Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
235
and delivered the men to the summit of Mount Howe a couple of minutes later. The de-
lighted party stopped several more times at outcrops on the flight back to the Mount
Weaver camp, accomplishing in four hours what they had planned to do in three weeks
with their unreliable snowmobiles, lithely soaring over an almost continuous crevasse
field between stops.
The helicopter stayed with the geologists for several more days, visiting in touch-and-
go reconnaissance fashion most of the outcrops in the upper Scott Glacier area, before
rejoining the Topo East traverse that had been busy with a series of stations that looped
Scott Glacier, including Mount Saltonstall, to the north of Mount Weaver; Mount Grier
in the La Gorce Mountains; and Mount Gardiner, abreast of Mount Blackburn at the
confluence of Bartlett and Scott Glaciers (see Fig. 6.2). The next three stations were cast
on the top of the Watson Escarpment, surveying the lowlands beginning at the backside
of the Gothic Mountains, past the narrow breach where Leverett Glacier breaks through
from the plateau, and around from there into the drainage of Reedy Glacier (see Fig.
5.20), the last major outlet crossing the Transantarctic Mountains before the East Antarc-
tic Ice Sheet merges with its West Antarctic counterpart beyond an irregular escarpment
that ends at the Ohio Range.
Having reached the distal termination of the mountains, Topo East backtracked to
Mount Weaver, where the full detachment of ten men and two helos invaded the geolo-
gists' camp on January 24. They were there ostensibly to give further assistance to the
geological party, but they were positioning themselves to leap from land's end and alight
at the South Pole. The geologists were served admirably by the army pilots, while Rad-
spinner argued with the navy about whether and how he would fly his Huey to the pole.
Eventually the geologists collected all the rocks they could carry and were flown by R4D
back to McMurdo, leaving the helo detachment in the field. The navy finally granted per-
mission for the army to make the first helicopter flight to either of the poles, but only on
the condition that one of their own LC-130 Hercules navigate to the South Pole, leading
the army helicopter with the contrail of its engines. With permission granted, Radspin-
ner piloted his HU-1B the 176 miles from Mount Howe to the South Pole on February
4, 1963, making that historic flight the capstone to two seasons of Antarctic exploration
that have never been matched in scope.
Within two years every 1:250,000 quadrangle of the Transantarctic Mountains was in
print. By this benchmark, the geographic exploration of the Transantarctic Mountains
was complete. By 1965 every spur on every ridgeline, every little tributary valley, was
mapped and published in beautiful detail. It was a wondrous accomplishment, one could
say a work of art, a rendering in some ways more real than the subject it represented.
But at the same moment in history that we had reached the limit of global explora-
tion, a vast new arena opened. It happened on October 4, 1957, during the first months of
the International Geophysical Year when a shining object named Sputnik streaked across
the heavens signaling to the world that the age of rocket-borne exploration had begun.
In the ensuing half-century, an ever-increasing array of satellites has looked down on
Earth, and probes have been launched to all quadrants of the solar system. Within a de-
cade we had seen the dark side of the moon and shortly thereafter had landed lunar astro-
