Free Blazing Ice by John H. Wright Page B

tape. It was three hundred feet long, if we needed all of it.
    â€œI got it. Take your mark.”
    â€œSeventy-nine feet,” I hollered loud enough for the others to hear.
    Shaun stood on a fifteen-foot-high pile of snow. That made the overall depth ninety-four feet. From the top of the pile he looked back through the shadowy gloom toward the road. The crevasse ended in that direction like a ship’s prow, eighty feet from where he stood. Shaun described the crevasse walls below the bridge: nearly solid ice, frosty, and bluish.
    â€œIt’s actually quite lovely down here. It is cold. And quiet.” He took pictures for us before he came out.
    We were going to school. If big crevasses could hide right next to us and pinch to nothing a few feet away, how would we know that without going over every square inch of ground? We needed some kind of map to make sense of the place, but those maps didn’t exist. We’d have to make our own.
    Over the next weeks, like blindfolded men probing a chessboard, we groped forward with the radar. Black flags became our pawns. The PistenBully ran down our centerline a tenth of a mile at a time. If we found a crevasse, we stopped and planted a black flag. If we found nothing, we marked the end of that run with a black flag. Then we backed straight in our own tracks, retreating to our starting point, and started another search parallel to our first line. Maybe we found something on this new line, maybe we didn’t. But when we’d searched out a hundred-foot width on both sides of our centerline, the white field before us took a shape we could now see: pickets of black flags marked either a “found” crevasse, or the limits of clear forward progress.
    We parlayed in camp over the meaning of the radar images, our chessboard maps, and how we could do things better. We assigned numbers to the crevasses. Baby became Crevasse 1. Crevasses 2 and 3 lay to the south, and as far as we could tell, neither crossed our road. Beyond those, the radar showed us mysterious black blobs. They didn’t look like crevasse images we’d seen in New Hampshire. But black images meant whatever caused them did not reflect radar back to us, like a void would not. Since real voids were black and shadowy, any black image on the radar conjured that same sort of demon. Some black blobs looked like amorphous amoebas. Many looked like eyes staring back at us.
    We didn’t know what the black blobs were. But we did have tools to look into them: our little drill and a twenty-one-foot string of auger bits to go with it.
    While two of us mapped ahead with the PistenBully, others drilled black blob targets in the middle of our road. We found no voids down where the blobs lived. Shrugging, we marked those spots with black flags, called them “questionable areas,” and moved on.
    At the site of Crevasse 4, just beyond the black blobs, our radar identified a distinct crevasse image striking across our path.
    Again, we brought up the explosives and drills. Stretch and Russ drilled the pattern through the snow bridge. Shaun and Eric belayed them. I sat off to the side, preparing the charges, watching the two men drilling. Their first holed through at nine feet. The two-inch holes and little sticks would work fine.
    Everybody helped finish making up the charges and loading the holes. The shot came under a beautiful blue sky, near the end of our day. When the smoke cleared away, Shaun peeked over the crater’s edge.
    â€œNot so big …”
    By next morning the air inside Crevasse 4 had cleared, and Shaun and Eric explored it.
    This one was only four feet wide. It measured 102 feet deep, and bottomed to a pinch once again. When they came out of the hole, Shaun approached me. “This is a pretty one. What do you say to us taking the others down?”
    â€œI’d say that is a good idea. Ask if they want to first. I’d like to go.”
    The blueness inside the