My name is Matt Means, and I’m a
PistenBully expert that was hired for the 88-South Traverse.
That was my first trip down. Pretty
unique opportunity when I got a phone call from a friend asking if I wanted to do it,
I was like, Absolutely. Sign me up.
Living in the field in Antarctica is tough, everything is harder
there. Getting dressed in the morning takes twice as long, trying to
get breakfast going takes twice as long. What I really found particularly
hard were simple things like going to the bathroom. It’s thirty
below, it just takes a lot of time. Yeah, it was very cold. It’s hard to work
in those temperatures. It’s hard to even think in those temperatures.
Out in that environment, you don’t have much for parts. It’s pretty much zip ties,
duct tape and some wire. And if it needs anything beyond that,
you’re kind of out of luck. So we’re cruising toward fuel cache 4
and I think we had 14 kilometers left. Kelly looks over and says
“How much fuel do we have?” And I said, “Fourteen liters.”
And these machines, they’re not very efficient.
She immediately ruled it out. She’s like “No way, we’re not going to make it.”
And for me, that’s like, yeah, we’re going to make it. How do we
make this happen? So we drove for about an hour
and you see the fuel cache. It’s way off in the distance. There’s
nothing on the horizon except for a dot. And we drove
the 14 kilometers on close to 14
liters of fuel. Yeah, we coasted in on fumes to say the least.
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