5a. Excerpt

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Surfing Climbing

Vinson Massif

Chapter 5

Cold and Broken

If a walrus had wings, it would fly like a Hercules C-130 cargo plane.

The plane lumbers through the air, propellers dragging its heavy load forward. You can feel the struggle in the cargo bay where the payload sways, the fuselage rattles as if the rivets will explode, the vibrations of the floor work through your toes up into your spine,

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To the Last Breath and the four engines scream so loud that you need earplugs as thick as bullets just to muffle the sound to a low roar.

For the last three hours I’ve been confined in a seat that flips down from the wall of the plane. The plane’s vibrations are shaking my bones; I’m past aching and we still have two more hours to go. We’re riding along with cargo that’s being delivered to a camp about a hundred miles deep into the manta ray–shaped continent of Antarctica. Among other things, the camp serves as a depot to stockpile supplies, some of which will then be taken further along to the South Pole itself. We won’t be going all the way to the Pole; we’re here to climb Vinson Massif, the highest mountain on the continent.

The remoteness of Antarctica can be measured in the price of a barrel of oil. A barrel that costs $40 in Santiago, Chile, costs $400 at the depot, and costs $4,000 at the South Pole. The increase scales with the cost of transport, and transport is pricey; the cost of spinning the propellers on a Hercules is roughly $10,000 per hour. We could never afford to book this flight on our own, and that’s why we’re traveling with a load of goods headed for the depot.

Sitting across from me is Jim Williams. Serene, head rolled back

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Cold and Broken against the fuselage, he is inconceivably restful, looking like he could keep calm through any storm. In fact, he can. He did just that on our last climb, Mount Everest. That was just six months ago, and this mountain will be item #5 on my eleven-item climbing and surfing list.

There is no runway in Antarctica, but over the years of flying here, pilots have identified a long thick strip of ice that can handle the bulk of a Hercules.

The plane rolls to a stop and with a grinding of gears the back panel of the plane begins to slowly drop down onto the ice, forming a ramp off the cargo bay. As we watch the door swing down, inch by inch, light starts to fill the bay. Before we can see the continent, we can feel it. A subzero wind blows into the hold, and we take in our first lungful of chill Antarctic air. I exhale in a thick, visible cloud.

Antarctica’s history is replete with tales of disaster, desperation, and triumph.

The first documented spotting of Antarctica was from the bow of a boat, in 1820. This was the one and only time in recorded history that a continent was truly discovered. There were no indigenous tribes here, no nomads who had passed through first. There is good reason for that, of course. The continent is utterly uninhabitable; there is nothing here that could sustain life: no fuel, no food, and despite having the largest amount of freshwater in the world, there isn’t a drop readily available—it is all frozen up in mile-thick ice.

That glimpse of Antarctica in 1820 turned out to be the safest way to explore the continent: at a distance. Over the next century the continent brought misery to most anyone who traveled here. Just two years later, the first group of travelers spent a winter here. Not by choice, but due to shipwreck.

It wasn’t until 1902 that a group would travel here with the intent

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To the Last Breath of planting a flag at the South Pole. The Pole had been part of the public imagination for decades, but, like all expeditions, no team could hope to be successful until they solved the grueling logistics of pushing hundreds of pounds of gear and food across a thousand miles of ice.

The first attempt failed. The team, led by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, pressed on through the subzero temperatures until they were overcome by snow blindness, frostbite, and scurvy. They turned back, still hundreds of miles short of the Pole.

Like customers in a ticket line, more expeditions followed, one after the other, often meeting with calamity. These expeditions weren’t motivated by the possibility of wealth; this wasn’t like Columbus being dispatched from Spain in the hopes that he would bring riches back to the kingdom.

Antarctica had no gold or coffee, no spices or beads. It offered only one thing: a story. No matter the characters or narrator, Antarctica always provided a tale of adventure about dog sleds, frostbite, and thinning rations, guaranteed to end in either tragedy or glory. Every nation that supported an expedition wanted that story to climax with their countryman’s boot touching the South Pole first. They wanted to boast that it was the grit and will born out of the soil of their great nation that allowed the explorer to triumph over the calamities that the Pole was sure to deliver.

Robert Scott desperately wanted that story to be his to tell; he had to reach the Pole first. Buoyed by completely unfounded determination, he returned to Antarctica less than ten years after his previous failed expedition.

Like me, he too would step onto the continent and exhale in a thick, visible cloud and look out over the vast sheet of ice with confidence, a goal clearly fixed in his mind.

Scott’s story would end in utter disaster. And his ultimate fate, his final desperate minutes, would lead to a turning point in my life.

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