A colleague of Pat Smith out on a hike in the frigid landscape near Thule Air Base, Greenland.
As people in Billings cautiously toy with the idea that our long, snowy winter might finally be over, consider how Pat Smith describes the best part of his job:
“Imagine turning in a circle to see endless white and blue divided by the horizon line, knowing there is up to two miles of snow and ice depth beneath you. I suppose it is similar to being a sailor in the middle of the ocean, a sense of solitude and beauty in the starkness of the place.”
The place is Greenland and Smith’s job is helping to haul tons of fuel and other supplies 700 miles across the ice cap of northern Greenland to a National Science Foundation research center at Summit Station.
Smith and his team were planning to leave on Monday from Thule Air Base on the northwest coast of Greenland. They will make the climb to Summit Station — starting at sea level and rising to 10,500 feet at the top of the Greenland plateau — before returning to Thule by the end of May, if all goes well.
Smith, still lean and fit at 57, lives in Billings but has spent much of his life in the forbidding world of the Arctic and Antarctic. His introduction to that cold, white world was in 1986, when he spent 11 months at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. He made four subsequent trips to Antarctica, working at McMurdo and South Pole stations.
His first stint in Greenland was in 1990, and he’s not even sure how many times he’s been there. Some years he would go there as many as three times to work on different projects. “Probably around 25 trips up here,” he said in an interview conducted by email.
Pat Smith, self-portrait, Greenland.
He works for CH2MHill Polar Services, providing support and logistics for the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Research Program. His main job is working as a mechanic — “you can imagine with temps as low as -55f keeping our equipment operating can be a challenge” — but his official position on this project is field supervisor.
That means keeping in daily contact via satellite phone with headquarters to let them know how they are doing, as well as tending to other administrative chores. He and the other four members of the Greenland Island Traverse, as the project is called, also share cooking duties, keep the equipment fueled, navigate and perform medical duties, since all of them are “wilderness first responders.”
They also shovel lots and lots of snow.
Smith has been at Thule since the first week of February preparing for the traverse. The team spent three weeks mapping a way through the first 75 miles, which are riddled with crevasses.
They use a tractor-mounted, ground-penetrating radar, supplemented by basic mountaineering skills. One of his co-workers is a New Zealander who first worked in the Antarctic in the 1970s, when dog-sled teams were still being used.
Eight 3,000-gallon fuel bladders, loaded up and ready for transport.
“He also had the extreme experience of having driven a tractor into an unknown crevasse, the tractor falling some ways down the crack with him inside and still survive and get back to the surface,” Smith wrote.
Finding a safe route through that first section has been particularly troublesome this year “because this section of the ice cap seems to have moved quite a bit and many more crevasses were found and our route was changed quite a bit from previous years,” Smith said. One of the warmest summers on record was in 2012, and the resulting lakes and rivers that formed on the ice cap lubricated the movement of the ice, he said.
Their transportation consists of four giant Case Quadtracs, a Tucker Snocat and a Skidoo snow machine. They will be accompanied to the end of the crevasse zone by four scientists, who will then go on ahead aboard two snow machines and a tracked vehicle.
Smith and the work crew will then take their convoy to Summit Station, but moving much more slowly.
“We have to fight off the tedium of driving in a straight line for 600 miles without falling asleep,” he said, “hoping we have enough music and podcasts on our mp3 players.”
The sun is still setting and it’s dark for a while this time of year, but in a couple of weeks there will be some light 24 hours a day. Even so, they can expect strong winds as they approach the edge of the ice cap, and during extended whiteouts they rely on aviation-model GPS systems to keep them on track.
Their cargo will include 16 fuel bladder tanks that hold 3,000 gallons each, a dozen 1,000-gallon empty steel fuel tanks to replace plastic fuel bladders now being used at Summit Station, plus a 38,000-pound “berthing module.”
Walking on sea ice near the face of Rasmussen Glacier near Thule-on-Wolstenholm Fiord.
The large items are placed on “air cargo sleds,” wooden decks mounted over air pontoons. Because of the mountainous terrain and soft snow during the first 300 miles or so of the traverse, two tractors will be needed to pull one loaded sled, meaning they will need to do “double hauls.”
“Makes for slow forward progress, as you can imagine,” Smith said.
Smith said the most interesting part of his job is when the crew has to pool its experience and creativity to “overcome whatever is thrown at us” — like figuring out how to get a 170,000-pound sled up a steep hill, or, better yet, down a steep hill, since the tractor weighs barely a third as much as its cargo.
They also haul tons of personal gear and equipment, including a custom-made insulated module that sleeps four and has a propane stove, a snow melter for running water and a battery bank and inverter powered by solar panels. On the last traverse, they were warm and cozy even when temperatures dropped to 55 below.
On their way back from Summit Station, they will stop at a Danish research station, which is currently unstaffed, to check on how the station weathered the winter with no one there.
On a hike to the face of the ice sheet near Thule, a 50-foot wall of ice is layered with dirt and rock,
Summit Station is a year-round research center that is staffed by a six-person winter crew that expands to more than 40 scientists and support personnel in the summer. Scientists there have undertaken numerous projects related to Arctic ozone hole research, weather observations, carbon accumulation and snow accumulation, generally as baseline studies to support research into atmospheric and climate change.
Smith and his wife, Mary Hernandez, stay in touch from Thule via a “decent Internet connection” and phone system. He is able to Skype on his phone, and on the icecap he uses an iridium satellite phone and iridium open-port satellite connection for Internet access.
When he was home in Billings, Smith spent many years working as a curator for the Yellowstone Art Museum. He quit that job a couple of years ago, but he spent a good portion of 2013 as an artist-in-residence with the museum’s Visible Vault.
That gave him a chance to catch up on three years’ worth of photograph projects he worked on in Greenland. He holds a fine arts degree in photography and has been chronicling his Arctic and Antarctic journeys from the beginning, sometimes using infrared film and sometimes hand-tinting black-and-white photographs.
Still, what he finds most satisfying is the work itself, “working with your peers to overcome the challenges to get the job done in an extreme environment.. … As a bonus I also get to pursue my art in the form of photography.”
More of Pat Smith’s photos follow:
Loading a 38,000-pound berthing module for transport to Summit Station.
Hundreds of arctic hares gather near Thule.
Loaded fuel sleds being towed by two Case tractors.
Rasmussen Glacier as it exits into Wolstenholm Fiord.
A "sundog" shines over the main structure at Summit Station in this photo from an earlier trip.
