensue and the flight would go. That line of reasoning led to a number of fun nights of drinking, including the very fun and very infamous McMurdo Halloween party which is about as debaucherous as parties come.

So a number of hungover mornings later Chris and I were sitting at our usual perch in the Galley sipping bad coffee and wondering when the cancellation page would buzz the pager. But no! Not today, the eighteenth day of our tenure here....Today we would fly! We rushed, said goodbyes to our newly acquired friends and old ones alike, knowing that when we returned they would be gone home and we would be different, bearded people.

Basler refueling at Siple Dome on the way to Fosdick Mountains

The next chapter of our Fosdick saga goes like this. The Captain of the LC-130, Carlysle, met us at the McMurdo airstrip. It was my first meeting, but I new that the fate of our season hung on his shoulders. Would he like the snow conditions in the Fosdicks? Or we he call off the whole mission! We shook hands, he was a gentle, easy going dude and said to us, "So I hear you guys didn't get out there last year, huh?" Chris said no, we didn't get out there last year. Carlysle replies with a wide grin, "we'll hook you up!"

Chris looking out the Basler wondering something

Chris and I kind of glanced at each other, our worries eased a bit knowing that Carlysle was on our side. Then he mentioned that he'd never done an open field landing before, this was his test run. I think he was as excited to prove himself a capable pilot as we were to get out and do geology.

In any case we got flown out over hundreds of miles of flat white nothing and then in the distance the Ford Ranges began to pierce the ice like teeth. One after another, until we came to the Sarnoffs, then our home for the next few months, the Fosdicks. The Basler pilots flew in low and circled the landing site a few times before the final approach and rough landing. Brian, the pilot said he wouldn't land here again.

We drove the skidoo out the airplane and Carlysle got on. My job now was to drive him two miles out the runway that the Air National Guard had proposed, which amounted to nothing more than a line drawn on the map that seemed free of crevasses. As it was Carlysle's first time doing this, I was a concerned as I steered around sastrugi to make the ground feel smoother to him, when in fact it seemed too rough perhaps for the large LC-130. We drove out and once back at the Basler Carlysle told me, "all good! We'll see you on Monday." I was a little dumbstruck, maybe because I figured the plan would not, could not, work out. But fate had other ideas.

...to be continued

Turning the heat up

Our Fosdick Mountains team is still in McMurdo playing the wait-for-good-weather game until we can get an aircraft in to the field site. The Fosdicks are roughly 750 miles from McMurdo across the Ross Sea. They are a coastal mountain range and are thus subject to severe storms and long stretches of bad weather. What has come to be known affectionately as "The Great Storm" pinned down the G097 crew in 2006 and ruined most of their camp. The most famous "casualty" of that storm was a Skandic skidoo that was carried a few hundred feet by the winds.

Overview of Fosdick Mountains (satellite imagery from Polar Geospatial Center).  We will be working mainly on the north side of the range.

Dr. Jo-Ann Mellish's B470 crew invited us out to help them collect infrared images of seals as they haul out of the water through holes in the sea ice. 

The Fosdick crew in infrared while out helping G470 collect imagery of pupping seals

Seals hauled out.       NMFS 15478  

Detail of Weddell Seal and blowing snow. NMFS 15478

Weddell seal and blowing snow with Royal Society Range in background. NMFS 15478

We've been keeping busy in Mactown but the time is coming for us to get out! I remain optimistic. Every day for the last week Chris Yakymchuck (phd student) and I have been scheduled on the Basler aircraft for put-in to our camp. But each day we've been cancelled due to weather. We've been coming up with a variety of ways to increase our chances of good weather. This morning Chris shaved his head to appease the weather gods. Photos soon to come and we'll find out how that worked tomorrow, our next shot to leave town.

Marie Byrd Land Awaits

Another season in Antarctica has begun again. The addictiveness of this place is palpable. From the moment I got the invitation to join the Fosdick Mountains geology expedition last spring, my excitement has only increased. Marie Byrd Land is on the opposite side of the Ross Ice Shelf from McMurdo Station and the transantarctic mountains. It is a barren land. The Polar Plateau flows towards the ocean and cuts through a variety of micro ranges. The Fosdicks are a sub-range of the Ford Ranges.

Drinking beer in Christchurch The Fosdicks are the site of perhaps the most notorious storm in recent United States Antarctic Program history. Five years ago their camp was overtaking by an unusually strong storm with near-hurricane force winds approaching 100 knots. The winds were so strong snowmobiles were thrown through the air, tents were destroyed, and it took all they had to huddle inside of their best shelter, a ninety pound canvas tent called a Scott tent, and hold the walls in from collapsing. It is a story that is retold every year in the survival school here. The snow is too hard to dig down adequately for snowblocks, so we've decided, upon the recommendation of the legendary mountain guide who was with the Fosdicks crew in the "Great Storm," to bring a chainsaw to cut down.

Getting to the Antarctic Terminal in Christchurch, New Zealand Our project is under to co-leadership of Dr. Michael Brown, the principle investigator, Dr. Fawna Korhonen, co-P.I., and Dr. Christine Siddoway, co P.I. Christine has arguably spent more time in Marie Byrd land than any other person, since her first trip to Antarctica in the late eighties as a grad student.

First sighting of the continent This season we have two halves. The first includes myself and Tim Burton as mountaineers, Fawna, Chris Yakymchuck (PhD student), and Tim Ivanic (Curtain University, Australia). We are all packed and ready to launch for the Fosdicks as soon as the weather and availability of aircraft allows for our departure. The plan this year is to put in an advance team that includes Chris Y and myself with a Basler (a retrofitted DC-3 twin engine aircraft) to the north side of Bird Bluff (named for the massive snow petrel rookery that lays their eggs there each austral summer). Then two LC-130 ski equipped aircraft flown by the New York Air National Guard will bring in the remaining three team members and the remaining thirteen thousand pounds of gear. We have a total of seventeen thousand pounds in total, which includes skidoos, twelve drums of fuel, tents, climbing equipment, cooking and survival gear, and food for two months for five people. It is a staggering amount of gear and it took five of us nine long days to pack and prepare all that gear. The support staff who run McMurdo station, where our project is based out of and supported from, have done an amazing amount of work to support our project as well. Everything from building and preparing skidoos, to preparing cargo loads, to checking and repairing field gear. The field area demands that we camp on glacier near the mountains that the geologists are most interested in sampling. We have moderate amounts of over-glacier travel with skidoos and large payloads to accomplish in order to build camps in the variety of locations in which me might work. Tim and I have spent considerable time preparing out five sleds (think Santa sled not kiddie sled) to be appropriate to handle the loading and packing needs of our travel. While establishing new routes over the glaciers, we will rope the skidoos together and the riders to the machines in order to prevent certain death in the event that one punches into a crevasse. The ultimate goal of our travel choices are to avoid at all costs a crevasse fall. This we accomplish by careful route selection and a fair degree of conservative choices. We have hundreds of pounds of one-inch nylon rope that we've spliced together and prepared specifically for use with our skidoos and sledges.

All of the geologists have been trained in the basics of glacier travel and crevasse rescue in the case that Tim or I punch into a slot and need rescue. Most of our time will be spent either at outcrops mapping and collecting samples, traveling to and from sites, or sitting in the kitchen tent during bad weather. We have two, two-burner stoves, ten cornish game hens, two stovetop ovens, a bunch of baking supplies and a deep reservoir of cooking talent. It will be a memorable season now matter what happens. The logistical complexities of our five-person project are just a small piece in the bigger picture of the many, many projects going on this year in the United States Antarctic Program. All of this is under the direction and funding of the National Science Foundation. Our project, unlike many of the larger projects that now seem to dominate the "landscape" of Antarctic science, is small and old school. Get dropped off, do a bunch of science for a while, get picked up. We have no support staff. We do everything for ourselves once we are out there. It is a good feeling to know that simple projects like this still happen. Luckily the only tools we really need for the science work are rock hammers and Brunton compasses. The "outcrops" we are sampling and mapping are really 500-800 meter granite peaks that make the rock climber in me drool uncontrollably. But the most efficient way to access the rock is to stroll up the base of the cliffs. There will be some ropework involved; specifically roped glacier travel and perhaps some fixed lines to help the geologists access certain parts of the outcrops. The Fosdicks are located on the coast, which combined with a variety of other factors make it magnet for bad weather. The season is going to be a great one with many adventures, follies, and successes ahead of us. The landscape here is no different than it ever was. It is a surreal wash of ice and rock with a few living things scattered about the perimeter. Snow and ice rule the world here, as does the wind. Seeing the tenuousness with which life exists gives one pause to reflect on the value of these brief yet beautiful lives we lead.

CTAM

On November 29th seven members of my field team arrived at McMurdo Station. With me we had eight; two mountaineers and six scientists. Our project was to complete a transect through the Transantarctic Mountains placing magnetotelluric data loggers every ten kilometers. Loads of work went into the planning and preparation for the trip.

G494 clockwise from bottom right: John Stodt, Graham Hill, Jamie Pierce, Kate Selway, Phil Wannamaker, Yasuo Ogawa, myself, and Virginie Maris. The brainpower in this group was astounding. Each of the geophysicists brains must be worth a million dollars. They never ceased to impress me; both with ability to explain in simple terms the complex science we were attempting, but also their dance moves.


G494 is our project code, G for "geology." The project was based out of the Central Transantarctic (CTAM) helicopter camp. Below you will see an aerial photo of camp. The runway is 2 miles long and the buildings behind are enough to luxuriously support up to eighty scientists and staff. CTAM is located precisely where it is because of its proximity to sites of geologic importance and because of its beautiful weather. Often called "The San Diego of Antarctica," CTAM was THE camp to be at this season, and our project's success was largely due to the incredible support provided by camp staff, the helicopter and fixed-wing teams, and the perfect weather we enjoyed.



CTAM camp was a carbon copy of the standard Antarctic field camp, scaled to size for this particular operation. We had a 2-mile military spec runway which allowed the Hercules LC-130 aircrafts, operated by Air National Guard from New York, to carry large loads in and out of camp. We had 2 dedicated Bell 212 Helicopters (think MASH: Vietnam era machines), one Twin Engine Otter flown by Ken Borek Air out of Canada, a mechanical tent, a communications tent, two fifty-foot science tents, a 130 foot dining and kitchen tent, a wash tent with hot showers, two heated berthing tents, a medical tent, six outhouses, two pee-holes, a tent city for personal tents, a large cargo yard, a 5-mile recreational trail, 2 50 KW generators running 24/7, three 5000 gallon fuel bladders, 15 skidoos, and many other things I'm forgetting to list. The community "tents" are in fact wooden-arched canvas-topped tube-shaped buildings with wooden floors and diesel powered stoves. This ain't your average camping trip. The main theme here is fossil fuel. Lets just say that each banana we had at camp was probably the most costly banana on Earth.

A Herc landing.


My responsibilities as mountaineer included helping decide where to put the transect. We did this using a combination of GIS and on site information. Before ever leaving the US there was a rough plan to put the line over the mountains, but flying at altitude would have severely limited our cargo capacity in the helicopters, in addition to the poor weather often in the mountains. So we decided to put the line as close to camp as possible, but also in a place which offered a line as close to perpindicular as possible, and lastly in locations that were free enough of crevasses that we felt safe landing and being unroped. I won't mention how many times I got out of the helo and immediately stuck my ice axe directly into a crevasse. Most of the unseen crevasses were small, thankfully, and we had no incidents.

After we picked out the line on the map and assigning GPS points to each preliminary guess Phil, Jamie and I flew over the line twice, once very close to the ground, then at high altitude, to get a sense of general crevasse patterns and likely hazard, then low to look for what kind of aircraft we'd need to land there. Many places were too rough for the Twin Otter so the helicopter was the only option.

The helicopter shadow provides reference for scale. The shadow's length is 40 feet, so the crevasses are roughly 3 times that wide here.


Twin Otter shadow for scale as we bank a turn while scouting sites on the plateau.


Then we trained everyone in crevasse rescue and developed a protocol for how to establish the sites safely. Ropes would have made everything much to complex on account of the 1.2 kilometers of electrical wire we'd be laying down. Jamie and I luckily had the foresight to bring our skis just for this purpose. Skis are a common risk management tool on glaciers, and often negate any need for a rope. So Jamie and I were therefore tasked with laying out the electrical lines at each site. Each site has a center where the data logger, batter, and solar panel live, and then in a + formation aligned with the compass directions, there were four 150 meter electrical lines. At each site we had to establish a safe zone for site center, then drag each electrical line out, and the end of which we buried a titanium mesh sheet which served as an electrode, attached to which was a preamp that would boost the low signal strength Phil and the team expected from the snow of the glaciers on which we were placing the instruments.

Jamie Pierce out working the electrical lines. This is what we did at all 33 sites.


Site center. Yasuo Ogawa connects all the bits and pieces to the data logger while John Stodt works in the background.


The season was a great success. We got 33 sites installed, and good data from all but one site. Phil wants to return next season to extend the ends of the line further and thereby increase the depth to which the MT data will be accurate.

Other bonuses of being at CTAM were good access to ski touring terrain, paragliding terrain, an awesome party scene, and the chance to be in vast amounts of unbelievable terrain.

Jamie skiing up the local hill behind camp.


Moraine underneath Mt. Achernar. Scale is impossible to express. Its fair to say that Manhattan would fit there.


An unnamed paraglider cruises past in an unspecified location...


Jamie and I next to the Bell 212, which was the key to success for our transect.


Veteran Antarctic pilot Paul Murphy makes sure that the movie was correct: white men can't jump.


A rare species of Antarctic Gorilla showed up at our last party of the season. I think he ate acclaimed mountaineer Peter Braddock that night.


All good parties look like this in the beginning. John and Graham using their PhDs for the good of all.


And then we danced.


...and kept dancing


...until there was only a paleontologist and a geophysicist left standing at 3:55 A.M.


Jamie Pierce takes a load off on one of our many Twin Otter reconnaisance flights.


Our transect line worked through the mountains from top to bottom. As we head further south we end up on the Polar Plateau. Pictured here from 1,000 feet above ground is an area where the glacier is being pulled in multiple directions, causing this kind of crevassing to appear. Certainly we would not be able to land there.


John Stodt in the science tent. Graham, Jamie, and Kate in the background.


Back at camp one of our esteemed mechanics was coerced into having a fake tatoo of a rose placed on a freshly-shaven spot in his beard.


Marie having fun in the helicopter.


Skidooing out on the Wahl Glacier behind CTAM on the way to go skiing.


My ski tracks. It was unusual to leave any tracks at all. Normally the sastrugi snow is solid, but we had a dusting a few days previously.



Ted and Phil walking out on a rope team to the electrode end.


Mike Robert's and Kathy Licht's camp 12 miles from CTAM on the edge of Achernar's great moraine. For scale, the camp has 5 skidoos, a large cook tent, and multiple 4-season mountain tents.


Mt Achernar. Up there are petrified forests.


A view down our transect line. Each site is 10 km apart, so we can see 3 sites worth of distance, or roughly 20 miles for the metrically challenged.


P.I. (Principle Investigator) Dr. Phil Wannamaker contemplating.


Site CTA8, 120 feet above sea level. This is as far as we got on the Ross Ice Shelf. And this photo is a great representation of why Dr. Wannamaker dreamed up this project in the first place. The relief between where the photo is taken and the mountains is 9,000 feet. The higher peaks rise up to 15,000 feet. The project seeks to determine what is holding up these giants deep inside the Earth.


The team at site center with icefall in background.



Skiing off the Wahl Glacier


Me standing on a pedastal of rock on the edge of site CTA6. We were eagerly anticipating this site because we knew how dramatic the exposure would be. In the distance are the transantarctics, below which is a sea of clouds. That cloud layer was our nemesis later on in project, as it prevented us from getting onto the Ross Ice Shelf to extend the A sites.


Robbie the helotech on what must feel like the edge of the world. Transantarctics at left and the cloud-covered Ross Ice Shelf in the background.




Waiting in -30 for the rest of the team to be done.


Kate's legs from inside the igloo.


Bija and I up on "Compost Hill." The site 5 miles away from camp that had heaps of fossiliferous glossopteris leaves. So essentially an enormous old leaf pile. Coalsack Bluff, about ten miles from here, was the source site from where David Elliot of Ohio State in 1965 found the fossil that forced the world geology community to finally accept continental drift. The fossil he found then linked Australia to Antarctica and irrevokably proved that the two continents were once one.


Twin Otter out on the plateau


Jamie on an early morning ski mission. This day we destroyed one skidoo and also proved to ourselves that "snow" at 83 degrees south is more like ice. Still fun though.


Geophysicists defy gravity.


Yasuo looking dismayed that the helicopter isn't coming back for us tonight.


CTB4. One of the more scenic sites, butted right up against the mountains.


Karen and me


A little snowgolf anyone?




Heading north back to Christchurch. The view from the C-17 cockpit on the way north to Christchurch. Like an out of body experience, floating over these smooth, white peaks.


An amazing season and we accomplished a lot. I can't wait to go back again. Thanks for reading.