The beautiful weather which had accompanied us for several days still continued on the next day. It was really a surprising stretch of splendid weather. We marched six hours, then stopped for luncheon, and then drilled along for six hours more. Repeatedly we passed fresh tracks of bear and hare, together with numerous fox tracks. Save for these, the march was uneventful, with the exception of two narrow leads which we crossed over thin young ice. All that day the sun was hot and blinding to an almost intolerable degree. It would have been practically impossible to travel with the sun in our faces, so fierce were its rays. Yet all this day the temperature ranged between 18° and 30° below zero.
The last day's journey before we reached shore began at 5 p.m. in that same brilliant, clear, calm weather. A short distance from camp we encountered an impracticable lead which the captain's trail crossed. In one fruitless attempt to pass it we got one of our teams in the water. Ultimately the lead swung to the east, and we found the captain's trail, took it up, and worked around the end of the lead.
APPROACHING THE PEAKS OF CAPE COLUMBIA OVER THE SURFACE OF THE "GLACIAL FRINGE"
Only a short distance further on we got our first glimpse of the edge of the glacial fringe ahead of us and stopped our march long enough to take some photographs. Before midnight that night the whole party had reached the glacial fringe of Grant Land. We had now left the ice of the polar sea and were practically on terra firma. When the last sledge came to the almost vertical edge of the glacier's fringe I thought my Eskimos had gone crazy. They yelled and called and danced until they fell from utter exhaustion. As Ootah sank down on his sledge he remarked in Eskimo: "The devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife or we should never have come back so easily." We stopped long enough for a leisurely luncheon with tea ad libitum and then pressed on until Cape Columbia was reached.
CRANE CITY AT CAPE COLUMBIA, ON THE RETURN
It was almost exactly six o'clock on the morning of April 23 when we reached the igloo of "Crane City" at Cape Columbia and the work was done. Here I wrote these words in my diary: