The Motherlode of all Road Trips
Ten vehicles. 180,000 gallons of fuel. Lots of supplies for the South Pole Station.
Due to the massive budget cuts, it was deemed too expensive to fly fuel and other supplies to the South Pole this year. In light of this, the powers that be have decided it would make better sense to have a crew drag this fuel and supplies across the Continent; across the Sheer Zone, across a glacier and through the Transantarctic Mountains. And this is known as the South Pole Traverse. They have made test runs of this endeavor, but never with the fuel and supplies. The team was allotted 25 days to make this haul of 800 miles. After two weeks, they managed 17 miles. Maybe they’ll be there by Christmas of ‘09. What were they thinking???
My ex-roomate is on this trip. Her job is to watch the GPS monitors and ground penetrating radars for crevasses. When they find a crevass, they stop. They inspect it. Maybe they go down into it. If it’s big and unstable, they blow it up. Then they check it again. When the crevass is happily filled and stable, they carry on.
Seems a litte nutty to me.
It’s a harsh continent.
