Snow Patrol  Snow Patrol   By Nancy Bazilchuk/Photography by Per
Breiehagen Published: November-December 2008  He fell asleep in
the soothing calm of a snow cave but awoke in the suffocating
silence of a tomb. Outside Roald Amundsen's improvised shelter
lay Norway's Hardangervidda Plateau, a desolate, wind-blasted
piece of tundra so vast and inhospitable it had not yet been
traversed in winter.  Roald and his brother Leon were attempting
to be the first to do so, in 1896. Bad luck and worse weather
had already forced them to turn back, their only map destroyed
and the last of their food bags lost in a whiteout. Amundsen
slept beneath a snowy blanket that night as the temperature
dropped ever lower, sealing him in a sarcophagus of ice. He
might have gasped his last breaths from within the icy crypt if
it weren't for a few telltale hairs from his reindeer-fur
sleeping bag that showed his brother where to dig him out. "The
training proved severer than the experience for which it was a
preparation," Amundsen late