There were plenty of vehicles around McMurdo. This is just a sample of them.
A Hagglund. Apparently these are designed to float if you should happen to break through the ice. They have hatches in the roof to escape through.
A PistenBully. Very popular with the biologists that make a lot of day trips from McMurdo and that have to haul around a lot of gear. Very manuverable. You can do doughnuts on a dime. Not that we did that or anything.
All of the vehicles were kept plugged in to electricity to keep the engines warm when not in use. As summer progresses that becomes unnecessary.
A Caterpillar Challenger. Nice.
A Ski-Doo Skandic. We used eight of these and two older Ski-Doo Alpine 1's for our expedition. The Skandic's were brand new. They had about three miles on them when we got hold of them.
A Tucker SnoCat. Now THAT's 4-wheel drive. They're old, but they're still going strong. They may be funny looking, but they can pull a lot of weight.
A Nodwell. I'm not sure if that was the real name, or the name given to it because of the movements your head made when riding in the back. I think it's the latter. It looked kind of homemade to me. It wasn't very comfortable, and it didn't hold a lot of people, but it was home for up to an hour when travelling back and forth to the airfields.
The Delta. This one was usually used for shuttling people back and forth to the ice runway. It had the same lack of capacity as the Nodwell.
This is 'Ivan' The Terra Bus. It was used mostly for hauling people to and from the ice runway. It had really fat tires so it could make it across the transition from island to sea ice that always gets pretty mushy as the summer goes on.
There were several Ford trucks with Mattracks. These were wannabe replacements for the SnoCats, but they have nowhere near the pulling capacity of the SnoCats, and bolts on the back side of the aparatus kept coming loose.
Ford 4x4 vans and trucks with extra fat tires. Again, for hauling people and stuff around. That's a popular activity down there.
One of several C-141 Starlifters that flew between New Zealand and McMurdo hauling people and cargo.
An LC-130 Hercules with skis (that's what the "L" stands for -- don't look at me...I didn't come up with it). These made flights between New Zealand and McMurdo, as well as between camps and bases on the continent. The C-141's required a perfect ice runway. The C-130's were able to land on not-so-perfect runways, so they got around more.
De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter. They were owned and operated by the Canadian company Kenn Borek Air Ltd. These planes bounce back and forth between the Arctic and the Antarctic depending on the season. They were used for all of the short missions between places like McMurdo and camps in the middle of nowhere. They didn't need any runway, but just a reasonably flat place to land.
An A-Star 350 or "Squirrel". I didn't get to fly in any helicopter on this trip, but they did come and go a lot.
2018-03-05