Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
156
were Gould's, and he took a sound roasting as they proceeded. Again distances were de-
ceiving. A nunatak in midstream that had been their goal was found the next day, after
triangulations, to be twenty-one miles away. The crevasses became increasingly hazard-
ous, eventually forcing the party to turn back. A try later that day at crossing Liv Gla-
cier met with another underestimate of distance and even worse crevassing. Thwarted
so soundly by the Liv Glacier, Gould collected some schists from the nearby spur and
decided that it would be better to try some access to the southeast, perhaps following
Amundsen's route up Axel Heiberg Glacier.
On their way the party wasted a day and a half in a vain search for the depot left
by the earlier flight. Despite carefully triangulated air photos that had been dropped to
the party, the cache remained lost in the swells north of the mouth of Liv Glacier. After
lunch on December 3, the men finally headed east in close along the rocks that descended
as a series of spurs from a crestline parallel to the coast (Fig. 5.11; see Fig. 5.9). All of the
rocks were of the basement, no sandstones here for Gould, but the outcrops held not only
schists as seen at the Liv camp, but also small intrusions of granite, which produced spec-
tacular contact relationships with the metamorphic rocks (Fig. 5.12).
By evening the party had reached the mouth of a small glacier that drains the face
of Mount Fridtjof Nansen. As a route to the base of Mount Fridtjof Nansen, its surface
looked snowy and promising, so here they made a depot for the return journey and killed
all but twenty-one of the dogs. Vaughan insisted that it was his duty to dispatch them,
and none of the others argued. This base was called Strom Camp, after Sverre Strom, the
carpenter on the expedition who, along with Bernt Balchen, had built the sleds that were
used by the geological party. Later the glacier also came to bear his name.
On December 6 the party started up Strom Glacier (see Figure 5.4). At first the ascent
was up and down over broad undulations, then crevasses became a hazard, but by the
end of the day they were camped three thousand feet higher and fifteen miles farther on.
The next day, what appeared to be an easy climb to the rocks was protracted in a tedium
of crevasses, so that when the men and dogs reached a relatively crevasse-free level, they
pitched camp, only four miles past and eighteen hundred feet above their last.
Finally, on the morning of December 8, the sedimentary section on the massif seemed
to be in reach. Gould, Thorne, Crockett, and Goodale fastened on their skis and roped up
to begin an ascent to one of the steep spurs reaching down from the face of Mount Fridt-
jof Nansen. As typically happens, the closer they approached the rock, the steeper and
more hard-packed the snow became. Eventually the men were sidehilling with their skis
to gain the necessary altitude. When at last they reached a saddle on the ridge, the snow
carried on another eighth of a mile up the crest. The closer to the rock Gould climbed,
the more his spirits fell, for the sandstone he expected to find appeared increasingly to re-
semble volcanic lava flows, sure to contain no fossils. So it was with doubled excitement
that he did indeed collect samples from an ancient, sandy river on the ridge of Fridtjof
Nansen late that day.
In a radio message that evening to Byrd, Gould's enthusiasm flowed: “No symphony
I have ever heard, no work of art before which I have stood in awe ever gave me quite the
thrill that I had when I reached out after that strenuous climb and picked up a piece of rock
to find it sandstone. It was just the rock I had come all the way to the Antarctic to find.”
