Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
173
and surveyor; he was the man who had survived a night out in a storm dug into a hole
in the snow with his huskies during the first Byrd expedition. The others, newcomers to
the Antarctic, had enlisted as dog drivers: Stuart D. Paine, navigator and radio operator,
and Richard S. Russell, Jr., who was in charge of transport and supplies. From the 300-
mile depot they drove three thirteen-dog teams with 1,400 pounds of dog food and 450
pounds of human food. During the next afternoon, well on the trail, the men caught
their first glimpse of the Queen Maud Mountains far ahead, a gray horizontal that was
both their goal and their starting point. That night they also shot their first dog, one of
Russell's team, and cached him for the return.
For the following two days a blizzard with sixty-knot gusts pinned the men in their
tent. Then on November 18 the party was nearly eaten alive by a crevasse field. First Rus-
sell's sled wedged crosswise in a crevasse hanging by one runner, then seven of Paine's
huskies went headfirst into a crevasse hanging by their harnesses in space. In the worst
incident, both of Blackburn's sledges went into a crevasse. The three teams were tied in
train with rope, with Blackburn's at the rear. When his sleds went down, the dogs went
to their bellies, flat out clawing, and Paine jammed a tethering pole into the snow to stop
the slide. Blackburn had caught himself and managed to climb out of the crevasse. All of
the navigational and geological gear plus a portion of rations and clothing swung in the
yawning gap. A seven-hour operation ensued, during which Blackburn and Russell alter-
nated at descending into the crevasse on the end of a rope to send the dismantled load up
a line. Making matters worse, this all occurred under a stiV wind streaming past from the
southeast.
Meanwhile, the Condor had started taking exploratory flights from Little America
whenever clear weather permitted. Several of these sorties were into unknown territory
along coastal Marie Byrd Land, but at 12:15 A.M. on November 22 the fully loaded biplane
took oV in a southeasterly direction, to explore the continuation of the Transantarctic
Mountains out beyond the farthest sighting of Gould's party in 1930. The geological
party, about fifty miles out from the mountain front, made hourly weather reports
throughout the early hours of the day.
After crossing a succession of crevasse fields, the Condor continued out onto the fea-
tureless surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A little before 6:00 A.M. the plane was
reaching the limits of its fuel, but because the weather conditions were ideal, the pilot
decided to push forward for a few more minutes. Then “a cluster of snow-clad peaks”
materialized on the horizon, perhaps a hundred miles oV. They were too distant for the
photographic camera to be of use, but binoculars brought them in with certainty as the
plane held its course to fix the bearing of these distant mountains. The estimate was that
the peaks were located at approximately 85° 30′ S and between 110° and 115° W, about 170
miles beyond Gould's sighting. This distant protrusion was called the Horlick Moun-
tains, after William Horlick, one of the major contributors to the expedition. Were these
mountains a continuation of the Queen Maud Mountains, or were they some lonesome
range set in extreme isolation? The answer would not be known until the end of the de-
cade, when Byrd again would lead an expedition to the icy continent.
After issuing weather reports, Blackburn's party slept for the day and then packed
camp and pushed forward until 11:00 A.M. the following morning, running an excep-
