Wilkins. Fairbanks, Alaska, kept its radio ear cocked. But after the message (TIME, April 12) saying that Captain Wilkins and Pilot Eielson had brought their freight-laden monoplane Alaskan safely to earth 560 miles northward at Point Barrow, the Arctic air yielded no more news of them.
The Fairbanks operators were, however, in constant touch with Wilkins' overland party under Explorer "Sandy" Smith. The latter had been obliged to leave his comrades encamped some 140 miles south of Point Barrow on the Colville River, while he and an aide mushed across the tundra to the nearest settlement. He had run out of food for the dogs. Soon, the encamped ones flashed, the animals would have to be shot. Wilkins, second-in-command, Major Lanphier, left behind in Fairbanks, at once rushed repairs on the damaged Fokker Detroiter to send aid. Meantime he worried and worried about Wilkins and Eielson.
At last the familiar signal flashed in. They were at Circle City, 130 miles northeast of Fairbanks on the Yukon. That they were safe was good news, but there was better news still.
The day they flew north from Fairbanks, they had reached the shore of the Polar Sea with the Alaskan still ticking off miles like a great grey goose and had bountiful fuel still aboard. They had thought it a shame to land, and decided on an unscheduled reconnaissance flight due north over the seething floes. It was snowing a bitter blizzard, but far from shore the sun reappeared and they distinguished, 7,000 feet below, that the smooth sea had changed to a white inferno of hummocks — the great polar icecap in the center of which is what geographers call "the pole of inaccessibility," one of the objectives for which their backers had sent them north.
On they sped, peering over the horizon for some distant rising film that would mean land. They reached what their instruments told them was the approximate point reached by Captain Robert E. Bartlett in the ice-ship Karluk in 1913; flew another hour, whizzing 70 miles into a frozen desert never before penetrated by man. When they circled back they had seen no land, but from their lofty lookout they had explored by eye a swath of the unknown perhaps 60 miles wide and 100 long — 6,000 square miles of "new world." Returning, they had flown far inland before being able to identify land beneath them through the snow. Gauging their position by the shore line, they found Barrow and landed with the snow drifting waisthigh. Blizzards and fog had kept them there six days before they could start back to Fairbanks.
Going south again they had not navigated (used instruments) but had piloted their plane by "familiar" landmarks remembered from the trip up. A buffeting headwind threw their calculations off a lot, and when they reached the Yukon they were far to the east of their course. Eielson had recognized Circle City; they had descended to refuel and pass the night.