SPOT

CHAPTER 8

The South Pole Station is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth- 800 miles from the nearest permanent base.  For most people, the only way to access the Pole is via aircraft.  There are a very few adventurous souls who cross-country ski in, and a slightly larger number of people who mount overland expeditions using modified trucks or vans, capable of withstanding the extreme cold and harsh snowy terrain- but both of these last groups are what we here at the station call “tourists”.  I don’t wholly disagree with the designation, but I tend to think of them with a little more admiration than most of the old time Polies who have a propensity to sneer when they say the word. For me, being a tourist isn’t always such a bad thing, and I might go so far as to classify myself as one in my current situation, just with a far longer stay at the Pole compared to the few hours or days that the normal tourists are here for.  The other difference between me and them, besides length of stay, is that I didn’t drop $40,000 to $60,000 for the privilege of achieving the Pole.  Granted I have to scrub dishes for four months and they don’t, but I still think I got the better deal.

That being said, I have an ingrained proclivity towards experiencing a place by overland travel, and a huge respect for those who hold the same inclination, regardless of how much money they invest (blow) on such a trip.  The trials and tribulations of overland travel can be overwhelming, but the reward of seeing a place up close, feeling the dirt (or ice) under your feet, and letting the air of first hand experience fill your lungs, is more than worth it in my opinion, and far better than dumbly watching a miniscule and two dimensional version of the world slide by through the muted glass of a cramped flying cattle-car.  I can see the convenience and necessity of air travel, but only to an extent… I would be a happy man to travel by land or sea exclusively, for the rest of my life.

And that brings us back to the South Pole-the only other way to get here by land, besides laying down a year’s salary, is to get a job on the South Pole Traverse, or SPOT.  SPOT is basically a fuel resupply mission run from McMurdo, crossing the Ross Ice Shelf, up and over the Transantarctic Mountains via the Leverett Glacier, and across the Polar Plateau, 1132 miles to the South Pole Station.  Each SPOT mission (there are two this year) consists of about ten goliath sized tractors, each pulling a huge sled.  Some of the sleds are basically buildings with skis on the bottom- living quarters for the equipment drivers- while the rest are no more than giant sheets of thick plastic, with eight long rubber bladders on top- each bladder holding about 3000 gallons of fuel.  The motivation behind transporting fuel overland to the South Pole, rather than flying it there on LC-130s (which they also do) is the substantial savings in fuel economy of the overland versus the airlift method: for every gallon of fuel delivered via SPOT, 0.8 gallons of fuel are burned; for every gallon of fuel delivered by LC-130, 1.6 gallons of fuel are burned.

The program is relatively young, only five years of complete missions to the Pole have been accomplished (previous years of reconnaissance missions didn’t make it all the way), and they are still working out the best method to perform the operation.  To start, the road, if you can call it that, is essentially erased by shifting glaciers and blowing snow every year.  To combat this, ground penetrating radar is used to locate fissures and chasms in the ice, which are then either navigated around, or imploded with explosives.  The constantly blowing snow is another headache.  It doesn’t just cover the path, it accumulates into meter high sastrugi (a fancy word for snow drifts), which makes the Polar Plateau a frozen ocean of icy waves.  Driving over an endless rollercoaster of waist high sastrugi would not only be seat-numbing, but incredibly harsh on the vehicles and equipment.  To cope with this, each tractor is equipped with a massive snow plow on the front (to smooth the way) and the design of the plastic sleds and rubber fuel bladders is such that they kind of slither their way over the uneven terrain.

All told, it takes an average of 30 days to travel the 850 miles from McMurdo to the pole, and that’s with no rest days.  I can only imagine that this mind-numbingly slow progress would become unbearably monotonous, especially on the featureless wastes of the Polar Plateau, but the drivers I have talked to (the first mission of the season, SPOT-1, just arrived a few days ago) have all seemed in good spirits and not at all mentally unstable. In fact, 5 of the 10 drivers are returning crew from last year, which means that there must be something special about slowly driving across the endless white of Antarctica.  For me, the idea of traveling overland to the Pole is entrancing, but just like our current positions here at the station, I think I would be perfectly content with only doing it once.