In the running for my proudest achievements during the spring months at Summit Station: shoveling out a buried cargo pallet with sixteen Jet-Assisted Take Off units: JATO rockets. In the long weeks of April flight delays, when the possibility was raised at dinnertime that we'd never get a flight, and so be stranded on the icecap hundreds of miles from the coast, talk naturally turned to our independent options for getting off the ice sheet. A lot of possibilities were raised, from the pedestrian to the exotic: the best of them called upon our stockpiles of either helium balloons or JATO units.
