BYRD EXPEDITION

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 266, 8 November 1929, Page 12

BYRD EXPEDITION

GEOLOGICAL PARTY LEAVES NEWS FROM SLEDGE PARTY VERY DANGEROUS AREA (By Russell Owen, copyrighted 1928, by New York 'Times Company and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. All rights | for publication reserved through world wireless to New York Tinies). ; BAY OF WHALES. Nov. 4. j The geological party started this j afternoon on tb e sledging journey ot: more than 400 miles to Queen. Maud j mountains at the edge of the Polar Plateau. They will be absent for three months. Nearly a month will be spent surveying and collecting geological data in this important but little known part of Antarctica. They will travel with light sledges for at least 100 miles and possibly fifty further, if the “snowmobile” has been able to haul the load forward from the point where they were left on the former trip. They should also meet the supporting party now returning. Team after team was harnessed after lunch to a chorus of howls and barks, the dogs straining at their picket ropes, snapping at each other, and plunging in their traces in mad excitement. When two could get near enough there was a momentary squabble and fight until they were pulled apart. Getting ready to go on the trail is the best fun they know. The”last litter of pups, little fellows, sniffed at the bigger dogs’ noses and were tolerated. They were like a lot of small boys wishing they could be grown up too. When the last team was harnessed and everyone in camp had shaken hands with the six. men of party and Commander Byrd had wished’ them good luck, each team rushed down the slope to'the inlet, and out <o the Bay, where they turned south, towards the Barrier. Th e w leader is Dr Lawrence Gould, the geologist of the expedition, whose face reflected all the delight he felt in getting away at last to the place that should be a geologist’s paradise. Deganahl’s supporting party camped on. Monday night 160 miles south of Little America, within an easy week’s march of the home base and warm bunks. ,and with all their obstacles behind them. According to a short radio message received by Commander Byrd, Deganahl adds a thrilling account of how they retraced their steps through a treacherous area of broken ice south of Depot 3. .“A haze blotted out the’broken features of the mountain of ice, but it did not hide the trail or patches of blue light around which it wound. It would have been suicide to have attempted to come through for the first time on a day like this, but we had tested every foot of the trail on our way south, and we felt we were comparatively safe in our own track. Had we not found our way through to firm ice on' the south side of the pressure when we did, we should still have been camped in a nest of hollow haycocks in the centre of the disturbance. In our first two camps south of the pressure area we heard an almost continuous rumble and cracking of ice. During the first night o - the apparently solid barrier to the south we awoke to find that a narrow crevasse had opened immediately under Walden and Braathen. Walden counted two hundred crevasses which crossed two miles of our trail through the heart of the disturbance. He did not attempt to count the open chasn s everywhere to right and left, though many of them were so close that we could see whero the blu e merged into the black.”