Page 333 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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ANTARCTIC CHALLENGERS THE ANTARCTIC CHALLENGE (2014 – 2015)
Imagine driving down an icy highway in a big Dodge dually. All of a sudden, a tire rolls past on your left, picking up speed. The chassis starts to shimmy and then—Wait! That looks like your rims! What the heck?! Now picture being at the bottom of the world at 50 degrees below zero, out in the middle of an ice
field with no discernable difference between land and sky. Just white. Everywhere. A rogue wheel passes you by on your left. Only it’s not a tire. And it’s not a Dodge pickup. And it’s most definitely not a paved highway. That’s exactly what Peterson’s Craig Bolton witnessed several times during his stint on the South Pole Tra- verse in 2012-2013. He was the guy that had to get out and fix them.
If ever there was a story that encapsulates all of Peterson’s Core Values, it’s the Antarctic Challenger project. In 2014, Peterson won the bid to customize nine Challenger tractors for the South Pole Traverse. The project was significant both for its contribution to scientific research, and its historic parallel to the extreme weather machines Buster Peterson built back in the 1950s.
At the beginning of the Cold War, the US Army Corps of Engineers contacted Caterpillar about building low ground pressure machines for helping to build the Distant Early Warning system, or DEW Line, at Thule Air Force Base in Greenland. Because of the accelerated deadline, Cat pushed the project to Buster Peterson who could get them into iron much faster. In 1953, Peterson shipped the first D7 SnoCat to Greenland to use as a supply mule. The Corps of Engineers was pleased. When Caterpillar saw a viable market developing, they took the design on themselves. Over the next several decades, SnoCats found their way to US bases around the world including McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which at that time was operated by the US Navy. Sixty years after that first D7 SnoCat delivered, Peterson got an opportunity to build extreme weather machines once again, this time for the Antarctic.
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