Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
230
were ready for work on December 25. Flying directly to Mount Gunn, where they filled
the tanks with fuel supplied by the navy helos, the teams started north along the low-
est stretch of the Transantarctic Mountains, surveying up to a shoulder on the northern
bank of David Glacier, where the broad outlet pinched and then released into the Dry-
galski Ice Tongue. This was David country, surveyed by Mawson in 1907 from points
along the coast, en route to the Magnetic South Pole (see Figs. 3.8, 3.10). The mountains,
as had been noted by Scott's first expedition, were blocky and tabular in shape. As the
survey teams worked in the mountains, the navy flew Otters to Terra Nova Bay, where
they landed on the sea ice at Cape Russell, built a camp, and depoted fuel. Separated by a
ragged glacier front aptly called Hell's Gate, this camp was about three miles directly east
of the beach on Inexpressible Island, where Priestley's party had wintered in 1911-1912.
The surveyors might have pushed it past six stations that day, but katabatic winds poured
down on them from the plateau, as is always the case in this area, freezing their hands and
faces and keeping open the polynya at the southern end of Terra Nova Bay (see Fig. 3.12).
The next day clouds grounded the party, but the surveyors took the opportunity to
measure their elevation relative to sea level. December 28 was bright and clear, but again
the Tellurometer failed to operate, and again the reason was a broken contact. Since the
camp was without the equipment to fix the circuit, an Otter had to be dispatched from
McMurdo to take the instrument back, where it was promptly repaired.
Another Otter flew in the Tellurometer on December 30, and the party sprang into
action. Its traverse took the men from David Glacier to the summit of Mount Melbourne
(Fig. 7.11; see Fig. 1.12). The station at Mount Crummer looked down onto Backstairs Pas-
sage, where David's party had found a bypass onto the upper Larsen Glacier and gained
the plateau (see Fig. 3.12).
At the start of New Year's Day 1962, the weather was clear. As the Hueys headed
north to continue their traverse, the Otters launched from McMurdo to move the camp
from Cape Russell to a site on Lady Newnes Bay. The first station was at the confluence
of two glaciers, Aviator and Tinker (see Fig. 1.7), at a spot so narrow that the helicopter
had to do a one-skid landing while holding power. The engineers hurriedly unloaded the
helo under the full draft of its rotor, but when it had flown away they were drafted from
another direction by severe katabatic winds, funneling down the glaciers and over their
survey station. To make matters worse, in their hurry to unload the helo, they had left the
windscreen on board. Unable to make their measurements under such gripping condi-
tions, the men hastily built a wall of rocks about three feet high and knelt behind it while
taking their readings with the theodolite.
The surveyors completed the next two stations with comparative ease as they worked
the high country, but as the Hueys were beginning to run low on fuel, a radio message
came that a fog bank was making it impossible to put in the camp on Lady Newnes Bay,
and that the party should end its day at Hallett Station. The situation became critical
when the helo crews failed to find a fuel cache that had been left for them by an R4D
several days before. With almost no fuel left in their tanks, the helos landed to gain their
bearings. At that moment the men heard an airplane flying overhead and radioed aloft
their situation. As luck would have it, this was the same R4D crew that had left the cache,
Figure 7.11. (opposite)
an icefall cascades down
the steep northeastern
wall of Priestley Glacier,
flowing through its deep
upper reaches toward
the Ross Sea. Mount Mel-
bourne towers above the
landscape at the left rear
of the image. From that
vantage the Topo North
engineers surveyed the
region around Terra Nova
Bay on December 30, 1961.
