Dr. Fuchs Almost At Journey’s End

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28524, 1 March 1958, Page 12

Dr. Fuchs Almost At Journey’s End

The first crossing of the Antarctic Continent has virtually been made. Late yesterday afternoon, Dr. Vivian Fuchs and his Commonwealth party were off' Minna Bluff and within 110 miles of the New Zealand base on McMurdo Sound where they are due to arrive tomorrow.

At 5.30 p.m. the . party was still moving. Twelve hours’ running will bring them to the end of their 1250-mile journey. Minna Bluff—a long cape run- Roy Howard (mechanics), Ralph ning down from Mount Discovery Lenton (radio operator), and has a dangerously-crevassed George Lowe, the New Zealand area off its point and the party photographer. must keep wide of the bluff to Dr. Stephenson and Mr Blaikavoid this. loc k were flown from Depot 480 Dr. Fuchs said yesterday morn- to Scott Base this week.

ing that he was delighted with lhe way the Journey had been going. “We hjrve all been very grateful to Ed. for his help.” Sir Edmund Hillary said the tractors came down the last few miles of the 100-mile long Skelton glacier in a near white-out. “I was looking out to one side and then the other picking up marks,” he said. “We were taking first one way and then the other—and then we ran right up on the depot. It was luck.” The snow surface since leaving Depot 700 had changed completely since he drove south in December, said Sir Edmund Hillary. Where it had been soft for the tractors between depots 700 and 480 it was now hard, and made difficult going for the snocats. Other sections, further south, which had been hard, were now soft. At Scott Base the flagging of a route for Dr. Fuchs’s snocats through the pressure ridges between the Ross Ice Shelf and the bay. iee of McMurdo Sound has caused no trouble.. Yesterday, Mr J. Holmes Miller and Dr. George Marsh were busy Choosing a route for the last mile or two into Scott Base. [The members of Dr. Fuchs’s party are Dr. Jon Stephenson, an Australian geologist. Geoffrey Pratt (seismologist), Dr. Hal List ter (glaciologist). Dr. Alan Rogers (physiologist), Hannes La Grange, a South African meteorologist, David Stratton and Ken Blaiklock (surveyors), David Pratt and