Word: poled
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...South Pole is not what it used to be. After 13 months of lavishly air-supplied U.S. occupancy, it has been described as "looking like a Chinese laundry after a hurricane," with assorted litter peppering the snow. But getting around the Antarctic by land is still quite a trick. Last week New Zealand's Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mt. Everest, arrived at the South Pole after a 1,200-mile journey by tractor from the British base at Scott Station on the Ross Sea (see map). He made it with only one drum of gasoline left, enough...
...with four tractors up the Skelton Glacier to the ice-covered tableland on the far side of Antarctica's main mountain range. When he had established Depot 700 (700 miles from the coast), his job was done, but only about 500 miles separated him from the U.S.-occupied Pole...
Gasping Tractors. One hundred miles from the Pole, the going got worse. The altitude, 11,000 ft., made the faithful tractors gasp for breath, and the snow got so soft that they often sank deeply into it and had to be manhandled out. Once the unemotional Hillary radioed: "I thought at one time that this might be the end of the line for the tractor train." But the tractors made it, and Hillary would have been all right, of course, if they had not. He was carrying emergency gear and supplies for foot travel to the U.S. base...
...POLE!" shrieked a headline in London's Daily Mail (circ. 2,138-510), and below it, in the hoary old tradition of British I-witness journalism, ran Correspondent Noel Barber's breathless dispatch: "I have reached the South Pole. I am the sixth Briton in history to do so, the first for 45 years since Scott's party of five reached here in 1912, only to perish on the return journey...
...Back in Fleet Street, Barber's "triumphant arrival" at the Pole in a U.S. Navy plane won a game salute from the Daily Mirror (circ. 4,658,793). But Beaverbrook's Daily Express (circ. 4.024,800), the Mail's archrival in the derring-do dateline, was as elaborately unimpressed as its big type could say. On the day of his triumph, without mentioning Barber, the paper ran a cut of the thickly populated U.S. polar base, "The 'Town at the South Pole," and noted pointedly that "the polar 'bus run' flight has become...