IN ANTARCTICA

Hokitika Guardian, 11 December 1929, Page 5

IN ANTARCTICA

(By Bussell Owen—Copyrighted 1929 by the New York Times Company, and St. Louis Post Despatch. All rights for publication reserved throughout the world. Wireless to New York Times.) POLAR FLIGHT PICTURES. * GLORIES OF THE MOUNTAINS. (United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) (Received this day at 10 a.m.) BAY OF WHALES, Dec. 9. The pictures of the Polar flight are fascinating. They depict the flight through the mountains, up a deep gorge of a glacier where the walls at times seem only a few feet away from the ’plane, and show the rising surface by the barrier coming closer and closer, which necessitated throwing overboard food to lighten the ’plane and then the final jump, over which the ’plane staggered to the long slope of the plateau. The scenery is magnificent. The great peaks rising about the ’plane are clouded with snow, except where the black precipitous sides are too steep to hold it. Rivers of ice pour down between them. The’ jumbled mass of mountains are as impressive as any in the world, rising along the edge of the interior plateau. As the ’plane went southward from them at a point where it entered the plateau, photographs we're taken (at intervals so that they overlapped They show the mountains stretched to the east and gradually curving north until the ’plane reached the interior of the Polar plateau whom even the mightiest of them disappeared below the horizon and there was only a limitless plain beneath without land marks or guides except the sun and magnetic compass. Nothing could so well make clear the difficulty of this flight as these photographs.

The whole trip to the Pole can be brought home to anyone when these strips are combined with the ones fi'om Little America to the mountains taken on the base laying flight. There is such astounding mountain scenery that everyone has been pouring over them with exclamations of delight.

These mountains are particularly interesting, because they are separated from any known land heretofore placed on charts. Byrd, on the eastern flight, flew to the north and east and south of Alexandra Mountains, which l’un in a different direction from, that shown on the charts. There i;s considerable difference between the eastern and new mountains, at least fifty miles, and probably more.