WEBVTT FILE

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My name is Matt Means, and I’m a

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PistenBully expert that was hired for the 88-South Traverse.

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That was my first trip down. Pretty

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unique opportunity when I got a phone call from a friend asking if I wanted to do it,

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I was like, Absolutely. Sign me up.

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Living in the field in Antarctica is tough, everything is harder

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there. Getting dressed in the morning takes twice as long, trying to

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get breakfast going takes twice as long. What I really found particularly

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hard were simple things like going to the bathroom. It’s thirty

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below, it just takes a lot of time. Yeah, it was very cold. It’s hard to work

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in those temperatures. It’s hard to even think in those temperatures.

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Out in that environment, you don’t have much for parts. It’s pretty much zip ties,

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duct tape and some wire. And if it needs anything beyond that,

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you’re kind of out of luck. So we’re cruising toward fuel cache 4

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and I think we had 14 kilometers left. Kelly looks over and says

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“How much fuel do we have?” And I said, “Fourteen liters.”

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And these machines, they’re not very efficient.

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She immediately ruled it out. She’s like “No way, we’re not going to make it.”

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And for me, that’s like, yeah, we’re going to make it. How do we

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make this happen? So we drove for about an hour

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and you see the fuel cache. It’s way off in the distance. There’s

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nothing on the horizon except for a dot. And we drove

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the 14 kilometers on close to 14

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liters of fuel. Yeah, we coasted in on fumes to say the least.

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[music]

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[music]