Antarctica Climb Tests Resolve Amid the Cold

After spending $16,200 on airplane tickets, Dave Tollakson wasn’t about to get cold feet at the last minute.

Not even when his toes became frostbitten two hours after he stepped from the plane near the South Pole on his way to the top of the bottom of the world.

Tollakson was a member of a San Fernando Valley-based mountain-climbing expedition that spent last month tackling Antarctica’s tallest peak--16,067-foot Vinson Massif.

“It was my own fault,” said Tollakson, 50, of Studio City. “My feet got cold while I was building a snow fence around our tents at our first base camp. I had seven layers on my feet. But I didn’t have my over boots on.”

Tollakson, who is a former junior high school math teacher, thawed his feet and nursed his damaged big toes for a few days.

But the icy reception turned out to be a preview of the minus-80 degree weather that Tollakson and six other experienced climbers encountered on their way to the top. Located about 700 miles from the South Pole, it had been conquered by only six previous expeditions.

“Just existing in the cold weather was the prime concern,” said expedition member Robert Failing, 58, a pathologist who is Santa Barbara County’s coroner’s physician.

“On other climbs, you have close calls where the mountain causes problems. Here, the weather was the scariest thing,” said Bill Martin, 37, an orthodontist from Gainesville, Fla.

To keep warm, the climbers wore double sets of long underwear, heavy wool clothing and down vests topped by thick pile jackets.

The expedition was organized by Paul Pfau, a deputy district attorney from Burbank who picked the mountain to climb because he felt the setting would be “the most pristine in the world.”

“Antarctica is one of the last great wildernesses on the planet,” Pfau, 37, said. “Climbers are always interested in the highest points each continent has to offer.”

More than 100 asked to go along when word circulated in mountaineering circles last spring that Pfau was planning an assault on Vinson Massif.

Most climbers quickly lost interest, however, when they learned that air fare for the expedition’s 1,500-mile hop between the Chilean city of Punta Arenas and the mountain was $105,000, or $15,000 for each team member of the expedition.

The flight involved tricky icecap takeoffs and landings on King George Island and Adelaide Island by an English-born bush pilot--and an Antarctic fuel drop for his plane by the Chilean air force.

“The pilot, Giles Kershaw, is right out of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ ” Pfau said. “He flew some mountain passes where ice was brushing both wing tips.”

The climb was an even tougher test of nerves.

“It was intimidating, being separated 200 miles from the nearest people in case of trouble,” said Mike Meyer, 27, a Temple City systems analyst.

On one steep ridge, Meyer slid 40 feet down an ice chute when he lost his footing and somersaulted backward. He saved himself by digging his pick into the ice. But the mishap smashed the prescription lens in his goggles and sent him groping back to the base camp for a backup pair.

The 24-hour daylight of the South Pole region was irksome, too.

“We had no darkness at all,” said expedition member Pete Ackerman of Canoga Park. “I took a drugstore sleep mask with me and used it. Several nights, I used a sleeping pill to get me off to sleep.”

The 39-year-old Ackerman, who is a mechanical engineer with Rocketdyne, was the expedition’s weather man. “I fly sailplanes, so I was the one who could look at the sky and make the most knowledgeable-sounding statement of what was coming in,” he said.

The team reached the summit on Nov. 24 after seven days of climbing. It was midnight, but it was sunny and relatively windless. The climbers stayed there about two hours.

At the top, some wrote post cards to mail later. Tollakson chipped a hole in the ice and buried photos of his wife and father and a roster of the Los Angeles Single Ski Club, whose members chipped in to help pay the $20,000 cost of his trip.

Failing produced a 5-iron and sliced a golf ball off the peak. He casually left the club behind, providing a surprise for the next expedition that fights its way to the top.

Despite the cold, the seven said they left with warm feelings.

Pfau said he is looking ahead to 1992, when he has a chance to climb the world’s highest peak, 29,028-foot Mt. Everest, with a group that has been granted a climbing permit by the Chinese government.

After that, he said, mountaineering will be all downhill.