Burton Island (AGB 1) - Naval Cruise Book

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Below: The loadmaster aboard one of the Air Force C-130s that fly in November between Christchurch and McMurdo, under contract to the Navy. His b0OfS GFS Of a special thermal construction, S0mefimeS culled moon boots. Right: The cargo aboard a Herc is color-coded to avoid pqperworky the colors painted on the corners of the crates indicate what station in the interior ofthe Continent they are destined for, thus cutting down on the number of personnel who have to keep track of them in offices. A soft spot for a snooze can always be found on top of a sea bag, and a man can stretch his legs or walk aft for a coffee. An artist was fascinated by the patterns in the jumble of obiectsg he was reminded of the shelter drawings of Henry Moore in World War ll. Lcdr Dick Brabec taxis east. The cargo hold of a Herc looks like the inside of a barn. There are rollers, hooks, straps sides amidships padded with survival gear, an aluminum ladde and special attachments for 74 litters. Several of these are in place, high up, as bunks for the crew. Most of the space is OC- cupied by the fuel drums, but forward there is a row of seats on each side, facing inward, made of canvas and tubing, with a backrest of webbing. The plane turns and starts down the skiway. There is not much of a wait for a signal from the tower, because there is no traffic. Dallas Herring and Chuck Hylland, members of the crew check the seat belts stonily, violating the airline stewardess' rule of the Perpetual Smile. There seems to be infinite room to take off, but beyond the 13,000-foot skiway are seal holes, cracks, drifts, an occasional scientist's hut, and at the end of the shelf a ten-foot drop onto the sea ice. 'le , the ra To a passenger, the sense of danger is not as great here as it is in the United States, since the Navy maintains its own aircraft, and its people are Hhighly motivated to stay alive. The Deep Freeze Navy pilots, like the skipper of a ship, have a Hharborn always in the back of their minds. In what Admiral Dufek called uthe worst flying weather in the worldf' they usually find a place to set the plane down without hurting anybody. When Byrd spent a winter alone on the Ross Ice Shelf, he wrote: uThe tolerable quality of a dangerous existence is the fact that the human mind cannot remain continuously sensitive to any- thing. Repetition's dulling impact sees to that. On another of Shackleton's expeditions, his men endured 522 days of unbeliev- able conditions between South Georgia and Elephant Island, yet uthey had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind them- selves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. Thirty seconds after the start of its run, 319 is in the air. Lacey looks at his watch. It is 9 A.M., the precise moment filed in the flight plan. The butterfly wings of White and Black Islands are seen on either side, then Minna Bluff appears. Here Scott perished in 1912. He ran into bad weather, even on the Ice Shelf, and the leather washers on the stoppers of his oil tins became worthless in the cold. At each depot he found that much of the fuel - on which he depended for melting snow to make drinking water - had evaporated. At the end, he and his two remaining companions were held in their tent for ten days by a blizzard, a single dayis march from the next depot. jerry Fichera, the flight engineer, comes aft. Lying on his stomach, he inspects the hydraulic worm of the landing gear through small glass ports in either side of the fuselage. He is responsible for all the machinery in this aircraft which has been perfected by the cumulative knowledge of fifty years. To star- board are the scintillating mountains of the Trans-Antarctic Range, a chain that goes across half the Continent and may have been linked with the Andes, according to one theory of continental drift- 38 , ,,,,,,,

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, .-.HA . .,.-....., .,.':'::1..', ' -:'1::::L7:'::Lg3 .. -.- -.-,.- -.. -.. - - .-,-,. ' rrrr H -as ----y F i Z l s e s 5 i '1 Bronze bust of the late Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd outside the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows at McMurdo. He was the first man, to fly over the South Pole, in 1929, and the first Officer-in-Charge of the U.S. Antarctic Re- search Program, at the beginning of Deep Freeze in 1956. Admiral Byrd's own words are inscribed on the base of the memorial: I am hopeful that Antarctica in its sym- bolic robe of white will shine forth asa continent of peace as nations working together there in the cause of science set an example of international cooperation. At the foot of the 15,000-foot Mount Markham is a gap where Scott, with Shackleton as a member of his party, reached a new Hfarthest southi' in 1902. - I Within an hour, or Qas Shackleton wrotej after a month of hard sledging, 'cthere burst upon our view an open road to the South, for there stretched before us a great glacier running almost south and north between two mountain rangesf, This is the Beardmore Glacier, so vast that it has several Hmouthsf' and at one of them are the great granite pillars he spoke of. It seems to be flowing softly onto the shelf ice, although its tremendous pres- sure creates waves for miles on the surface of the Barrier. Lt Frontz says on the intercom, H1'll tell you what itis like . . . you 've seen your wife pour batter out of a cake bowl .... '7 On board is a man with the lean look of a British ambassa- dor. He turns out to be L. M. Forbes, editor of the Polar Record in Cambridge, England, one of a number of publications Admiral Bakutis studied in order to prepare himself for the ice. Although he has not been in the Antarctic before, Mr. Forbes has known many of the explorers who opened up the Continent. Sir Charles Wright, for instance, who has just left here after a visit as a scien- tific consultant, accompanied Scott as far as the top of the Beard- more Glacier in 1911 and found his body near Minna Bluff in 1912. He has retired three times since 1947, but the continuity of his knowledge of the Antarctic makes him invaluable. The work Sir Charles does in upper atmosphere physics has a direct bearing on the fate of 319 whose radio is in contact with Little Ieana, a summer weather station on the Barrier. He wrote recently, H. . . the ionosphere must be regularly monitored in the Antarctic to help maintain communications. When the normal complement of electrons is augmented by a burst from a solar flare, the D layer absorbs short-wave radio signals. Often the effect is severe enough to black out all radio communication and therefore also to ground all aircraft. Mr. Forbes clambers up, walks aft on the tops of the oil drums, and drops to the deck near a door that slopes outward. Mindful of skin being stripped off by cold metal, he avoids the handles and leans against the door. HThose lines on the side of the glassier, he says, Hare where the ice is breaking away from the mountains. The smaller mountains are covered almost to the top with ice, as if inundated. Some of it is blue, like the wa- ter in the Bahamas. Mr. Forbes says this color is due to the absence of snow. Scott wrote in his diary: HAH this soft snow is an aftermath of our prolonged storm. Hereabouts Shackleton found hard blue ice. It seems an extraordinary difference in for- tune, and at every step S.'s luck becomes more evident? The Hluckyn Shackleton had falls, bruises, cut shins . . . the worst surface possible, sharp-edged blue ice full of chasms and crevasses, rising to hills and descending into gullies, in fact, a surface that could not be equalled in any polar work for difficulty in travelling. In the Age of the Goon, until five years ago, the LC-47s used to labor up the Glacier, barely gaining altitude as fast as the ice rose toward the plateau, but the Here is flying effortlessly at 26,000 feet. 40 W