BYRD ANTAKCTIC EXPEDITION — GOULD 241 



graphs that Captain McKinley had taken on the base-laying flight, 

 one of them showing a system of crevasses so regular that we all 

 thought this particular print had been made with a celluloid grid, 

 with parallel lines scratched on it overlying the negative. Surely 

 there could be no such regularly spaced system of crevasses anywhere. 

 Instead, therefore, of altering our course to avoid them as far as 

 possible, we plunged headlong into the most frightfully uncertain 

 and hazardous traveling that we encountered all summer. 



As we came still nearer to the mountains we were struck by the 

 fact that the crevasses and undulations were not crescentic to the 

 glacier outlets. They were rather so distributed as to indicate a 

 movement from an easterly direction parallel to the range front at 

 this place. 



We camped at the foot of Liv Glacier on December 1 and on the 

 next day attempted an ascent. For the 2 or 3 miles of the ascent 

 these great rolls, some of which attained a height of 500 feet, still 

 persisted right up the glacier as though it had not been there. They 

 seemed to have triumphed over the puny glacier flow itself ; without 

 disturbing the symmetry of the rolls, it had but caused their surfaces 

 to become crevassed. The aspect of the whole was like that suggested 

 by the waves forced up a harbor or broad river mouth in the wake 

 of a large vessel. 



From Little America to within 15 miles of the mountains the 

 shelf -ice surface had been one of varied soft snow surfaces w^here 

 there had been apparently but little wind, to wide wind-swept areas 

 with hard sasfrugi as much as 3 or 4 feet high and always showing 

 an east-southeast to west-northwest trend. But when we came close 

 to the mountains the snow surface changed in places to a hard 

 pebbled or rippled and icy surface. It seems that on occasion the 

 snow becomes so soft and mushy that it is beaten up into these tiny 

 ridges by the force of the wind. When we first experienced the 

 fohnlike wind down a glacier from the mountains we at once realized 

 how the temperature might be raised high enough to produce such 

 an effect. 



THE MOUNTAINS AND THEIR STRUCTURE 



From some 20 miles away we began to form our first definite 

 ideas about the mountains and the major aspects of their structure. 

 We saw a great array of ragged, irregular, rather low-lying peaks 

 backed up by great tabular mountain masses that towered far above 

 them. The tabular mountains immediately suggested horsts; and 

 the straight, even lines of at least some of the greater outlet glaciers 

 looked to me like depressed fault blocks. A further striking impres- 

 sion of the mountains was the sharp clear-cut front of the whole 

 range— a typical sharpl}^ defined fault-line scarp. 



