KEY POINTS:
Geoffrey Lee Martin was a senior reporter on the New Zealand Herald, as well as a Summer Party member of the Commonwealth Trans Antarctic Expedition, 1956-57, reporting for the NZPA. The following summer, 1957-58, he was in the Antarctic exclusively for the Herald and The Daily Telegraph, London,
and accompanied Sir Edmund to the South Pole, January 20, 1958, for the historic meeting with Dr (later Sir) Vivian Fuchs, leader of the British party.
We called it "suicide alley" and those of us who drove tractor trains along it every day agreed that as a highway it had nothing to commend it.
The 20km track, quite tortuous most of the time, snaked over melting ice floes from where Endeavour was moored against the edge of the sea ice in McMurdo Sound to our site for Scott Base, at Pram Pt on the southern tip of Ross Island, facing the Ross Ice Shelf.
But to those of us conscripted as tractor drivers - biologists, geologists and surveyors, as well as myself - it had become as familiar as the road home as we drove back and forth, unloading the ship.
We knew every changing tidal crack in the ice, every slushy patch needing caution. Often the tractors and Weasels [tracked jeeps] sank up to their wheel hubs in melted icy water; occasionally their exhausts burbled away beneath the water.
We prayed for the weather to stay overcast - bad weather that gave us nice, cold, sub-zero temperatures that would harden the track and make it more safe.
Unfortunately clear blue skies with a warming sun persisted. So warm, in fact, that I sometimes drove wearing just a string singlet and a good New Zealand wool shirt. An anorak was always close by, though, in case a chill wind sprang up.
Our task, stretching over about three weeks, was to navigate our trusty and hardworking Ferguson tractors while towing sledges laden with prefabricated sections of the huts that would grow into the base "village". There were also crates, crates and more crates of food, equipment and fuel that would last the expedition for 18 months.
A round trip could take as long as five or six hours. More if, as frequently happened, we had trouble with the tractors' still-experimental metal tracks.
In the first week, as we raced to get Scott Base established, it was quite common to work 20 hours non-stop.
At first the "road" from the ship was a winding, rather hair-raising, route dipping through melt holes and past blue, broken cracks where the ice was beginning to break up in the summer heat.
We, the drivers and our occasional passengers, were always conscious that about a metre below - at least we hoped it was a metre below but it often turned out to be much less - was the deadly cold, green water of McMurdo Sound, water so cold that it could kill within minutes. But soon there was a tendency to become hardened to the conditions, to accept them without much thought.
Or there was, until Roy Carlyon, a surveyor-navigator, saw a seal poking its head out of a melt hole right beside the trail, and realised the hole must go right through.
We always drove in convoys of at least two tractors so we could help each other when required - and it was regularly needed. Quite often one tractor driver would walk ahead on the softer stretches with an ice axe, testing the surface.
After a week or so, some Americans arrived from their McMurdo base to service two of their cargo ships that had just arrived, and they bulldozed the snow and ice into a smoother, if no safer, surface.
That took something of the tenseness out of the first 4-5km, so much so that on one trip I was startled to see Murray Douglas, a mountaineer and dog handler from Mt Cook, bowling slowly toward me, all alone in a Weasel, sound asleep, with his pipe clenched firmly between his teeth.
Before I was able to reach him, the Weasel bumped into some piled snow beside the track and fortunately woke him up.
The next 3-4km retained some of the former hazards of "suicide alley", mainly because they were criss-crossed by fuel lines to the airstrip which had been bulldozed out of much firmer, thicker sea ice nearer land. Black fuel lines have a habit of melting wide crevasses into white snow and ice.
There were, too, gaping tidal cracks to trap a vehicle. Sometimes cargo on the sledges would be awash as we drove through.
But it was around Cape Armitage, the last long stretch to Scott Base, that prompted Trevor Hatherton, our chief scientist, to compare tractor driving with playing Russian roulette - "sooner or later you're bound to cop it!"
A couple of days after he said that, a Weasel carrying himself, Ed Hillary and Peter Mulgrew, who was our chief radio operator, crashed through and was only stopped from plunging into about 250m of very cold water because the sledge it was towing ran on and wedged the Weasel in the hole.
The three escaped with nothing worse than a dunking when the vehicle sank until its cab was awash. They managed to get out quickly because Ed had ordered that the hoods be taken off the vehicles' cabs after an American Weasel had sunk in similar circumstances the previous week, drowning one man.
"The Weasel's buoyancy tanks helped hold her," Ed said, as I reported, "but we certainly didn't waste any time getting out of there." And it took about five hours to drag the vehicle free and rescue the cargo.
Later the weather became more unstable. Once, when a storm was blowing up and the temperature was about minus 8C, I cut my hand while fixing one of the track links that had an annoying habit of coming unstuck. The blood froze instantly on the metal surface, like red enamel.
The work of unloading the ship ended during the last week of January, and not a day too soon. By then most of the bay ice was thawing rapidly and breaking off in half-mile slabs before drifting into the Ross Sea where it would eventually form the nucleus of next year's pack ice.
We had hauled more than 1000 tonnes from Endeavour and the Towle, a US Navy ship that carried some of our cargo that couldn't fit into Endeavour: not only the prefabricated huts but about 12,000 items ranging from a piano to a barrel of pickled pork, donated by an Auckland businessman, and even pipe cleaners. Only 10 of the 23 men wintering over smoked, but two were pipe smokers.
I remember Ed and Bob Holmes Miller, our deputy leader and a surveyor, poring over pages of foolscap lists in Auckland three months before we sailed. The list began with "adzes, awls, axes", and included everything anyone could think of, including a bootmaker's last, tailors' thimbles, Vaseline for cracked lips and dubbin for cracked boots, and a range of metal and woodworking tools for budding handymen.
There were such daunting items as sheath knives and firearms, and felt slippers, electric toasters and dramamine tablets, which anticipated our rough trip in Endeavour.
Of course, there were all the essentials items, but also - in addition to the piano - mouth organs, footballs, cricket gear, playing cards and many table games including chess and draughts sets.
We installed the large record player with 500 long-playing records in the mess hall and created a library of about 750 books. Time would not drag during the long winter months.
Now everything was ashore, and the real work of Scott Base, both scientific and exploratory, could begin in earnest.
