Roald Amundsen and the 1925 North Pole Expedition

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May 26 brought startling changes to the ice pack. Shifting had occurred throughout the night, so by morning the two Dorniers had drifted within easy visual contact with each other. At 3 p.m., with temperatures at 14 F, Ellsworth signaled that he, Dietrichson and Omdahl would try to cross to N25. Within 20 minutes, the trio had worked their way to within 200 yards of a mundsen. Riiser-Larsen took N25’s canvas boat to meet them.

Ellsworth’s crew had marched too close to a patch of thin ice. Suddenly, Dietrichson crashed through into the freezing water. Fortunately, the men were carrying their skis rather than wearing them, but the pilot’s 80-pound backpack was pulling him down. At Dietrichson’s cry, Omdahl turned and also plunged through the ice. Both men scrambled at the surface, only to have the thin ice break under their hands. Dietrichson managed to get his rifle on top of the flimsy sheet.

When the two men crashed through the ice, Ellsworth managed to jump sideways as the sheet sagged beneath him. Finding a solid spot on some old ice, he reached his ski toward Dietrichson and managed to pull him partially onto the firmer ice. Omdahl cried out, ‘I’m gone! I’m gone!’ as his head began to submerge. The American managed to hook the strap of the mechanic’s backpack and hold on until Dietrichson could crawl over to help. ‘It took all the remaining strength of the two of us to drag Omdahl up onto the old ice,’ Ellsworth later wrote. The three managed to struggle to Riiser-Larsen’s boat, and he quickly transported them to the relative comfort and warmth of N25.

The six men decided their best chance of escape from the Arctic ice was to abandon N24 with its disabled engine and work to get N25 aloft. Amundsen’s Dornier, however, was still threatened by the icy slush freezing around the fuselage. Working with their makeshift tools, the party succeeded in freeing N25 and cutting a shallow ramp onto the ice pack. With a nearly superhuman effort, they hauled the Dornier onto the surface of the floe.

Fuel was drained from N24 to N25 while Amundsen and Ellsworth worked on a list of necessities. Any item not needed would be left on the ice. To make sure the food supply would last until they could get airborne, the rations were cut from two pounds per day to three-quarters of a pound.

Even allowing for abandoned equipment, N25 would have to take off with the added weight of more fuel and three more men. Amundsen and Riiser-Larsen reckoned that because there was no open water nearby, they would need at least 500 yards of relatively smooth, hard ice as a runway-and there was nothing smooth about the ice surrounding them. The only alternative was to use their makeshift tools and fashion a path for their plane.

On June 1, after the men had chipped and scraped ice for days to form a firm runway, N25 was ready to fly. The air intake on the aft engine had been repaired, and both Rolls-Royce engines ran smoothly. After manhandling the Dornier through deep, soft snow, the men clambered aboard. No sooner had they begun their takeoff run than the ice path they had so laboriously cut began to sag under the plane, and slushy water splashed against the duralumin skin. Worse still, fog suddenly blanketed the ice floe, forcing them to cancel their takeoff attempt.

For two days, the explorers battled ice threatening to crush the Dornier as they worked to chisel a new runway. On June 2, a second liftoff was aborted when the flying boat broke through the ice of the new runway. By June 4, heavy fog enveloped them and brought a new onslaught of ice pressure. ‘There were pipings and singings all round us as the ice jammed against the machine,’ Amundsen later recalled. To make matters worse, the shifting ice was inexorably heaving a forbidding iceberg which they nicknamed ‘the Sphinx’-in their direction.

Tags: Adventurers & Trail Blazers, Aircraft, Aviation History, Expeditions, Historical Discoveries, Historical Figures

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