Given my longstanding affection for all-things Antarctica -- especially its exploration and a desire to educate as many people as possible about the remote seventh continent - a couple end-of-the-year stories have given me pause.
Motorized vehicles are not brand new to the bottom of the globe. Robert Falcon Scott took turn-of-the-century pickup trucks on his 1911 attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole, which killed him; the trucks froze-up within days. But this summer season two teams have for a first time driven cross-continent.
(I'm admittedly biased towards more old-school efforts. In the past couple decades I've witnessed some of the great crossings of Antarctica, going back to the 1989-1990 dogsled adventure, the Transantarctica Expedition, which took a team of six men and 36 dogs 3,741 miles from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula to the South Pole and then to the Russian base at Mirnyy. I was also there when Reinhold Messner and Arvid Fuchs (1989-90) and Borges Ousland (1996-97) pulled off crossings on foot.)
This year, between November 10 and December 5, a team from the Indian National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research drove four Toyota pick-ups on a 2,800-mile roundtrip from the coast to the South Pole and back.
Continue reading Bowermaster's Adventures: Antarctica by pickup truck?Bowermaster's Adventures: Antarctica by pickup truck? originally appeared on Gadling on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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