Page 334 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

It’s quite an accomplishment to be able to literally build a tractor for the toughest environment on the planet.
– Duane Doyle Jr., president of Earthmoving Operations, Peterson-Cat
Top left, clockwise: Buster Peterson visited Greenland and his SnoCats in the mid-1950s; Craig Bolton with penguin friends; Peterson SnoCat at Thule AFB in Greenland in the 1950s
The Traverse departs McMurdo Station on the month-long journey to the South Pole. One tractor can pull 24,000 gallons of fuel in bladders on top of sheets of HMW plastic.
In the fall of 2011, Peterson field tech Craig Bolton (Redmond store) had one item left on his bucket list. He’d set a goal of stepping foot on all seven continents by the time he turned 30. He’d spent the last two years in Afghanistan as a ci- vilian contractor, working on C7 engines for the Department of Defense. That September, he had eight months and one continent left to go. “The first time I went to Antarctica, I had absolutely no intention of ever going back. I was going once, to say I’d done it and get that checkmark. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But once I got there and worked a season, I absolutely loved it.”
Bolton worked his first season as a mechanic at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station repairing Cat dozers. He spent his second season as an operator and mechanic on the South Pole Traverse, a 2,060-mile roundtrip supply route between NSF’s McMurdo Station and the South Pole. “The only things I worked on were the Case Quadtracs because that’s the only thing that broke. It was a common occurrence to be driving down the trail and an idler or bogie wheel would pass up your machine. They’d come off at speed and once they hit the snow, they just took off because they had no load. At the time, it wasn’t funny. Now it’s hilarious.”
332 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG