ON THE ICY TRAIL

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 22 February 1935, Page 9

ON THE ICY TRAIL

PRIVATIONS OF EXPLORERS BYRD PARTY’S JOURNEYS DEPENDENCE ON DOG TEAMS. “When you arc out ou tlie trail with the dog teams aud the temperature is (50 degrees below zero you have to be very careful of your physical condition,” said Captain A. Innes-Taylor, the chief of Admiral Byrd’s transport staff, and an ocknowledged expert on all matters affecting sledge transport in the polar regions, in an interview at Dunedin. “Should you exhaust yourself physically,” he said, “you are bound to strike trouble. For the cold is so intense that it exhausts a great part of your vitality and before a man realises the danger he has been frostbitten.

“So long as one can get a good warm sleep at night aud plenty of good food things are not so bad even when the temperature is hanging about 35 degrees below; but once it gets below 40 it is very difficult to sleep soundly. And then if you have used up your physical reserves you are in for trouble. It is quite impossible to 'live on your nerves’ in Antarctica.”

Captain Innes-Taylor has had a particularly strenuous time during the past 12 months. He has been responsible for mapping out all tractor and sledge journeys and one of his trips—that to the Queen Maude Range —involved the covering of 1500 miles over ice and snow by dog team. AN ARDUOUS JOURNEY. The expedition had scarcely landed on the Barrier before Captain InnesTaylor was headed southward with his dogs. Setting out on March 1 of last year, he undertook a journey of 180 miles to the south, laying caches of food and building and stocking the post at which Admiral Byrd was to spend his lonely winter. By the time the party arrived back at Little Ameiica the days had become very short, and a fortnight later total darkness set in. It was the long period of darkness each day over the last part of this trip which made it so difficult, for at nights the temperatures fell to an alarming extent.

“It is impossible to keep warm even in a fur-lined sleeping bag when the temperature gets past 40 degrees below zero,” said Captain Innes-Taylor. “Your sleeping bag becomes clogged with ice no matter what you do, and mine actually had 201 b of ice in it when I got back. It was terribly hard on the dogs, and one day when the temperature fell to 35 degrees below and a 30mile an hour wind was blowing we lost four dogs in 25 minutes. During those 31 days of travel we had 13 days of blizzard.”

“The dogs were the mainstay of the expedition when it came to long-dis-tance journeys. With nine dogs to a sledge and each sledge carrying a load of 11001 b., we once covered 300 miles in nine days. The big St. Bernard wolf cross Huskies stood up to it wonderfully. Actually our main casualties were due to losses in fights among the dogs, which often had to be destroyed as°the result of the severe wounds they received.” TRIBUTE TO CAPTAIN SCOTT. After two expeditions to Antarctica Captain Innes-Taylor is still unable to understand how the members of Captain Scott’s party succeeded in getting so far as they did. “To me,” he said, “their march to the Pole, hauling their sledges by man power, is the most amazing feat of human endurance and physical stamina that, could bo imagined. I am still at a loss to understand how they managed it. Scientists to-day say that even with the most concentrated foods known they could not suggest a ration which would be light enough and sufficiently nourishing to enable men to accomplish such a march. Aud in Scott’s time nothing was known about vitamins and scien-tifically-balanced diets. It was not exhaustion or cold that killed Scott and his men; it was nothing more nor less than sheer starvation caused by taking foods that would not yield sufficient nourishment to enable them to endure such terrific exertion and exposure.”