The following is the personal account of a single, long-winded individual’s experiences living and working in Antarctica. No part of it has been reviewed or in any way endorsed by the United States Antarctic Program or the National Science Foundation, or any other public or private organization, institution, contractor, or company associated therewith. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone, for good or for ill.
Day 17: 30 January, 47 miles today, 220 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 8,159 feet, ambient temperature -25°C, Sastrugi National Park
Altitude affects everyone differently—and tends even to affect the same person differently each time they jump up in elevation. One of the other operators, for example, was a genial, good-natured fellow with an even temperament, a long white beard, and a crop of grandchildren back in the states, who struggled to catch his breath for pretty much the entire month we were on the plateau during SPOT 1. At least for the first few days at elevation on SPOT 3, however, he was doing fine. For that matter, I wasn’t feeling nearly as easily winded myself as I had the last time we had come this way, jumping on and off the tractor as easily as I had on the ice shelf below. But the one constant when it came to acclimatizing to altitude, at least for me, was insomnia. I’d slept badly the week I’d spent at Pole when I’d flown there in 2019, and I slept badly for a week or two after we climbed the Leverett two months before. And now, our first night on the Plateau, I barely slept at all, staring intently at the backs of my eyelids as the hours ground on without rest.
I felt like shit in the morning. Nobody functions well without sleep, but it always feels as if the decline in my mental acuity is sharper than most. I had to have every conversation at least twice, since even the simplest bit of information wouldn’t penetrate the thick, viscous layer of doltishness that had coated my conscious mind. I’d known this would be a long and grueling day even as I lay in my bunk, but there was nothing for it but to make it to the other side and hope for better when the night finally came. The wind had slackened, dropping from the sand-blasting gale that had sprung up yesterday afternoon to a steady cold blow. The fuel loads were all buried in snow—though thankfully not so badly that they needed to be shoveled out. This was, I was learning, one of the most crucial differences between having fuel and cargo hitched to your tractor: while the massive skis of the cargo sleds required occasional shoveling after a storm, most of the bits that required inspection and management are several feet off the ground. They don’t wear out as they are dragged along the trail, and they don’t get buried in snow. The ring straps on the fuel loads, on the other hand, do. They are run through slots molded in the plastic sheets to create tie-down points for the endless straps that do the actual work of keeping the bladders from sliding off the HMW, and they wear out as the loads runs over the ground. And when covered in snow, which turns out to be quite often, it can be hard to tell how close to failure any ring strap is until it gives out entirely.
I wasn’t sure if it was the stress the climb up the Leverett had put on all the rigging, or the relative hardness of the snow on the plateau (or, most likely, some combination of the two), but every time I checked my load I found at least one strap that needed an immediate repair. It was aggravating, and it wasn’t as if my fatigue had made me better equipped to deal with frustration, but the sun was warm and wind wasn’t terrible, and, pouty or not, I recognized that the situation could have been a great deal worse. In fact, things were going fairly well, and we covered more miles in the first day and half on the plateau on SPOT 3 than we had in the first five on SPOT 1, getting well into the formidable terrain of Sastrugi National Park before stopping to set up camp for the night. Tired or not, I thought it best to take advantage of the notoriously capricious polar weather while it was in a mood to play nice, so I dragged my wearied ass into the narrow shower. We might see a week of easy, beautiful days—or this might be the last evening before we got to Pole that filling the snow melter would not be a torment of wind and blowing crystals of ice. Clean and drained, I tucked myself into my bunk, falling at once into a deep and grateful slumber, altitude or no.
Day 18: 31 January, 39 miles today, 181 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 8,987 feet, ambient temperature -25°C, Sastrugi National Park
There is no safe or easy passage through Sastrugi National Park. The features carved into the firn are constantly evolving, and maintaining any sort of a workable road through the area would require near-constant attention. The trail had been untouched since we’d returned from Pole on SPOT 1, but was in surprisingly good condition considering that fact. We filed into a narrow corridor, the blade CATs in the front of the formation doing what they could to smooth out the worst of the bumps and ridges, while the rest of us stayed more or less single-file in the hope that we could protect the plastic sheets from the concrete-like sastrugi on either side of the trail. We had lost several days to this field of wonder and sorrow on our first trip south, slowed by weather, terrain, and a pair of HMW sheets ruined by the strange and hostile landscape. Things were going much better this time around, though the wind was still stolen from our sails by the myriad small hills in our path, which would catch one tractor’s load and then another’s, bogging down the engine until the vehicle stalled out.
Though probably no colder than it had been on our first visit, the constant wind gave the chill in the air a serious bite. The relative thinness of the atmosphere played hell with tractors’ cooling systems, and every small adjustment in speed (of which in SNP there were many) required an attendant adjustment to the canvas flap regulating the amount of cold air passing through the engine—and every time I cracked open the door to raise or lower the flap, just a hair, the wind would grab the thing from hand and rip it all the way open, flooding my cozy, protected little bubble of human habitat with the bellicose Antarctic environment. Another feature of the cold is the way that it makes plastic, usually soft and pliable in warm conditions, brittle as the thin sheen of ice that grows over puddles in a parking lot after a light freeze. I was reminded forcefully of this fact when I returned to my tractor from the kitchen after lunch, my pee jug strapped to my backpack to keep it from blowing away in the wind. It was a short walk—no more than two or three minutes of tromping across the snow—but a cold one, and as I clambered into the cab I slammed the door behind me with relief. Instantly, there was a huge BANG! like the sound of a paper bag popped by a bored seventh grader, the sound deafening in the small, enclosed space, and I was pelted with a shower of clear, plastic shards. My pee jug, made brittle by the cold and then smashed between the door and my backpack, had exploded.
This was the third jug I had lost in a week*—though at least this one was empty. As I opened the door to extricate the wreckage from the workings, a gust of wind blew a large piece out onto the snow. The SPOT 3 supervisor, helpfully, pointed this out to me over the radio, which led to my having to explain what had just happened to the entire crew while I ran out to fetch the plastic shard. While I had hoped to avoid exactly this sort of scenario, it did at least result in one of the others running to the heated storage shed to grab me yet another replacement jug while I cleaned up the pieces in my tractor.
Fuel circle was no less complicated by the cold or the terrain. It took several awful minutes to finally align my tractor with the CRREL tool, which was cockeyed by the rolling, chunky landscape, in such a way as to slide the pin free. I ended up having to run the pump, and needed to have someone on the ground guide me into place, uncomfortably close to the doghouse and balanced precariously atop a small, rounded sastrugi. The fuel pump is controlled from the cab of the tractor whose hydraulic system is being used to power it, largely because the pressure it puts out could easily overwhelm any of the connections if someone tried to control the flow with the nozzle. Each operator places the nozzle into their tank, locks it open, and then signals to the pumper when to begin and when to stop. Things were going well until the kindly, motorcycle-crashing grandpa gave me the signal to start just a touch too soon. The nozzle closed on him, and the hose grew stiff and wild as it was flooded with a gallon of diesel each second. He tried to open the nozzle to relieve the pressure, but with pump still running all this did was rocket the hose out of his control. I was unaware of any of this, until a sudden spray of fuel erupted into the air and across the windows of his tractor. He began signaling furiously to stop the pump as I hit the switch to shut it down. It had been running for only a few seconds, but already he and his tractor were soaked.
Still, he insisted he was fine. “Did you get any in your eyes?” we asked, again and again, as he blinked like a man forced without warning out of the darkness of his bunk and into the blazing sunlight. “Yeah, a little,” he said, “but it don’t burn or nothing. I’m okay.” He stayed in the fuel circle for another five minutes, resolute that he was good to keep working, but eventually he relented. It wasn’t the -25° diesel soaking into his skin, or the fumes wafting from his clothes—our constant haranguing had finally driven him to head back to camp early to get cleaned up.
*Ed. note—If you are tired of reading about my never ending misadventures with urine-containment vessels, trust me, it’s nothing compared to how tired I’ve become of having to write about them.
Day 19: 01 February, 23 miles today, 158 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 9,241 feet, ambient temperature -29°C, Sastrugi National Park
308 was a beast. A crane CAT with the full weight package, it was the heaviest tractor in the fleet—matched only by its sisters 307, which was driven by the SPOT 3 mechanic foreman, and 306, driven by the SPOT 2 supervisor. With a massive counterweight on the front, one set into the middle of each track assembly, and thick steel plates girding each of the four idler wheels, it seemed unstoppable even in slick, uneven terrain, when every tractor around it was spinning out. I was proud of the fact that together we had pulled a full fuel load over 850 miles. Almost every other tractor had had its load diminished at fuel circle to help it keep up with the group. For 308, that had never been necessary.
This was why I was selected to be among the elite, unfortunate crew tapped to help tow camp through Sastrugi National Park. The train—comprising the tool shed, the kitchen mod, the gen mod, the living mod, Fawlty Towers, H2, the dance floor with its 12-pack of u-barrels, and a tail of bundled HMW sheets bound for South Pole Fleet Ops—was simply too heavy for a single tractor, particularly up the slow, steady grade and across the burnished ice that kept slipping up tractors with far lighter loads. It was therefore decided that the three tractors having the easiest time keeping up with the convoy would follow behind camp, taking turns dropping off their own loads and playing the tow truck for a mile or so before returning to retrieve them.
The wind had found its voice, forcefully answering the question no one had asked: What if everything were somehow worse? Just hooking up to a fuel load was an exercise in discomfort, as the crane blocked any view I might have of the tractor’s hitch, leaving me to run from the cab to the hitch and back over and over again, making small adjustments until the vehicle and the load were perfectly aligned. In order to allow the other tractors in the tow crew to pass, we had to park our fuel loads off the trail, in fields of uncut sastrugi. The ground beneath us was wildly uneven, making it a challenge just to stop in such a way that we could effectively lower the jack on the CRREL tool and remove the pin. I had been gifted a single, glorious night of uninterrupted sleep, but altitude and middle age had shaken hands and agreed that one night would be the limit. I was tired when we began, and by load check I was ready to doze off in the freezing wind.
From the start, the pace was fevered and grueling: pull off to the side, jump out, pin stuck, climb up, reposition, repeat, in, out, up, down, pin out, jack down, climb up, tow camp, drive back, back up, jump down, check position, climb, reposition, repeat, in, out, in, out, up, down, up, down, set pin, raise jack, tow load, catch camp, pull off to the side, repeat, repeat, repeat, in, out, in, out, up, down, up, down, up, down, over and over and over. The group in front of camp moved at a steady crawl so as not to pull too far ahead of us—we were covering three times the distance, and had to do so as quickly as we could, hitting bumps, rises, dips, and divots at top speed until the constant rocking and slamming around the cab had given me a literal pounding headache. The solid, hard-edged terrain and breakneck pace were also hard on my load, and every load check I had something to replace. I was kneeling between two bladders, sawing the remnants of a failed ring strap from my load with a leatherman, when I heard the chatter from the party ahead. They were posing for a group photo at a trail monument due to be replaced the following year; meanwhile my fingers were so stiff from the cold I was worried I might drop my pointed multitool onto one of my full fuel bladders.
We were dumping all our energy into keeping up with the slow-moving parade, and, all things considered, had precious few miles to show for it by the end of the day. This terrible, freezing dance was clearly not the best solution to getting camp through this morass of ice and snow along with ten loads of fuel—we still had another forty miles and 600 vertical feet to go before the conditions would start to change. The SPOT 3 supervisor’s solution was novel, but seemed plausible enough. We would empty the fuel from the middle sheet of the lightest fuel load, then fill the bladders with air, move the sheet to the rear of the camp train, run a long dyneema rope from the CRREL tool, and use that to help tow camp with a single, dedicated tractor. But to do that, we would have to spend hours in the wind, transferring fuel from the center bladders and into those at the sides. Perhaps it was fitting that the long, hard, cold day should be capped by the longest, hardest, coldest fuel circle. The wind cut through every layer of clothing, making it feel as if our lined overalls and quilted jackets were made out of ice. Most people wore balaclavas or buffs pulled up to their eyes, the fabric hardened with frost and frozen condensation. You couldn’t see much more of a person’s face than their frosted eyelashes, but even in these you could read the misery of the penetrating, inescapable cold. The wind blown crystals of ice in the air caught the sun, and over our heads hung the most vivid, spectacular sun dogs any of us had ever seen—though we scarcely paused to look. Relief and warmth lay only at the end of the job, and though the wind pelted us with snow and suffering, we would get the damn thing done.
Day 20: 02 February, 43 miles today, 115 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 9,636 feet, ambient temperature -30°C, the Swamp (aka the Marsh)
I slept badly. While the problem was actually probably technically a lowered core body temperature—or, you know, hypothermia—what it felt like in the blazing warmth of my tiny bunkroom with the overclocked heater, under several layers of wool clothing and bundled beneath a down blanket, was that my skin was too cold, and I wouldn’t be able to find a patch of peaceful sleep until it thawed. I naturally assumed it had just been me, the guy prone to insomnia who still hadn’t figured out how to layer properly for the elements, but everyone at the morning meeting was dark-eyed and exhausted. For that matter, 308 hadn’t faired much better through the wind blown night. The interior of the cab was dusted with snow that had forced its way through every imperceptibly tiny gap in the door’s weather stripping, and the engine died the first four times I tried to start it.
Even so, the grand plan for towing camp made it all worthwhile—though it was touch and go at first, requiring a third tractor to get the full train moved to a flat, cooperative section of trail. It was an awkward rig, easily stretching a quarter mile from one end to the other: one tractor, hard-hitched to a fuel load, tied by a pair of long, shackled ropes to a second tractor, hooked by a third rope to the long string of camp mods and miscellaneous others buildings, etc. But it worked, some kind of Groundhog Day miracle. The first tractor, still hauling 12,000 gallons of diesel, gave the second just enough added oomph to keep it from getting hung up on the hills, spinning out on patches of ice, or bogging down in soft spots. In fact, it was doing better than I was. I found a slick piece of road almost as soon as I got rolling from my position at the very back of the convoy, watching with one eye as the rest of the tractors slipped into the haze of blowing snow while I tried to find just enough purchase to creep forward. I had been in the habit of keeping my movable hitch locked in place, but ran out into the cold to open it. Giving the tractor just those few extra inches of free play to either side gave me just enough good ground to inch forward until the tracks caught some traction and I could start trying to catch up.
The SPOT trail consists largely of a series of straight lines connecting a series of waypoints, each of these maybe 80’ to 100’ wide. Through Sastrugi National Park, however, the trail narrows to half that width, and meanders like a river around the biggest features. This is largely the work of the blade CATs in the front of the caravan, who cut a path for the rest of us while hewing more or less to the route marked by the fading green flags. You can tell when you’re coming to the end of SNP simply by the fact that the road starts to straighten out and widen up, as there are fewer and fewer obstacles for it to go around. You can also tell that you’re coming into the Swamp (aka the Marsh), as the full fuel load you’ve pulled easily for 900 miles across Antarctica becomes a leaden weight—almost an anchor, digging and dragging into the softening snow behind you.
308 had consistently been among the fastest Challengers in the SPOT armada, but for the last hour of the day I found that I couldn’t quite keep up with the rest of the caravan. It was embarrassing, a humiliation that could yet have remained private but for the fact that we crossed paths with Heavy Science Traverse at the very end of the day, when I was nearly a half behind everyone else. HST had followed the path we’d broken on SPOT 1 to Pole, then driven into the wastes beyond and camped there for a month, returning briefly to the station to recuperate before making the trek back to McMurdo. They passed our loose parade in tight formation, each of their half-dozen tractors perfectly spaced as they made their way north. What they’d have seen, in turn, was a nice cluster of ten tractors, flowing more or less together as a single unit—with one misfit out on his own, like a toddler struggling to keep up with a gang of older kids.
Day 21: 03 February, 44 miles today, 71 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 9,499 feet, ambient temperature -32°C, the Swamp (aka the Marsh)
It’s generally a bad idea to put things in your mouth that aren’t, like, food, or a toothbrush or something—I just seem to run out of hands pretty frequently, and my teeth seem like such a good temporary substitute that I’ll carry something between them without a second thought. This is a tendency of mine that I won’t defend, even when the things in question aren’t particularly gross, like finishing nails or a clean towel I’m awkwardly trying to fold. But if you make a habit out of a bad idea, it will eventually—to quote an old coworker of mine—“eat you in the ass.”
The morning was bright and still, naturally cold, but in a way that was easy to miss without the wind to slap you across the face with it, and I was, actually, double-fisting bad ideas. I used a ratty old NRS strap to keep the electric cables for 308 battery and coolant warmers wrapped up while we drove throughout the day. This is a good idea. Less good, however, was my habit of threading the frayed, defeated webbing through the metal buckle barehanded in the cold—as -32° is maybe not quite low enough to get contact frostbite in the time it takes to secure a strap, but it’s not far off, and it sure burns like hell for several minutes afterwards. Even worse, I needed both hands for the job, and reflexively stuck my mittens in my mouth to keep them out of the way. The mittens I’d been using for months to work with fuel and paint and heavy equipment. The mittens I’d been wearing five minutes before when I’d added a gallon of engine oil to my tractor. The mittens that I had written the word NO on the backs of in thick block letters to remind me to never, ever, ever use them while shoveling snow for drinking water. The sensorial experience that followed was intense and profound, but was not one I would recommend—even though, as it turns out, the flavor combination of diesel and 0W-40 will wake you up faster than even the strongest cup of black coffee.
We had reached the high point of the trail, which meant this was our last best time to bleed air from the bladders before begin the slow descent to Pole. This was something each of us had been working on for our own loads, by ourselves during load checks for the last day or so—but any bladder depleted enough by fuel circles not to have the internal pressure needed to force air out on its own required two people to bleed. So we paired up in the morning after we drove out to the fuel loads, parked in a long row along the trail behind camp, and took turns rolling across the tops of the half-empty bladders to force air out of the hose couplings at the tail ends, where the other person would manage the valve to prevent an eruption of diesel once all the air was gone. It was already much colder on the plateau than it had been when we’d done this job on SPOT 1, and the cold fuel below us as we flopped around was uncomfortable, even through our thick coats and quilted pants. Worse still, every bladder had a patina of fuel, even if none of them were noticeably wet with it, and the reek from my outerwear was unbearable once I was finally in my cab with the door shut. The taint of diesel had, at last, become ubiquitous and inescapable.
The sun was low, golden and bright as it traced a perfect circle in the sky. As the day wore on, the atmosphere in the cab grew increasingly sultry, until the tractor’s feeble air-conditioning was completely overwhelmed. Every day after lunch I would wage a quiet but very brave battle against the afternoon sleepies, frequently dropping off for just a quarter of a second before startling awake—but on days like this the struggle felt all but hopeless. What match can a single person pose against an alliance of such potent and determined adversaries? A full belly, weeks of fatigue and insufficient sleep, and a warm, cozy tractor are too much for even the strongest human being, and it was only a matter of time before I would doze off completely behind the wheel of my 33-ton machine. But this would not be my day. I was fighting to keep my eyes open, and had indeed nodded off once again for a bare moment, when I was brought to sharp attention by a call over the radio: the operator just ahead of me was calling the mechanic driving the tractor just ahead of him, barking his name into the mic in hard, staccato syllables. The mechanic had clearly fallen asleep, and his tractor had drifted well off the trail and into the bottomless soft belly of the Swamp (aka the Marsh) beyond. He snapped to, trying to wrestle his machine back onto the compacted roadway, but he’d gone too far out into no man’s land. He was stuck. The entire procession was brought to a halt so the operator ahead of me could unhook from his load and tow the mechanic free. The SPOT 3 supervisor, seeing that we were stopped anyway, called for an early load check, and as I threaded my arms into my dieselly coat, I looked out at the scene before me—two tractors trudging through the mush back toward the trail. And there, I thought, but for the grace of god go I.
Day 22: 04 February, 33 miles today, 38 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 9,373 feet, ambient temperature -33°C, the Swamp (aka the Marsh)
I was coming to dread the mornings. Not that contemplative first pint of black coffee, nor my hasty, taste-free breakfast, nor the mandatory morning meetings, nor even the ice-water shock of the alarm cutting through the sweet blackness of sleep. It was the first hour in the tractor, when my coat was still soaked with the cold of the day’s first load check, but the engine—barely warm enough to function as it was—hadn’t yet become hot enough to lend heat of any kind to the cab. Load check and fuel circle could be miserable and cold, especially in the wind, but these at least kept you moving. There is no layer as warming as physical activity, but the tractor severely limits what you’re able to do without accidentally shifting or breaking the key off in the ignition.* And so, across the wide unbroken expanse of the Polar Plateau, the first hour of driving was spent wrapped in diesel-infused outerwear while staring with mounting irritation at all the snow I’d tracked in that had yet to melt.
This despite the hour (give or take) we let the Challengers warm up each morning, idling away through breakfast and morning meeting. The native air was just too thin and too cold for the vehicle to properly heat up until a load was placed on the engine—which was why we were required to complete a warm-up mile at low speed each morning on the plateau before we could really put the machine to work. It didn’t help this particularly cold morning when we stopped just short of our first mile to reclaim an abandoned cache of fuel, left at the 89th parallel by a rushed and defunct field project. Pole had finally become desperate enough to want this 8-pack of weathered steel drums carrying diesel that been gelled** as it had sat over the winter in this lonely place, exposed to the extremes of the local environment. Craning the drums onto the small platform we’d tied to the back of the camp train was a straightforward job for a couple of tractors, leaving the rest of us to sit in our cold cabs while we waited. Not that I truly minded. While chilly and uncomfortable, moments like this were the only time I had to read the book I’d carried with me all the way from McMurdo.
How strange a contrast, then, was the afternoon. When the heater had finally come to life, and had been doing its job admirably for a few hours, it was then joined by the gleefully potent sun, making the cab a sweltering glass box of sweat and torpor. I might spend most of the afternoon in a pair of long johns and a t-shirt, but outside it was still really fucking cold, so preparations for load check included a complete costume change that took several long minutes and left me with the sense that I might pass out from heat before I was able to climb out of the cab and into the weather. It tickled my sense of irony, to look out on a landscape built entirely out of ice and snow while sweating though my underwear onto the towel I left draped over the seat.
I was mulling this over, draped across the cab like a tourist in the tropics splayed over a hammock trying to find some relief from the heat, when my reverie was interrupted by a call from the lone tractor behind me in the caravan: it had veered off trail, gotten stuck in the soft powder of the Swamp (aka the Marsh), and needed a tow. I threw on my pants, ran outside to unhitch from my load, and started driving the half mile back to where the hapless Challenger was buried up to its bogies in the snow. This one was piloted by a different mechanic than the one who had gotten stuck in the soft stuff the day before, and at first I assumed that his machine had been pulled off into no man’s land by the loose surface of a trail broken and torn by all the vehicles that had come before it. That happens. But as I drew closer, I couldn’t see any of the telltale gouges or ruts of a struggle against a force pulling the tractor against the operator’s desired path—just a pair of tracks leading straight from the road into the mush. The afternoon sleepies had claimed yet another victim.
*I have only personally done one of these, and can attest that finding yourself unexpectedly in the wrong gear is bad enough.
**I don’t know at what temperature diesel actually freezes solid, but the blend specifically made for use in Antarctica, called AN8, develops ice crystals around -60°C, making the fuel thick and viscous, or gelled. The winter temperature on the plateau regularly falls well below this mark.
Day 23: 05 February, 38 miles today, 0 miles remaining to Pole, elevation 9,301 feet, ambient temperature -34°C, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
The day we arrived once again at the South Pole was the coldest day of the waning summer thus far—though it didn’t feel like it. Standing in the sunlight was almost almost warm, the still air deceptive and seductive in its lack of a hard, immediate bite. It was easy to run outside in little more than a sweatshirt without noticing the cold until it eventually began to burn your naked ears or nose, or until you were stupid enough to grab an exposed piece of metal—like the buckle of the NRS strap you might use to tie up a set of cables outside the living mod—with your bare hand. The evening before, the SPOT 3 supervisor had run around the small kitchen, excitedly asking everyone still in the building what they thought the temperature might be, but no one was even close. “It’s because there isn’t any wind,” I said, as he bundled up properly to head back outside, “it would be absolutely miserable if there were even the tiniest breeze right now.” “Yeah,” he replied over his shoulder as he headed out the thick, insulated door, “the wind makes every last bit of difference.”
When we had crossed paths with Heavy Science Traverse in the liminal space between Sastrugi National Park and the Swamp (aka the Marsh), the two supervisors had traded information about trail conditions over the radio while everyone else listened it. The road through the Swamp (aka the Marsh), we learned, was firm and hard, having sintered and frozen solid in the six weeks or so since we’d last been through the area. It would easily support our eleven Challengers, ten fuel loads, and one ridiculously long camp train. As we made our way across the last 100 miles to Pole, I couldn’t help but wonder who among our crew had bullied the HST supervisor so badly that he would feed us all such a wildly bald-faced lie. The farther into the Swamp (aka the Marsh) we got, the swampier (aka marshier) it became. The last two mornings on trail, the tandem team rigged to the camp could not pull it free by themselves, and when they tried, found their tractors quickly sunk in up to the belly pan. Just moving camp onto the sturdiest part of the trail had become a painstaking, three-tractor ordeal.
Things were no better for me. I had one of the two heaviest and strongest machines in the team, but I was also still pulling a completely untapped fuel load—a feat many SPOT operators dreamed of but one that almost nobody accomplished. The fact that I had had almost nothing to do with any skill on my part. Given my tractor and my load, anyone else in SPOT could have traversed the distance to Pole with a full load; as far as I was concerned, it was luck that these pieces had fallen to me. And it was on the last day that that luck finally started to fail. Over and over again I would spin out, the machine coming to a sudden stop while the tracks beneath continued to spin furiously, churning their way into the delicate sugar below. I found that I could hit these soft spots less frequently—though never avoid them entirely—if I stuck to a thin band of compressed snow toward the middle of the trail. This was the line HST had taken as they rolled single-file on their way north a few days before, and it worked well enough to keep me from sinking too far into the powder until we had to fan out to park for lunch. I had a mechanic riding close to my bladders, so it was important that I called out every unplanned halt over the radio. “308 stopped.” Then, “308 rolling again.” “308 stopped.” “308 rolling.” This went on for several long minutes, until I had at last crept up into formation. “308 stopped for lunch. Finally.”
Even this close to the end, this was still the hard part—maybe the most taxing section of the entire trail, demanding as it did every last bit of each operator’s skill and attention every minute of every weary hour. Several tractors needed to be towed once they had veered too close to the edge of the compacted trail and had gotten pulled violently into the treacherous fluff of the Swamp (aka the Marsh). I had my turn, startled once again into awe as I stood holding my tow rope in front of my tractor, listening as the thunderclap roar of firnquakes echoed beneath the plains while another tractor came ripping across the snow to my rescue. But we were within striking distance of Pole, and it quickly became clear that reaching the station before we made camp that night had become our captain’s white whale. We slipped, we spun out, we got stuck, again and again and again, but the SPOT 3 supervisor pushed us on relentlessly, stopping only when absolutely necessary and for as short a time as we could manage, and bit by bit we limped ever closer toward the trail’s southern terminus. As the afternoon wore into the evening and the unrelenting southern sun slipped behind a bank of clouds, the station came finally into view.
There was little fanfare for our second coming. The South Pole’s short summer was almost at its close, and the novelty of our arrival had long since worn off. Even so, a pair of excitable polies stood on the wide, round balcony overhanging the station’s thick front door, waving at each tractor as we trundled past. We had crossed the Polar Plateau in a week—less than half as long as it had taken us to make the same trek on SPOT 1—but even so we’d still had to fight for each and every mile. Our emergence from the vacant horizon might have become routine, but the journey itself could never be. It was with great relief that we brought our tractors up to camp, staged in its usual place just downwind from the ceremonial pole. We plugged in our machines for the night and jumped towards one another as we passed, high-fiving with such genuine enthusiasm that we missed one another’s hands more often than we made actual contact. Once again we’d found the end that had seemed all but impossible for so many of the long and empty days, returning to a strange flavor of civilization from the greatest untamable wasteland left on the planet. We met briefly in our own kitchen for a single moment of reflection of our arrival and all that it meant, then headed inside the station, where the galley staff was working late, holding dinner for us.
