When "Project Icicle" was first discussed, few Air Force people besides Lieut. Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher had any real enthusiasm for it; the idea of a weather station floating lazily through the Arctic Ocean on a huge island of ice seemed just too fanciful. But Joe Fletcher, then C.O. of the 58th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron at Fairbanks, Alaska, kept wheedling and nagging at his superiors. Last week Fletcher's party finally fought their way on to the ice island some 100 miles from the North Pole. With a double-thickness tent, a month's rations, primus stoves and a minimum of meteorological equipment, they set up camp.
New Landmark. Fletcher's crusade began over a year ago when the radar operator of a B-29 flying the dogleg "Ptarmigan" track (Alaska to the Pole) reported that he had picked up a strange target—an "island" of some sort where there should have been nothing but spongy, saltwater ice pack (TIME, Nov. 27,1950). Because the 16-hour weather hops over the white wastes of the Arctic get monotonous, the crews took a lively interest in searching for a new landmark.
To Fletcher, T1, as the first island was named, looked strangely like the great glacial ice-foot that puzzled Peary at the turn of the century. But if it was Peary's giant ice-foot, it was circling slowly across the top of the world in the sea currents that swirl through the Arctic. It might make an ideal, stable platform for scientific observation.
Alert Ptarmigan crews turned up two more islands, named them T-2 and T3. Fletcher studied them, picked T-3 for his weather station. Then he convinced Major General William D. Old that it was time to organize Project Icicle. The time to land on T3, they decided, was shortly after mid-March. The earth would be tilted properly on its axis and they would have the benefit of 24-hour daylight.
Nightmare White. Last week a ski-equipped C-47 of the 10th Rescue Squadron ferried Fletcher, Captain Marion F. Brinegar and Norwegian-born Dr. Kaare Rodahl, Arctic expert, to T3. C-54 mother ships flew along to navigate and drop supplies. The only newsman on the expedition: LIFE Photographer George Silk.
In a nightmare of white haze, white snow and blinding Arctic glare, the C-47 pilot picked out a landing area. Time after time he skimmed low over the island, slapping his skis on hummocks of ice, skipping from crest to crest like a stone over water. For nearly an hour he made passes at the island before he landed and slued to a halt. Photographer Silk crawled from the plane to shoot his pictures.* General Old, who had flown as copilot, trudged back up the plane's ski tracks in the 60°-below-zero cold. "I don't see how a man can live here," he told Fletcher when he had staggered back.
But Colonel Fletcher had come too far to quit. The two-men stood within a foot of each other, their hands over their faces, mumbling against the cold that numbs men's minds. Every now & then they would drop their hands and jump about violently for warmth. Eventually Fletcher won the argument. He and his two assistants were permitted to stay, and General Old pitched in to help unload supplies.