THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 221 



June 11th we again reached bottom, this time at 668 meters. From 

 that point we sounded every few miles, took very careful account 

 of marches between soundings, and located ourselves by astro- 

 nomical observations on every clear day. 



During this week the struggle was a bit discouraging. Some 

 days travel was impossible because of bad weather and excessive ice 

 motion, and on those days we lost ground, for the ice was always 

 drifting south and sometimes west as well. When we did travel we 

 had trouble not only with open water but with the softness of the 

 snow. Drifts which would have been hard under foot, scarcely 

 recording impressions of the feet of men and dogs in a temperature 

 below freezing, were now heaps of snow resembling granulated 

 sugar, through which it was no easier to walk than through a bin 

 of wheat. The sled sank into this snow so that we had to drag it 

 like a snow plow, and the dogs floundered for lack of solid footing. 

 Sometimes the men had to force the sled forward ten or twenty 

 yards at a time with no help from the dogs, and often this was not 

 possible until after we had tramped back and forward several times 

 making a sort of road for it. 



On previous expeditions I had had to deal with snow of this 

 sort and been led by it to devise an improvement to the ordinary 

 Alaska sled. Alaska sleds as built in Nome and elsewhere are 

 twelve or fourteen feet long and twenty-one to twenty-eight inches 

 wide. As their pictures show, there are stanchions upward from 

 the runners so that the load is borne on a platform from six to 

 nine inches high. This platform is supported by cross benches 

 underneath between the stanchions, and as the sled sinks these cross 

 benches catch the snow and push it forward. When this happens 

 it is not possible to move the sled without an expenditure of force 

 many times greater than would be necessary if the cross benches did 

 not touch the snow. For travel through soft snow no sled is really 

 suitable except the Indian toboggan, but it is not practical in rough 

 ice nor upon hard roads. There occurred to me a plan for combin- 

 ing the advantages of both types of sled by nailing boards under- 

 neath the cross benches of the Nome type so that when the runners 

 sank deep enough to bring the body-part into contact with the 

 snow, the under-surface should have the character of a toboggan 

 and ride smoothly over the snow exactly as a toboggan does. 



Like most innovations, this one had met with no favor among 

 the experienced men of my expedition. In Nome I had had several 

 sleds made with toboggan bottoms, but in the southern section of 

 the expedition and also on the Karluk these bottoms had in my 



