The Arrival

“Cameras clicked madly as our pilot wheeled the big transport around the mountains. Here were our peaks! Beautiful pyramids of rock, long glaciers and impressive faces laced with ice fingers and capped by corniced summits. A wall of mountains eighty miles long loomed before us.”—Marts, 1967 AAJ

After meeting in Los Angeles, the team flew to Tahiti, then Auckland, then Christchurch—after negotiating a potential airline strike. The logistical difficulties continued: “Then we had an eight hour flight to McMurdo on a C130, then another eight hour C130 flight to the range where we could not land because of a cloud cover,” Eiichi Fukushima wrote in a recent email to the AAC. “So we flew a few more hours to Byrd Station. We tried again some hours later and finally landed some distance from our intended landing spot, again due to cloud cover. It had been a very long journey up to that point. I suppose the excitement was mounting all that time so it was a sense of 'we're finally here' after all that.”

The team arrived at their first camp, Air Base, on December 7, where they realized that some gear had been temporarily lost en route. After two unsuccessful searches for fuel, the team began to haul their supply sleds toward Vinson Massif. Marts recalled the ordeal in his trip report:

“Six of us pulled a 1,000-pound sled about seven miles before quitting for the night, exhausted. Sacrifices to the god of lost motor gas must have been made while I slept that evening because just as we were starting to pull again at the traces in the morning, our motor toboggan drove into sight with Nick riding cowboy-style astride a barrel of gas. The barrel was set up as the world’s loneliest gas station; with our sled hooked onto a heavier one, off the toboggan went with 2,500 pounds of gear.”