LEFT IN DRIFT

Evening Star, Issue 20328, 9 November 1929, Page 15

LEFT IN DRIFT

ANTARCTIC SNOWMOBILE BREAKS DOWN PARTY WALKS BACK TO BASE Special to Press ■ Association from the Byrd Expedition by Russell Owen. (Copyright.) BAY OF WHALES, November 7. (Received November 9 at 10 a.m.) The three men who started off in a snowmobile a fortnight ago in another attempt at ' mechanical transportation in the Antarctic, are back in camp. They walked back eighty miles, having left the snowmobile parked in a drift with its rear end broken from bucking soft. snow. They made eighty miles in eight days, one of'which was spent in their tent during a blizzard, and were greeted on their return to camp with streamers from the radio towers, a signal rocket, and. much good-natured razzing. Tlk? experience gained from this trip leads Commander ’Byrd to the opinion that a specially ’ designed snowmobile would work. It would need to be a long, low, flexible machine, with very wide and carefully designed treads. The returning trio had a fairly rough trip. An overcast sky made visibility very bad and frequently they could not see thirty,feet in front of them, particularly when the wind kicked up the light drift. They frequently had difficulty in picking-up the flags on the trail and the sledge and snowmobile tracks were almost obliterated. They would keep one flag in sight behind them until they would see another ahead, but sometimes the one ahead would not show up when it should, and one man would leave the group and keeping them in sight would hunt round till he round the marker, sometimes away off down one side showing how easily one can wander from the straight line over those snowy wastes. Visibility played queer pranks. Sometimes a flag would jump out at them before they expected it, and at other times they would see one apparently only a short distance ahead, and then walk miles, apparently, before reaching it. They could see water and sky at the seaward edge of the barrier after they got about halfway back to the camp and steered on a corner of that.