Some of you may know this man and some may not. I have had the pleasure of meeting him twice, once in Shaktoolik and once on the Yukon. At those times he was doing the Serum Run at age 94. He told me the story of how he was selected for Adm. Richard E. Byrd's team for the south pole. He plans at 100 years old to climb Mount Vaughan.
(Photo by Bill Roth / Anchorage Daily News)
Southern exposure recalls his own South Pole trip -- and the cold!
By GEORGE BRYSON
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: February 8, 2004)
Norman Vaughan served as a dog handler on Adm. Richard E. Byrd's historic 1928-30 Antarctic expedition. He slept outdoors one night when the temperature dipped to minus 73 degrees. Vaughan was in his mid-20s when he went to Antarctica.
In "With Byrd at the Bottom of the World," Vaughan described the party that made for the South Pole and returned: "Weary and grubby but elated, the overland explorers arrived safely home to Little America. Eddie Goodale and Jack O'Brien are standing, with Mike Thorne, Freddie Crockett, Larry Gould, and Norman Vaughan (right) on the sled."
Sitting in his Spenard apartment, talking about Ernest Shackleton's polar survival story -- featured in a museum exhibit opening here next week -- 98-year-old Norman Vaughan's blue eyes twinkled at the question.
Did he ever get seriously cold on his own journey to Antarctica?
Why, yes, answered Vaughan, the last surviving member of Adm. Richard E. Byrd's historic 1928-30 Antarctica expedition -- in which Byrd flew the first plane over the South Pole after his men built "Little America," the first settlement on the continent.
In fact, Vaughan, who made the trip in his mid-20s, was as cold as anyone there.
Not because he and his fellow dog handlers spent more time outdoors than any of the three dozen other men on the expedition.
And not because Vaughan was picked for the final party that skied and drove dogs more than 1,500 miles toward the pole and back to gather scientific data.
No, worse than all that, Vaughan said, was the time back in camp when he participated in a modest field experiment on the coldest night of the year.
It was Byrd's idea. The admiral had wanted to know whether wool underwear and clothing made from natural fibers and animal furs would be warmer or colder than clothing fashioned from man-made fibers.
So he challenged two of the youngest men in the party -- Vaughan, dressed in woolies and furs, and Eddie Goodale, dressed in synthetic clothing -- to spend a tentless night without sleeping bags on the Ross Ice Shelf with nothing but their clothes and a face scarf to keep them warm.
"When you lay down in a situation like that, you open your eye once in a while and look over to see what the other fellow is doing," Vaughan recalled.
"Well, I remember looking at (Goodale) and I never saw him moving once. And he said he looked at me and I never moved once. But we were both cold. Neither one of us slept."
Calling it a tie in the early morning, the two contestants broke the icy scarves off their faces and staggered into the mess hall to warm up around the stove. The little room was empty, except for the cook, who handed each a cup of the previous night's coffee. The meteorologist walked in then and wondered out loud why anyone except the cook was up so early.
"And we said, 'Well, we slept out last night,' " Vaughan recalled. "And he said, 'You did? ... Do you know how cold it was?' I said, 'No.' And he said, 'Seventy-three below zero.' "
Vaughan smiled at the old, cold memory.
When the temperature was lower than minus 60, he said, your breath froze as you exhaled -- then it fell to the ground.
"You could hear it freeze --shhhhh -- like that ... and then if you held a black satin cloth out in your hands, like this, you could see your frozen breath drop right onto the satin cloth. And then you could pick (your breath) up in your fingers."
Only once or twice in Antarctica did he ever get dangerously cold, Vaughan said. Once, near camp, he began shivering and couldn't stop. It got so bad he began to get warm, but it was a false warmth.
"That's the danger point," Vaughan said. "Your body makes this one last attempt to get blood out to your extremities ... and that was the final warning sign."
So he stopped his work and crawled into his sleeping bag. Eventually he quit shivering and his body temperature returned to normal.
A good sleeping bag can be a life saver, Vaughan said. The type they used in Antarctica was sewn from caribou hides purchased in Alaska. The fur could be turned inside or outside, but usually Vaughan kept it toward his skin. The bags were comfortable, he said. Their biggest drawback was the caribou hair that froze to his face and clothes whenever he bivouacked outdoors. Then he would walk around hairy all day.
They ate pretty well, Vaughan said. Ravenous for protein and animal fat, they'd consumed a lot of whale meat during the long voyage to Antarctica -- part of it in a square-masted sailing ship -- then penguin and seal meat once they landed.
Butchering seals, Vaughan became infested with parasitic worms, which began to multiply and crawl beneath his skin. They especially tormented his legs as he and the other dog drivers labored to transport 650 tons of supplies from the ship to the Little America building site 10 miles inland. The camp doctor tried to extract the worms with forceps, which Vaughan describes in his book, "With Byrd at the Bottom of the World," in graphically painful terms, but it took weeks until he was fully cured.
After Little America was erected, it was soon buried in snow -- and the expedition dug in for the winter. A few of the men grew homesick and depressed during the long months of confinement, Vaughan said, especially his former boss, Arthur Walden, "the old Alaskan dog driver."
Walden ran dog teams in the Klondike during the Gold Rush years at the turn of the century. Later, he retired to New Hampshire, where Byrd found him in 1927 and enlisted him to train and manage the expedition's dog teams.
Vaughan joined the party in New Hampshire too. He and two college classmates had quit their studies at Harvard to assist Walden full time as the veteran musher prepared 97 dogs for the journey.
At first, they all got along, Vaughan said. He'd driven dogs in Canada and knew how to manage a kennel. Walden had the most trail experience, but he wasn't as interested in all the planning the expedition required -- so Vaughan assumed some of those duties.
As the voyage to Antarctica began, Byrd began to delegate more of the logistical responsibilities to Vaughan, a trend that continued after they landed. As Walden fell into the background, his attitude seemed to deteriorate, Vaughan said. He grew more sullen as winter came. He didn't like Antarctica. He didn't like Vaughan.
Russell Owen, a journalist who accompanied Byrd, noticed the senior musher's change of heart and wrote about it later in a book that won a Pulitzer Prize.
"The dog driver (Walden) always thinks in terms of Alaska and maintains that this is the most uninteresting experience he has ever known," Owens reported. "Even the sledging here is monotonous, he says, because it is so smooth and easy going. He longs for the woods (and) the howl of wolves. ... His anger is a dangerous thing."
Increasingly, Walden began to direct that anger toward Vaughan. He no longer spoke to him during their dog chores. In the mess hall, he often glared at Vaughan from across the room. Other expedition members began to talk about it.
The tipping point came when Byrd chose Vaughan to serve as lead dog driver for the critical three-month journey toward the pole, leaving Walden off the team. After that, Vaughan said, Walden began to wear a pistol around camp -- which alarmed Walden's Norwegian bunk-mates. One of them warned Vaughan that Walden sometimes talked about killing him and he should at least be careful when he slept.
He thought then about confronting Walden, Vaughan said, but he decided it wouldn't help.
"He would have been even more angry with me if I had words with him," he said. "I certainly didn't want to go to Byrd, and nobody else went to Byrd about it either."
So Vaughan decided to begin sleeping outdoors just to avoid the worry. Pulling a sled behind him loaded with a tent and sleeping bag, he covered his tracks and slipped into the darkness each night into temperatures that hovered near 40 below. Then each morning he returned to camp.
"I wasn't happy about doing it," he said, "but I didn't dare not to."
Even though the Norwegians took Walden's gun away about a week later, Vaughan camped out for the rest of the winter. He could still picture Walden trying to kill him in his sleep.
All that ended with the overland expedition and their journey toward the pole.
It was very exciting, Vaughan said. Parts of it were perilous, with the dog teams threading their way through crevasse fields on ice 700 feet thick. Some of the dogs weakened and had to be put down. Food rations grew short. Still, they reached the Queen Maud Mountains -- just 273 miles shy of the South Pole -- which allowed overland group leader Larry Gould to record data on the geology of the area.
Then the group turned back. That had been the plan all along, Vaughan said, but he still felt disappointed. He was sure they had enough food and water to reach the pole across the relatively easy terrain that remained.
"(But) Byrd had made it clear before we left that the geological party would not be going to the Pole unless we went there as a rescue party of his plane," he explained.
The 750-mile return to Little America was just as treacherous as the outbound journey, but they returned to a hero's welcome. They were, in Byrd's words, "lean, hard, grizzled and dirty" -- and a most wonderful sight.
In his youth back then, Vaughan said, he didn't realize how important that moment would loom for the rest of his life.
Ten years ago -- at the age of 88 -- he returned to Antarctica, along with his wife, Carolyn Muegge-Vaughan, and Anchorage climbing guide Vern Tejas. Together they completed a successful first ascent of 10,302-foot Mount Vaughan, the Antarctic peak that Byrd named in his honor.
Now he's setting his sights on Antarctica once again. That's where he wants to spend his 100th birthday -- in December 2005.
Said Vaughan: "That would be terrific."
Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com
