Story from Ray Hansen's trip to Camp TUTO and Camp Century in 1955 -1958

US ARMY FIRST ENGINEER ARCTIC TASK FORCE

Ray Hansen's recollections from 1955-58.

Ray aren't any more, he passed away june 2011. He walks on the eternal snowy fields around Thule, Camp TUTO, and Camp Century. He passed away In Black hill, one of his favorite skiing places.

Nancy wrote:

Yes my dad did pass away after a skiing accident. He was a great skier and though 82 years old still tried to go every week. It was an unfortunate accident, someone out of control ran into him. He died from a subsequent bleed in his brain. However, he died doing something he really loved despite the risks.

Living a life of passionate pursuits up til the end... it's how I want to live my life .

As with all you others whose Thule or TUTO experiences mean so much, those exciting times sure enriched my life. I went up with the First Army Engineer Arctic Task Force ("EATF") in spring of 1956. The assignment ended in spring of 1958, and included two six-month "seasons" in Greenland.

This was at the height of the Cold War. The United States suddenly realized it had better catch-up with the Soviets. The US needed to learn more about design and construction of facilities, and operations and survival, in the Arctic Things the Russians had been doing for ages. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was directed to get things rolling. The Corps, in turn, created the EATF to construct the facilities and provide supplies, equipment and personnel to support Army R&D projects throughout the Arctic.

My first job was Operations Officer, under the then-CO, Lt. Col Elmer F. ("Ed") Clark. Clark was sure a character. His enthusiasm and initiative were unbounded, with a Sergeant Bilko way of cutting red tape to get funds, support and equipment. He had a Patton-like way of not suffering fools or incompetence, yet taking good care of his people. His energy, imagination, organizational and leadership abilities made those formative years of the Corps' Arctic program a success. Speaking of the soldiers, he had insisted and received authority that they all be volunteers. He also saw to it that we received double rations (and beer rations!).

He had two SOP's as to work schedules: ten-hour workdays and six-and-a-half-day weeks. The half-day off was Sunday mornings. "Everyone ought to be able to sleep in one day a week." he'd say. Usually adding "Besides, on assignments like this, free time just invites problems."

EATF's base camp, "TUTO," had been set up in 1955, maybe started in 1954. It was 15-20 miles inland from Thule Air Force Base, at the very edge of the ice cap. The name came from "Thule Takeoff"-where the slope of the icecap could be readily accessed by tracked vehicles or even on foot. Camp structures were, at least at first, just Jamesway tents, which have heavy quilt-like covering and a Quonset-hut shape.

Their large flat packing boxes provided a (somewhat) insulated floor. They came in various sizes, even big enough for equipment garages, maintenance shops, a mess hall, and of course housing for personnel. Later we replaced some of them with insulated wooden buildings, especially for maintenance of the big wide-tracked D-8 tractors so vital to hauling big sleds of supplies (and wannigans for transporting personnel) out to the ice cap camps.

Picture note: Outside each bunk tent was a 55-gallon drum, fuel for the pot-bellied stoves that kept the insides warm, or at least above freezing......

Each season we also established, or reestablished, four or five satellite camps:

Camp Whitehorse, at about Mile 25, was right in the middle of the crevasse zone. The middle of Greenland is bowl-shaped, and in most areas the icecap is held back by coastal ranges. The ice mass gradually-at "glacial pace!"-moves over and down from those mountains. As it does, its surface goes into tension creating stresses and strains, many of which open up as cracks-often wide enough to swallow a person, even vehicles. It's really just like a concrete beam: when bent too much it cracks. On the icecap, however, the cracks are often invisible, bridged-over by snow......

Descending into them was, in those days, the main way to study their life cycles, formation, width, depth, and movements. Yes, crevasses can be as scary as they look. Crevasse detection was really high priority, to develop ways and equipment to detect them, and finding methods for navigating over or around them......

Our largest icecap camp, sometimes referred to as Camp Fistclench-though I never knew why-was at Site 2, out at Mile 200. From TUTO it was a four or five day trip by cat train. Several dozen people worked there at the height of the season. Key projects included deep icecap boring, airfield construction, weather observations, snow structures, whiteout and snowdrift studies, and experiments with construction methods for camp facilities in areas of deep snow.

Results from these projects contributed to designs for Camp Century. That was the "under snow city," the newspapers called it. Its construction was started in 1958 and it was Located at Mile 100. Most or all of the Site 2 projects were relocated to Century, including deep ice drilling. That project, in 1966, accomplished the first continuous drilling through a polar ice sheet: nearly 5,000-feet deep......

One of Century's unique features was being powered by a Corps of Engineers' mobile nuclear power plant. My successor, then-Major Fred Irving, did most of the planning for layout of Century, and did an outstanding job of it. .....

We also had small field parties doing short-term projects. One, in 1956 I think, was just north of Thule, right on the Moltke Glacier. The furthest project at that time was in Southern Greenland, finding and surveying a route for icecap access up onto the icecap where a radar station was to be built......

I visited the outlying icecap camps each season, some frequently. I usually went out on one of surface supply runs, called "swings." These consisted of wide-tracked D-8 tractors towing cargo sleds and a wannigan or two, often accompanied by "Weasels," a sort of track-mounted jeep. The wannigans were for crew, passengers, and radios. Weather forecasts being virtually non-existent, swings often had to stop for and wait-out storms and white-outs.

Sometimes it was possible to creep along at a mile or two an hour by having a point man walk ahead to find and guide us from one trail marker to the next. But when it turned into a storm, usually followed by a white-out, they simply had to stop and hunker-down. Once or twice a day the drivers went out to their tractors (which were kept running round the clock) and pull the sleds forward a ways. If sled runners became frozen in, it was the devil to work them free.

I was on one of those for about a week once. Actually it turned out almost pleasant. The six or eight of us in the wannigan sat around its pot belly stove, listening as the old Arctic hands traded yarns of ice cap journeys and explorations in years gone by.

On one Site 2 swing I met Chet Langway (the future Dr. Chester C. Langway, Jr.) He was a new member deep ice drilling team, which in 1956 proved the feasibility of retrieving continuous, unbroken cores.

The next year they reached depths of over 1300 feet, to thousand-year-old snow. The information "buried" in these year-by-year records have tremendously expanded man's knowledge of conditions and changes over time in the earth's weather and climate, plus detailed information about air quality, pollen, dust, and distribution of chemical elements and molecules.

Key findings included the fact that major, hemispheric-wide, climate changes can and do occur with dramatic speed, not over long periods as once thought. Another was that atmospheric CO2 has doubled since glacial times, and that its large increases over last 200 years have been a direct consequence of burning fossil fuels. By the way, drilling in ensuing years obtained cores from depths of over ten-thousand feet, and down to bedrock-meaning back 100,000 years.

Core from depth of about 100 metes being removed from the core barrel by the SIPRE drilling crew. Continious 4" core was taken to a depth of 1000 feet. Drilling with intermittant coring continued to 1350 feet (10th century ice). Cores were recovered of snows that had fallen over 1,000 years ago. They provided year-by-year information on ancient weather, climate changes, physical and mechanical properties, and entrapped gasses, isotopes, pollen and dust. Subsequent drilling obtained cores of snows that fell over 100,000 years ago. Lead driller, Jack Tedrow, is 2^nd from right, and Project Leader, Dr. G. Robert Lange, is 3^rd from right.......

For Langway, the mid-50's proved the beginning of a beautiful friendship with the ice and paleoclimatology. For more info about ice cores and what they contain, see Greenland Ice Core: Geophysics, Geochemistry, and the Environment; Langway, Oeschger and Dansgaard, Editors; 1984.

Another dedicated person, who often worked alongside Langway, was Jack V. Tedrow. Jack did ice drilling for the rest of his exciting and many-faceted career. I have his unpublished paper "Tedrow's Eighteen Years on Ice" about the career that took him all sorts of places and challenges. In WW2 he had worked on the Alcan Highway, and then went to Europe as a combat engineer.

Never one to avoid action, he was up front-and taken as a prisoner by the Germans. But then, in his style, escaped. After the war he went into oil drilling. The Corps of Engineers found out about his expertise, and hired him for what became decades of ice drilling throughout the world.

I must, while mentioning outstanding people, add Dr. Henri Bader. He was Chief Scientist of the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE), and a spark plug behind the program as a whole. Unfortunately he is not in any photos I have.

One unanticipated trip out to Site 2 proved more adventurous than most. About half way through the 1967 season one our key people out there seemed to have flipped. He wouldn't answer when radioed him. Scientists out there said he was increasingly withdrawn, erratic, and staying in his tent except for late night visits to the mess hall for a sandwich. I needed to go out there anyway, so the CO sent me.

Weather prevented flying, so put together a re-supply swing and we went overland. After about five days we arrived to find that Doctor, a Major Barquist-who was doing research for the Army Medical Corps-had realized the fellow had real medical problems, and talked him into taking a break, go back to Thule for a checkup. Fortunately the weather cleared and he was evacuated. We heard later that he had had brain tumor, which proved fatal......

Mental problems were not new to Site 2. Ed Clark told about how, in 1955 I think, one the guys out there radioed TUTO describing trees growing on the icecap. He too was evacuated, though I never heard what happened to him (or the trees!). Another earlier Site 2 incident was a fellow who had taken along a fifth of vodka in his duffle bag. He kept it stashed-away next to his cot, tucked under the cloth of the edge of the tent-where cold air usually seeped in One bitterly frigid night he had been drinking but hadn't stopped to realize that 80-proof remains liquid far, far below 0 F. Next morning he was found dead, insides frozen.

Life-threatening emergencies were actually relatively rare. But every month or so we had a potential crisis of some sort: lost contact with a field party, delays in getting flights for evacuating an injury, a field party stuck in a whiteout, equipment breakdowns, and radio outages-usually due to auroras......

We had Army helicopters and small fixed-wing planes. Organizationally, I think they were or had been part of the Army's Transportation Arctic Group. It was a tough decision to ask the pilots to go out to the icecap unless the weather was perfect. One rescue flight did crash in the 1958 season, with multiple deaths. Even sending-out Weasels could be a hard decision. A few years later the purpose-made and reliable "Snow-cat" vehicles came into being, which would have solved many of our movement problems.

Besides men such as Clark, Langway, Barquist, Tedrow, Bader, and the dedicated soldiers of the EATF, another exceptional acquaintance was the Danish Liaison Officer, Danish Royal Navy Commander Orla Jensen. He--and his wife!-lived in a nice house on the outskirts of Thule (I think the US had built it for the Danes, as part of the base agreement).

Orla visited TUTO often, because our research was important to Denmark too. His wife sometimes came along. Naturally everyone wanted to meet them. Especially her, she being probably the first woman to visit TUTO. Needless to say, she was first gal we'd seen in months. The Jensens sometimes invited Ed and me (I had become EATF Executive Officer) to their house for an evening of dinner and lively conversation.

What a treat it was to be in a regular home again: curtained windows, well-set table, and cozy fireplace. Commander Jensen's career took a royal turn a few years later: the king promoted him and made him Captain of the Royal Yacht, a position he held for many years. In island-studded Denmark, that was a busy and highly responsible job. Despite the pleasure, the visits with them made me homesick for my wife--and five children, one just a few months old. Normally we were too busy to get homesick.

In the spring of 1957, Washington D.C. sent us a message to go help with an International Geophysical Year (IGY) project, up on an ice island near the North Pole. Only Ice Island I'd ever heard of was the fictional "Ice Station Zebra." Our mission was to go up and help the USAF fix a runway. Problem was, they had made all their plans based on using wheeled C-124's. Well, the first landing attempt had resulted in a crash.

Have I mentioned that, as far as anyone seemed aware of, that size plane had never landed on an ice island before? Ski-equipped C-47's, usually the norm, had flown a few loads, such as tents and rations, for a small ground crew. They had a couple pieces of very light construction equipment, and had scraped away some snow to make a strip. There was also a small Caterpillar dozer (D-2 model), which one of the AF guys said the Soviets had abandoned after they had used the island for a weather station, a few years before.

It was a rush job because several IGY scientists had been cooling their heels at Thule, getting behind schedules by the day. Some threatened to cancel, go home. Washington was getting embarrassed and panicky. So we put together a team, although no one at Thule seemed to know what caused the crash or what might be needed to make a suitable runway. First thing we decided upon, for sure, was to take a surveyor and survey equipment, that being a vital part of any airfield job. We also took a heavy equipment mechanic (those unseen guys are the real heroes behind most construction projects), and one or two equipment operators. One of my biggest regrets is not having kept the names of those fine soldiers who volunteered to come along.

For some months I'd been considering increasing my life insurance, and even had the application for it. Clearly this was the time to use it! I mailed it from Thule the day we took off for T-3.

The fifteen mile drive from TUTO to Thule -actually just a scraped-out dozer trail-usually took less than an hour by jeep or truck, in summer. But this was late spring or early summer and snow had fallen all night before we were to leave. The weather turned miserable, almost obliterating the road, so we had to take Weasels. In fact we took three of them, one a spare. Whenever you used those rattle-traps you also took a spare, given their unreliability.

within a half hour the visibility turned so bad that we-including Ed Clark himself-took ten-minute turns walking out in front of the lead Weasel to feel for the road-which by then could hardly be made out through snow-pattered windshields. Walking "point" meant plodding through deepening snow and squinting into the storm from one trail marker pole to the next. It was midnight before we hit the sack in Thule.

Despite the weather, next morning a ski equipped C 47 (aka DC 3, aka Gooney Bird) was ready for us to load. It was equipped with JATO (Jet assisted take off) bottles for taking off when snow got deep or sticky. JATO makes a rocket like takeoff you never forget (but actually you look forward to doing it again sometime). That day we were lucky, because the weather was calm, the scenery gorgeous. This was my first and thrilling view of the Arctic Ocean.

While gawking at the scenery, I noticed that a C-54 (a larger, 4-engine cousin of the C-47) seemed to be trailing us. I had been glued to the window, entranced by the sparkling blue-white icebergs and then the unending expanse of snow-covered ice to the north. What a coincidence to see another plane going our way, thought I. No, not a coincidence at all, said our pilot. He explained that it was there to spot us in case we had to put down unexpectedly.

Good idea, because T-3 was up near the North Pole, beyond the point-of-no-return for our fuel supply. That's when we learned for the first time that the next refueling was from 55 gal drums stashed on T-3. Reason for trailing C-54, he too-calmly said, was that if we should have to put down it would know where we were and get help. I didn't ask the nature of that remote "help." Drop us bibles maybe?

Obviously we made it. T-3's problem was obvious: the surface was like a stretched out washboard. The poor AF engineer who had been sent to build it was a 2d Lieutenant just out of college: his first assignment and first time in the Arctic. On top of that, he had no criteria from which to work, except runway length, maybe width. No wonder the first C 124 had crashed. We sure felt sorry for him.

Fortunately, one of our high priority projects, at Site 2, had been experimenting with constructing runways on snow or ice. The airfield design courses that I had taken helped, for they taught criteria for maximum amount of change in grade (levelness) per unit length of runway, by type of aircraft. Recalling those numbers, even approximations, turned out to be the only criteria we had to go on.

The Air Force guys had broken into the crashed C-124 and recovered its blessing of a load: a road grader. Fortunately it had a scarifier (scraper) attachment, which became an essential part of the job. We commenced surveying at once, and soon found that the runway's "vertical curves," (amount of ups and downs relative to length) had simply been too much for the C-124. Basically it had bounced off the runway then taken a nose dive in the snow, although it wasn't broken up--and no one had been killed.

The little old dozer with its almost toy of a snow drag, and the grader with its scarifier, worked around the clock scraping off the high spots......

Equipment operators and we surveyors took breaks in the warm-up tent every couple hours, about the only opportunity for even a catnap, because there weren't enough of us to have shifts......

The scrapings were continually moved into the lows spots, and tamped them the best we could with the D-2's tracks and the grader's wheels. It was lucky that the midday sun was warm enough to bring surface temps up near 32F. And lucky that the nighttime temperatures got down into the 10's and 20's (F) so that fills would harden.

Surveying was a critical part of the job, and was my main job. The EATF surveyor and I took turns, one with the transit the other with the survey rod. First we took elevations all down the centerline, and then at cross sections every 50 yards. After the equipment operators had worked an area we rechecked the elevations. And usually had to do all that a second time. We worked almost around the clock, constantly taking turns: one of us squinting through the transit's icy eye-piece, the other holding the survey rod, working our way up and down the runway. The Lt. Col. Clark supervised the whole operation, and often spelled us with the surveying. Probably ran the equipment from time to time too, but from a distance you could never tell who was where.

The project took about a week. When we finally reckoned it was level enough, we recommended the AF people make another go at it. That evening a loaded C-124 set down, and the pilot felt it was okay to call in the rest. Clark wouldn't let us depart until at least three flights had landed okay. So couple days later, after IGY scientists and more equipment had been safely landed, we departed feeling good the Corps of Engineers had helped saved the day.

An historical note about T 3: It had been floating, clockwise, around the Arctic Ocean for years. It was BIG: several miles across, and something like twenty feet thick. On its journey around the pole, it had been occupied one or more times by our Cold War adversary, the Soviets, probably as a weather station. Its location, when we were there was about 86 degrees N, 100 degrees W. That's northwest of Ellesmere Island, a couple hundred miles from the pole. By the 1960s, it had floated across Beaufort Sea and come to ground north of Point Barrow, Alaska. By then it was but a piece of its former self, but had again become a platform for research.

Back at TUTO, later that season, one of our many visitors was the famous Arctic explorer--and aviator, mariner, submarine navigator, and more)-- was Sir Hubert Wilkins. The Chief of Engineers had retained him as a consultant on matters of arctic clothing, survival, rations, and operations and so on. We sure felt great when "Sir Hubert" said how pleased he was with our camps and operations. In his report to Washington, Wilkins congratulated the Army on the condition of our camps, and even lauded them in comparison to what he'd found at the Antarctic camps. He wrote a letter to us saying that. I didn't realize, at the time, what an event it was to meet him.

Speaking of camp operations, we served double rations about 5,000 calories/day as I recall. Breakfasts always included options such as steak and eggs, the works. And our cooks-bless them-would serve a snack or a full meal to anyone, anytime, "24/7."

At the end of 1957 season, late September I think, after sealing-up the camps, I and most others flew on C-130's back to the States. I think a few of our people caught rides home on a Coast Guard icebreaker-which would have been more pleasant (quieter and warmer!). On a C-130 you could hardly hear each other. Besides that, the "seating" was canvass seats along the wall. If you tried you'd be horse by the end of the trip. Actually, the, most of us just bombed out on top of the pile of duffle bags that covered most of the floor, And dreamt of home.

Winters, the Task Force was kept pretty busy: writing reports about the past field season, giving briefings at the Pentagon, getting funds, planning and requisitioning logistics for the next season's work, making requests for naval and air support, and interviewing new volunteers. Around that time the Task Force's roles were expanded and its name was changed to "US Army Polar Research and Development Support Center."

Because most of the Greenland projects originated with and were supervised by specialized agencies that the EATF supported. These agencies, in addition to SIPRE already mentioned, included the Corps of Engineers' Waterways Experiment Station and its Arctic Construction and Frost Effects Laboratory, and projects run by the Army Signal Corps, Medical Corps, and Transportation Corps.

I'm trying but failing to find the words to share my feelings about that Greenland assignment. Ordinary words such as "adventurous" and "exciting" fall way short, so I won't try. Except to say it was a stroke of luck getting that assignment and working with all those dedicated and gung-ho guys in the EATF.

Updated at oktober 08, 2018