Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
232
so the plane flew in under the cloud bank and proceeded to lead the helos to the fuel.
More low clouds gathered as the teams completed their day's work, so again the helos de-
scended into the fog, refueled, and then flew on to Hallett Station in whiteout conditions
beneath the layer of cloud.
The following week both clouds and the men stewed around Hallett Station. Dur-
ing a few short breaks they were able to take six readings on stars to fix the northern end
of the traverse. On January 8 the weather was marginal, and the helo party was becom-
ing desperate. Throughout the day the helicopters dodged rolling clouds and completed
four stations that brought the traverse to Hallett Station. The plan called for only five
more stations from there, but Hallett Station remained socked in for the next two days.
On January 11, three of the targeted stations came out of cloud. The engineers dispatched
the first two with finesse, but as they were moving toward the third, the controls on the
lead helicopter froze. While both pilot and mechanic pulled on the stick with all their
might, the helicopter descended in a spiral and bounced to a safe landing on level snow.
Inspection determined that meltwater had trickled in and then frozen around the steer-
ing mechanism, probably earlier that day at Hallett Station. The craft worked fine after
the mechanic cleared the ice.
Perhaps this was an omen that it was time to cease this work. The season had cer-
tainly turned. Because of all the open water, the air was full of moisture, rolling up the
glaciers and clouding over the peaks. So Chapman halted the traverse at Hallett Station,
and the party flew back to McMurdo on January 12, after twenty-six days on the job.
The engineers of Topo South and Topo North completed a truly astonishing season,
measuring a traverse distance of 1,510 miles by Tellurometer, and covering approximately
1,100 miles of the Transantarctic Mountains. They occupied seventy stations, set fifty sta-
tionary tablets, and intersected 113 points, overall controlling an area of 100,000 square
miles for the 1:250,000 scale topographic maps that were already rolling out of the U.S.
Geological Survey. Never before nor since has a party in a single season seen so much
of the Transantarctic Mountains in such detail, encompassing such a spacious sweep of
h istor y.
Flush with their success, the U.S.G.S. and the army were back in Deep Freeze 63 with
a team of surveyors and the two HU-1Bs. This season the leader of the party was Pete
Bermel, a topographer who had been to the Ice two years earlier on a motor toboggan tra-
verse to the Horlick Mountains and the solitary Thiel Mountains, poking from beneath
the ice 125 miles to the east of the Ohio Range. The plan for 1962-1963 was to extend the
traverses of the previous season, first by doing a loop to complete northern Victoria Land
(Topo West) and then extending in the other direction from Beardmore Glacier to the
end of the Ohio Range (Topo East).
The logistic plan that had served so well in the previous season was basically followed
again, with the navy maintaining and moving the camp and resupplying with fixed-wing
aircraft. The Tellurometer, however, was replaced with an improved model that could
both send and receive a signal, so two pairs of topographers worked on alternating peaks,
leapfrogging each other rather than having to occupy each station twice, as had been the
case the previous season. Topo West started from Hallett Station and worked west along
