Burton Island (AGB 1) - Naval Cruise Book

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'ii f.4F3 'ff---RE: Above is the Strip, as the skiway, together with its temporary buildings, is known. Its location varies with the season. Near the end ofthe Deep Freeze '65 sum- mer season, when the ice threatened to break out, the whole complex of buildings had to be moved about a mile and a half to the south. The rectangular building is the new sick bay, and behind it is the chow hall. White ls- land is in the background. On the HStrip7' the wind is approaching 65 knots. Only fifty yards away, two LC-130 Hercules on skis, as graceful as dolphins, are almost obscured by blowing snow. The other ski-aircraft, i'Goony-Birds and Otters, are tied down farther out. One of the Super-Constellations is left, like a waif, alone on the ice runway a couple of miles to the west. Its companion waits on wheels in the hot sun at Christchurch. The Strip, which serves the skiway, is a village in itself and the men who work there seldom go up to the NHill. The 4'Hercs are kept flying around the clock, since the squadron is sometimes behind due to the weather. Each Hercules has two crews. Some of the pilots have bunks behind the Strip Coordinators Office, in a Iamesway, a hut made of two layers of green fabric with fiberglass between. Here they rest until it is time to file for the next flight. The Strip has its own sick bay, movies, and chow hall. In the chow hall - two Jamesways placed end to end with a pair of wings for the galley - half a dozen 'fair-dalesi' Qaviation ratingsj are having coffee. Bruce Benson, an Otter 'cplane cap- tain or mechanic, says that last season a chopper tried to land during a uwhite-outi' - the continuous refraction of light between low clouds and the ice, with no shadows and no horizon. The crewman dropped a smoke flare to show the wind direction and to find out how close the ground was, but it went off inside the air- craft and temporarily blinded the pilot. The c'helo crashed, with- out injuring anyone, and was later retrieved by an icebreaker and a long line of men pulling on ropes - as practiced in the time of the Pyramids. Benson is reminiscing about the time he fixed up a Weasel that had been 'csurveyedn or written off. It isthe smallest thing on tracks, but he claims he got it up to 70 miles per hour on the ice runway and that one day he did the four miles from the Hill I4

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l'Uncle Herman, alias 'lthe German, officially known as CMI John L. Koehler, boss of the gas shop at McMur- do. With a small group ofSeaBees, he uses all sorts of ingenious tricks, including prayer, to keep all the so-called light machines - anything that is not Diesel - in work- ing order. Below is MRI Gordon Boyd, head land sometimes onlyl man in the machine shop, which is adiacent to Koehler's emporium. Boyd, from Wakefield, Massachusetts, has been in the Navy eleven years and wintered-over this season at McMurdo.

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in five minutes, slaloming between the flags that mark the safe ice. When they found out how good it was, they took it back, says Woody Hill, another teller of tall tales and a fine mechanic. The serious man at the table is Dick Andersen, who is a career counselor as well as an expert radioman. Because most of the Deep Freeze people are screened volunteers, and the way to get ahead is by advancing in rate through technical study, they listen to him. His words are convincing, since he wintered-over in 1962 and thought enough of the ice to return. He is proud of his long flights in the ancient HC-oons QLC-47X 117 Dakotasjtg of the field parties they serve, and, above all, of the continuity of his experi- ence here, which leads him to more and more understanding. He gets the connection between an apparently arbitrary scientific proj- ect and the fact that it depends on the Navy - on him. Andersen gets up to leave. Here, as everywhere on the ice, they work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Outside, it is no longer like New England. The Antarctic is as dry as a desert - in fact is classified as one - and the cold and the wind grind the snow to a fine powder. It is not the same as occasional snow falling on warm earth, it is aeons old. After the sun has loosened the snow, the blizzards come shouting in, as Byrd put it, filling the air with drift. Although blinded, Andersen A Herc on the skiway. Williams Field was named for a driver who died when his tractor tell through the ice in the first year of Deep Freeze. Some of the' vans contain- ing communications equipment can be seen at right. ln l960, all flights between New Zealand and McMurdo had to be cancelled when sunspots knocked out radio com- munications for eight days in a row. Radio reliability' used to be about 50 percent, but with a new type of antenna it is now about 90 percent. 4' , K .