...a project he ran would stand on foundations of uncompromised planning, systematic trials and intense safety management. At the start of each construction season of the four-year project, which began in late October and ran through the brief Antarctic summer, he returned to Wheater for a “reality check” before heading back to the ice.

“John is just the right kind of person for certain situations and exactly the wrong kind of person for others,” says George Blaisdell, the National Science Foundation’s representative at McMurdo Station. “He has a very clear personal vision and a very inquiring mind, but in certain things he is very rigid. Some people are not able to work with him. He gives huge attention to detail, he thinks of ways to do things safely and smartly, and I think he was ideal for this job. But on a production traverse, not only would he not be interested, he wouldn’t be chosen. He’s much better at pioneering.”

Blaisdell says Wright has many of the qualities that set the early Arctic and Antarctic explorers apart from others. As Wheater puts it, in an earlier age, “He would be called a hero.”

Wright

Wright wouldn’t agree. He speaks of teams and friends and working together, but he also reveals a wariness of institutional hubris and unearned trust. “There is some kind of menace working in this system,” he says. “To protect the lives of my crew I have to identify this strange menace that I can’t quite define but I have to say ‘there it is,’ when I see its shadow.”

The route Wright followed goes 640 miles across the Ross Ice Shelf before climbing 6,560 ft in 70 miles up the Leverett Glacier for the last 300-mile trek to the South Pole. The last part had never been crossed before. The most recent attempt of a round-trip traverse was in 1912. The bodies were never found.

George Blaisdell, USAP/NSF Wright, top, picked his team as if it were a long-duration space crew. Average age was 511/2.

The plan was to edge out from McMurdo a few hundred miles further each season, using satellite imagery and remote sensing data and scouting by vehicle to analyze the terrain. They would go in a column, proving a path 20 to 40 ft wide and 1,032 miles long. When they could not avoid crevasses they would dynamite the bridges and push snow in until they had a solid crossing. The mantra was “no air.”

Success

They gradually refined the fleet as tractor and sled performance was analyzed by Wright’s crew and researchers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center and its Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. They got about 120 miles in Year 1, spending much time blowing and filling 32 crevasses to make a crossing through the McMurdo Sheer Zone, a crevasse field near McMurdo Station. In Year 2 they hit unexpectedly soft snow that held them to 425 miles. Equipment changes in Year 3 helped, but finding a path through another crevasse field took so much fuel they had to turn back 300 miles from the Pole. But each season, performance improved.

By Year 4 Wright’s team of men and women was poised for success. “I very carefully selected my team over the four years,” Wright says. “The average age was 511⁄2. I am not remotely interested in hurting myself or injuring my family. I also knew we were done with silliness. We were old and we were smart and we weren’t going to get hurt.”

John Wright, USAP/NSF A Cat D8 wintered over at the foot of the Leverett Glacier, 640 miles out, between Years 3 and 4. It took digging out.

It took a month of high-risk plodding at 7 mph or less each way, with days lost waiting out blizzards. The team slept in a tiny life-support module and tracked a nearly invisible trail of proven safety last crossed a year before, aware that it was shifting seaward 1,000 ft a year and more in places, with the moving ice shelf. They tested the path the whole way, as crevasses shifted and expanded, supporting each other through the ordeal.

When they reached the last 300 miles of the route, they fought for 97 miles, extraordinarily rough ice called sastrugi with ridges as tall as 8 ft that had to be knocked down by the D8 to avoid wrecking sleds. Then they found a vast snowswamp the icy equivalent of quicksand 100 miles from the Pole. It added days to the trek, as they lightened loads to shuttle through it.

When the Proof of Concept crew rolled back into McMurdo on Jan. 14, 2006, after 65 days in the field, it marked a mission accomplished in the most hostile terrain on earth, with “zero accidents or injuries and zero environmental incidents” over the entire four years, according to Wright’s final report.

“The significance is that we needed to show that it could be done, and done safely,” says Blaisdell. “Without it being proven, it was just a theory. It is ‘The Proof’ that allows us to continue.”