For the uninitiated, I note that SIPRE stood for the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It had its headquarters in the late 1950s first in Wilmette, IL, and then in Evanston, IL, both north suburbs of Chicago on Lake Michigan. I spent time in both offices, working under Robert Gerdel ("Doc Gerdel," a man in his late 50s who had been deafened as a child and relied--quite successfully--on lip reading.

I believe that his PhD was in chemistry. The civilian director of SIPRE during those years was named Gillis, as I recall, maybe Robert. I knew Gillis somewhat, and enjoyed at least one jeep ride with him driving along the Greenland coast below Thule in summer, 1957.

Over Gillis was Col. Clark. SIPRE changed its name to the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in the 1960s and moved to Hanover, NH -its new location chosen at least in part because of the influence Dartmouth College professors had with the agency. By the time of the move, both Marv Diamond and Howie Reiquam had left the agency, Howie joining Boeing in Seattle. The "fence project" was as far as I know the brain child of Marvin Diamond (Marv) of SIPRE. He, along with Howard Reiquam (Howie) was the director of the Whiteout Project mentioned previously. Howie and he, neither of whom enjoyed being exiled to the Greenland Ice Cap three months of the year, took turns going to Greenland.

Marv's involvement in the fence project was, I believe, completely separate from his work on the Whiteout Project. Accordingly, in 1957, when Howie was the man on the spot with the Whiteout Project, Marv showed up late in the 1957 season to oversee the construction of various types of snow fences on the Ice Cap. The goal of the fence project was to determine which of several fence designs was best for building up a runway-shaped plateau above the surface of the Ice Cap, a plateau that could be used to land heavy planes. In other words, the fences were to act as snow fences, causing snow to fall preferentially on their leeward side.

I don't know whether there had been any small-scale field testing of the various fence designs. The test on the Ice Cap was far from small scale, and involved most of the military and civilian personnel of Camp Fistclench working for several full days in construction of the fences. In addition to hammering reinforced paper strips onto wooden posts during the construction phase, I spent a day taping colored tape onto several hundred bamboo poles.

In doing the taping I worked with a full-time SIPRE employee from the Keewanaw Field Station. The day was perfectly clear, with temps in the 20s, a painfully beautiful day on the Ice Cap marred only by the pain that developed in my fingers after about half an hour of work, as I found that I could not do the taping while wearing any type of gloves or mittens. In the midst of admiring the wonderful day while trying to ignore the pain in my fingers, I was drawn into a conversation with my helper, gradually realizing that he was a bit unbalanced.

He directed the conversation repeatedly to the possibility of people being left behind on the Ice Cap at the end of the season. From there he expounded on his religious faith and the help that his bible provided in comforting him when he got frightened. (At another time and place, I heard Doc Gerdel say with respect to this employee that he was afraid he was headed for "another breakdown," given that he was carrying his bible around with him again.)

At noon, I pleaded my finger pain and as a result the bamboo-taping operation was moved into one of the larger buildings of the Camp. That was interesting in itself, since I got to observe an egregious failure of human relations on the part of the young army individual (perhaps a corporal) who was in charge of the 20 or so GIs in the room. (I have forgotten what they were doing--perhaps they were also taping bamboo).

This young fellow began talking to the GIs about how terrible GIs were, how he would never want a daughter of his to have anything to do with a GI or to even live in the vicinity of an army base. Even as a not-very-seasoned 19-year-old, I was amazed at the guy's lack of judgment in saying things like this, which of course put him in a minority of one in the room.

The purpose of the bamboo was to provide the means to measure the depth of the snow augmentation as a function of position with respect to the various fences, as the years went by and the snow continued to accumulate in the production of the desired landing strip. Alas, it was all for naught, as I describe below.

So, the marked bamboos were stuck in the Ice Cap in a predetermined pattern mapped across the area, and the periphery of the area, selected for the landing strip. It was a mile or two from Camp, in the SE direction as I remember it. Then, for at least the next two day, I assisted in hammering strips of reinforced paper strips onto the vertical wood posts that had also been deployed in that area. (See photos.) The array was several hundred feet long and perhaps a hundred feet in width.

I do not recall the various fence designs used, but believe that they pertained primarily to the type of material hammered onto the posts. (I note in passing that we did not have anything as useful as staple guns--maybe they had not been invented yet--but strictly had to use hammers in attaching the papers to the posts.) I only worked with one design, that using continuous paper strips that were on the order of 1 foot in width. (See photos.)

A day or two after the job was completed, I exited my Jamesway (we were still living on the surface in 1957) to find strips of fence paper wrapped around my Jamesway and everywhere else as well. A moderate wind blowing from the fence to the Camp had undone the work of several hundred man hours. The fence project was for all practical purposes over with. No one said what some of us were thinking, namely that the experiment might have been thought out a bit better before deployment, with perhaps some small-scale preliminary runs being done beforehand. In my opinion the test of concept could have been set in a couple of hours, with the full deployment, with the three hundred taped depth measurement gauges prepared only after the concept had been shown to work.

In spite of the lack of criticism in the Camp, Marv was everywhere telling people that the experiment was worthwhile, since "the failure provided us with valuable information." In spite of the brave front he put up, I suspect that the failure of the snow fence project was one of the things that led Marv to leave SIPRE in the summer of 1958. (That is another story, as his abrupt departure from SIPRE in 1958, the year he was supposed to have his turn running the Whiteout Project on the Ice Cap, is what led to my de facto, and later de jure, promotion to Project Director). Whatever the reason Marv left SIPRE for the National Center fo Atmospheric Research, he seems to have had a successful career at the latter location. I once saw his name mentioned in TIME magazine in connection with his demonstration that cannon fired at Queen Victoria's coronation could have been heard at the great distances reported, as a result of the atmospheric conditions then prevailing.

The following four photographs show the construction of the set of snow fences in late summer 1957. They were about two miles from Camp, probably to the SE. The purpose was to determine which design of fence would be best for achieving the end goal, which was the creation of a large runway-shaped plateau that could be used as a permanent landing strip for large aircraft. Unfortunately, less than a week following the dedication of several hundred man-hours to the construction of the fences, they were all destroyed by a moderate wind blowing from the fence to the camp. During the next two seasons, while I was back at Camp Fistclench, no further efforts were made consistent with the original work.