Conquerors of Uspallata Pass

Extract

There was a race on, in 1914, to cross Uspallata Pass over the Andes—which would get across first, an automobile or an airplane? Man’s feet had worn trails across the high mountains, but neither of these two vehicles had ever crossed the dizzy heights of this Pass. Both were comparatively new means of transportation, and both faced great hazards in this undertaking. For the auto there was only an old, winding, dirt road; for the airplane there were the formidable, twenty-three-thousand-foot-high snow-capped mountains with their treacherous wind currents. It seemed as if Nature had had a prevision of these new inventions, and, to guard her inviolability, had thrown up insuperable physical barriers. The mountains hampered and impeded communication between various South American countries, and particularly between Chile and Argentina the Andes formed a tantalizing barricade. The ranges were like an ocean separating the two countries, and the same spirit which spurs man on to see what is over the horizon, or around the next bend in the road, would not let him rest until he had flown himself over the Andes.