Driving SW#4 is like going to 1st grade.

Wednesday night Paula and were able to lead a Delta trip together to Cape Evans. Hopefully you all remember what a Delta is by now. It is a homely 4WD vehicle that is a second cousin to the Ward la France Ambassador. Well come to find out it is also a second cousin to SW #4. Just because it is 4WD doesn’t mean that is capable of going off a paved road. (It was a very long way to go Mike, but yes I did just say that Engine 51 is related to SW4. Your turn!)





Oh yes, back to the trip. This trip is the second last recreation trip to Cape Evans for the season. And I will give a report of the Hut there some time soon, it is an amazing sight. One of the reasons that the trips will be ending is because the sea ice is changing and more importantly the snow on top of it is changing. The snow and the ice is getting warmer and so the snow is becoming soft and compressible. This is not a good thing when driving a 33,000 pound truck with 44 inch wide tires. So we had a good trip out to the Cape and the second Delta that was behind us got stuck in the snow 3 times. What happens is the first trip over the snow is fine, but the weight of the truck breaks up the solid snow on top and the next vehicle to pass sinks to the sea ice. And right now that is about 12 inches down.

Well I only got one chance to drive the Delta that evening and so I wanted to make it memorable. The second Delta was stuck about 1 mile from the Cape and our group was finished in the Hut. So we decided that I drive out to the other group and bring them to the Hut while Paula stayed behind with our group and the second Delta crew would shovel themselves out. So I got out to them and loaded the 15 passengers in the truck and started to back the 1 mile back to hut. This way I would not have to turn around and get off of the road. Well I did fine until I decided to back into a side road and then head to the hut forward. When I pulled forward towards the hut my rear wheels fell off of the packed road and I was stuck there. Very shortly after this the second Delta caught up to me and we unloaded the passengers and loaded them back onto their original ride. Fun!!!

And here is the ‘Hero’ shot. Me and my machine.



And this is the aftermath.



The amazing thing about these Deltas is that they are easy to dig out by hand. Much unlike SW4 and E51 if I might add. With three people shoveling for about 10 minutes we had the truck up and out of the hole. The tires are so wide that they act as snowplows and any lose snow in front of them will stop you in no time. And so all that is needed is a clear path from the rear tires to the front tires and a gently ramp going up in front of the front tires. I was amazed when we drove out. FYI I did help shovel.



To give you some idea of the hole, the rear stairs are usually about 15” off of the ground when they are folded down. As you can start to see in the last photo they are quite as designed. And the helper with the shovel is Kyle, a fellow NY’er. He is here with the 109th Air National Guard. He is a rigger that packs parachutes for all of the cargo that they drop out of C-130’s over science camps in the deep field.

Well we then made it successfully back home to MacTown with only two other instances of getting stuck in the snow. These two times Paula was the driver and as any good Fire Chief would, she didn’t let anyone out of the truck with a camera. No proof here! After all of the fun we made it home only a half hour later than we normally do. So it was a fun trip for all. And we did not see any Penguins but we did pass a seal.









Enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving weekend. We will be having our Thanksgiving meal on Saturday at 5 which is Friday at 11pm for you people in the East. And we also get a two day weekend, another good thing,

Take care.
R.J.