The Adventurer's Son(24)
For the first two nights on the Harding, we camped where three glaciers spilled off in three directions; the Japanese camped an hour’s ski away on its edge. South of us, the Harding Icefield opened up in earnest: flat, featureless, blindingly white, with only distant nunataks as landmarks. The icefield is sometimes blasted by powerful, storm-driven cyclones that spin off the Gulf of Alaska at over a hundred miles an hour. These storms usually come at night, following a day of rain.
It had rained all day. We were holed up in our big dome tent where we played rummy and Yahtzee, drank coco and killed time. Roman teased Jazz. The siblings have always been close, but because she’d beaten him in cards, he used his sharp tongue to even the score.
The Japanese scientists came by to drill for ice worms and establish where in the snowpack the nocturnal annelids spent the day. While the Japanese drilled through snow and into the ice below, I stood in the wind and rain outside the tent and monitored the kids’ giggles and barbs.
Kohshima pulled up a three-foot core of solid, blue glacier ice. At the bottom was a living ice worm. How it got there, we had not a clue. Perhaps it followed hairline cracks, or used a unique gland to somehow melt its way down. We scratched our heads, noting the mystery in our yellow waterproof field books. After the Japanese left for camp, the winds picked up. Strong gusts interrupted the kids’ card games and the tent banged and flapped during dinner and hot drinks. We laughed at first. But as the storm bullied the tent and darkness fell, the mood changed.
“Dad,” Jazz asked, “should we be worried about this?”
“No,” I lied, hoping to hide my fear.
“What are we going to do?” she pushed.
I thought about that. If the tent blew apart, we would be vulnerable to strong wind and freezing rain and unable to see where to go. There was no boulder to tuck behind, no soft snow to dig into for a cave, no place to hide. Not until morning would we be able to ski to a shelter hut located five miles away at the edge of the icefield, beyond a mile-long maze of crevasses.
Eventually, bigger gusts flattened the brand-new dome tent, but, as with the faded old one on Umnak, its shape rebounded each time. The kids moved to my end, all three of us in a four-person, group-sized overbag that trapped heat escaping from our individual sleeping bags. If the tent failed, we could hunker down inside the overbag and cling to each other for warmth until morning. We shoved our cookpot and stove, lighters, compass, map and food, rain shells, extra clothes, and Nalgene bottles full of warm water into our big overbag. We wanted to be ready in case the tent should blow apart and the wind scatter its contents.
We sang songs and told jokes until the wind’s roar silenced us with wet tent fabric pushed flat to our faces. We retreated deep into the muggy blackness of the overbag, where Jazz asked, “How long is this going to last, Dad?”
“I don’t know, Jazz, but it should be better tomorrow,” I said hopefully.
Clutching tight to each other, we fell asleep eventually and woke to a calm, clear morning. The Japanese crew came by to visit. We laughed and shook our heads, sharing stories about the storm’s ferocity. They had lost a tent and the five of them had crowded into one shelter, up all night, their backs against the windward wall to keep their tent erect.
The Japanese team would stay at their camp on the edge of the icefield, repair their broken tent poles, and continue their research measuring the light reflected from snow with varying densities of snow algae that actually melt snow to survive. The kids and I would push onward, deeper into the icefield, to sample snow for algae and count ice worms. “Dad,” Jazz questioned as we packed up to head out, “are we going to have any more storms like that? It was scary.”
“Not like that,” I reassured her. “Usually good weather follows bad. We’ll be okay.”
A few days later, we skied among nunataks as we crossed the rounded dome at the icefield’s high point. A fog rolled in off the Gulf. In those days before low-cost GPS, we relied on compass navigation and maps. Roman held the compass like he’d learned on Umnak and kept me on course as I led the way with his direction.
We came to a crevasse field creased by cracks: some big enough to swallow a skier whole in their gaping maw. “What do I do with all this stuff again?” asked Jazz as she held out a handful of carabiners, pulleys, and ascenders that hung on her gear sling like clunky costume jewelry. The cracks were open and easy to see, and the slope flat enough that we could shuffle past. Still the potential hazard was clear. The Japanese were miles away. Both kids had ascended ropes hung from tropical trees in Borneo and Costa Rica, as well as from backyard spruce, but Jazzy wanted a refresher.
“What do Roman and me do if you fall in?” she asked.
Good question, I thought. “It’s pretty safe here. It’ll be hard to fall in. You’d almost have to jump into a crevasse. But if I fall in, you and Roman need to anchor the rope with your skis and throw Roman’s end of the rope down to me.”
We moved nervously through the mile or so of icy cracks and fissures, relieved when we reached the other side of the crevasse field, where we camped out of danger. “I don’t like those crevasses, Dad. They look scary and deep.”
“I know. There won’t be any more. We’re done with them.”
I had hoped this experience would get the kids interested in more glacier travel, but it had the opposite effect. Neither would ever want to go skiing in summer again. “Nah,” Roman answered the next time I asked him out on an ice-worming ski trip. “Why waste summer on the snow when we have all winter to ski?”