Frozen Ramparts

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 828, 23 November 1929, Page 9

Frozen Ramparts

PEAKS THAT GUARD POLE Byrd Tells His Story ANTARCTICA'S PERIL AND ROMANCE ; . ted. by tho “New York Times' company ami the St. Louis XV ire less to tlie “New York Times.’* Ktvrivrd .r, a.m. DAY OK "WHALES, Thursday. Tl i H day before yesterday, our Kurd plane established a tiny base almost xvithin the shadow of the .South Pole. We went out a total of 440 miles, and reached the mountain rampart that guards the plateau.

Before we started the flight. I told Dean Smith to deliver mail to the mountains. We all know that an air-mail : pilot with mail aboard will go through i when it can be done. Dean did a line job, holding the indistinct trail made j by the dog-teams of the geological : party. We passed this party 200 miles . out. and looked down at our comrades j 2.000 ft beneath us, making only 10 j or 15 miles a day, where we were : making 100 miles an hour. It emphasised the great difference between | the old method of polar exploration | by dog-team and the new method by j aviation. • The dog-team party, however, will be able to remain at the * mountains for several weeks, where ! an airplane might be blown away in a storm. That is why minute geological investigations must be made by the foot traveller. Even however, we have learned enough to design a plane that we can anchor to the snow, and so defy the winds. CHAOTIC CREVASSES About midway in the flight we passed over the crevassed region that the supporting party worked its way through. We could see their zigzag path, as it wound in and out among the bottomless crevasses and dangerous pits. All the more we realised what a wonderful job this party did in getting through this area of chaotic masses of criss-crossing chasms, gigantic ice-blocks on end, fan-shaped cracks, wide and narrow, stretching for miles to east and west. It is entirely beyond my powers of descrip- | tion. We must let the mapping ; camera tell the story. Not Jong after passing the crevassed area, we sighted great mountains on the starboard bow. Later on the return trip, from 5,000 ft, we thought we could follow them 150 miles. We judge that we saw all the way to the Beardmore glacier, where Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton ascended to the plateau on their polar effort. Captain McKinlay photographed this range, and a new one running near it in the same direction. We can definitely join up the Axel Heiberg glacier with the Beardmore glacier. HUGE GLACIERS SEEN This is a magnificent range. As we approached the mountains, peak [after peak came into view, until I finally the whole horizon from the south-east to the south-west was filled ; with mountains. It looked as if

nature had built these impassable ramparts to keep forever the secret of the South Pole; but as we approached nearer, we saw huge glaciers debouching ice into the Barrier through great ragged gashes in the mountains. These are outlets for a two-mile-high plateau of ice, in the centre of which lies the South Polo, i Never have 1 seen such rugged mountains or such magnificent scenery—great mountain masses rising from sea level precipitously to thousands of feet. Peak after peak towered to heights of 10.000, 12,000, and 15,000 feet. McKinley photographed with his mapping camera dozens of mountain peaks never before seen, and will develop his films so that the world can see what we saw, and science study at its leisure, and with a microscope, these extraordinary glacial phenomena. AT FOOT OF MOUNTAINS Perhaps one of the biggest ; moments on the whole expedition was landing at the foot of the mountains, for landing away from the base on unknown fields is always uncertain, and is even more so in polar regions, with a heavy load aboard. So far as our aviation mission is concerned, and as far as a very great many other vital things were concerned, all our eggs were in the plane when the landing was made. All was staked on that landing. It was an unknown quantity. What a colossal mess it would have been had we failed. It was one of those risks one must sometimes take in polar regions to win. Smith was given this big responsibility'’ of landing on an unknown ground, the character of which is not easy to judge from the air; but Dean did his stuff. He carried his mail to the mountains. When we had built our base and taken the air again, we could look back at the little pile of food and gasoline. It appeared very tiny and utterly lonely there on the great expanse of snow, with those tremendous mountains in the background. It.’s those great mountains that make our problem a peculiarly difficult one, and prevent a non-stop flight to the Pole from Little America. We cannot carry a sufficient load of gasoline to scale those peaks, reach the Pole, and return non-stop, so that is why we must have gasoline available at the foot of the mountains, when we will become short of fuel on our return.