Will Steger (b. 1944) and Jean-Louis Etienne (b. 1946) had taken upon themselves more than three times this distance in the 1989/ 90 Antarctic summer.
Steger, mountaineer, adventurer and dog breeder from Minnesota, who could call on a rich experience with dog sledges in the Arctic, and Etienne, a French doctor and climber, who had marched alone and on skis with air support to the North Pole, wanted to kill several birds with one stone with their 'Trans-Antarctica' expedition. Their traverse was to be the longest possible, they were to serve world peace and ecology, above all, it was planned as a public relations spectacular with live television coverage and its own magazine.
In a purely technical sense, the project was artificial. The traverse of Antarctica was not to follow the classic Weddell Sea-Ross Sea route. Steger and Etienne chose the longest possible stretch (6,450km), from the northern point of the Antarctic peninsula (Hope Bay), past Mount Vinson, highest peak on the continent, through the Thiel Mountains to the South Pole, then on through eastern Antarctica, via the USSR station Vostok, through Wilkes Land and down to the Davis Sea where the USSR base Mirny lies. Besides the two initiators, there were four men - a Russian, a Chinese, a Japanese and a Briton. Each had his job and all six made up a perfect team. Thirty-six dogs, which were often replaced, pulled the three expedition sledges which were laden with a weight of 450 kilos most of the time. More than a dozen depots, set up by air, made supplies easier. The international quality of the group was to strengthen its international concern: before the expiry of the Antarctic Treaty in 1991, the attention of the world public was to be massively directed towards the threatened continent - with a modern dog-sledge adventure, the likes of which had no equal. Although the expedition claimed to be the first traverse of Antarctica without mechanical aids, it was from the outset dependent on technical help like snow vehicles and aircraft. Twelve depots were supplied by air-drops, five research stations used as staging posts. In these altogether 14 tons of provisions and dog food were stored. Exhausted and sick dogs were flown out to recover and replaced by fresh ones. The elaborate logistics cost almost DM 20,000,000. Steger and Etienne raised the money from French industrialists, from an American dog food manufacturer, from sports gear firms and a television company.
Because of the distance, the expedition was compelled to set out on 17 July 1989 in the harshest weather conditions of the Antarctic winter. In September, with temperatures of -43°C., men and dogs were pinned down for thirteen days by a snowstorm. In spite of the delay they adhered to their timetable all through and reached the South Pole on 11 December 1989. From there to the Russian station Vostok, they used a route on which no man had been before. On 24 February 1990 finally they reached their ultimate goal, the USSR base Mirny on the Davis Sea, where their ship, the specially built U.A.P., so named after a French insurance company which had likewise sponsored them, was waiting. Apart from a couple of frozen dogs there were no casualties to lament. In 213 days the expedition had covered 6,400 kilometres, a daily average of 30 kilometres. A splendid performance.
At the same time and in part parallel to 'Trans-Antarctica', their paths sometimes crossing, there took place the expedition fully described in the present book: the 'Wurth-Antarktis-Transversale' [Antarctica. Both Heaven and Hell by Reinhold Messner]. Reinhold Messner (b.1944), the South Tyrolean mountaineer and adventurer, who is the only person to have climbed all fourteen 8,000 metre peaks without artificial oxygen, and Arved Fuchs (b.1952), a German seaman and Arctic expert, who in the winter of 1984 had paddled a canoe around Cape Horn and who on 14 January 1989 had reached the North Pole on foot, as part of an international expedition led by Robert Swan, took up the old Filchner/Shackleton plan for an Antarctic crossing in its original form. They made it come true with two air-supplied dumps as their only compromise to 'by fair means'. Under their own steam, on foot they walked across the continent after an aircraft had taken them to the starting point. Through a personal stake, they demonstrated their commitment to an Antarctic 'World Park' in a very effective manner: no more motorized locomotion, no intensive depot flying, as required by the use of dog sledges, no leaving behind of rubbish. Thank to their self-imposed restrictions, Messner and Fuchs managed with costs of just DM I,000,000 for expedition expenses (excluding the production costs of the television film).
The original plan of starting for the South Pole from the edge of the Ronne Shelf Ice came to nothing when, time and again, their departure for the Antarctic had to be put back on account of bad weather conditions. When the pair at last landed at 'Patriot Hills', a camp run by the private organization 'Adventure Network', on the edge of the Ellsworth Mountains, they were already two weeks late. A further week was lost through shortage of aircraft fuel. On 13 November 1989 they set out for the Pole front a point on the mainland 500 kilometres inside the Ronne Shelf Ice. Each man pulled a sledge with an 80-kilo load (cooker, tent, fuel, food) behind him. Only two supply points were planned on the (as the crow flies) 2,450- kilometre route, the first in the Thiel Mountains, the second at the South Pole. On 6 December Messner and Fuchs arrived at the Thiel Mountains and replenished their food stocks. After a two-day rest stop, they continued on towards the Pole. The satellite navigation system GPS, really developed for sea voyages and now used for the first time on a land journey in Antarctica, was operated by Arved Fuchs and came through with flying colours, On 31 December 1989 they reached the American research station at the South Pole. They had coped with the first section of 1,050 kilometres in forty-eight days (22 kilometres per day). After three rest days, the pair replenished their supplies for the second and last time.
At the Pole they loaded their sledges with some 120 kilos, the maximum which they were able to pull under the hard Antarctic conditions. Based on a need for 5,200 calories per day, this worked out at rations for forty-five days. The fuel was to last more than fifty days. The weight-distance calculation was based on the premise that the 1,450 kilometres over the polar plateau, Mill and Beardmore glaciers and Ross Shelf Ice, in part the old Scott route, to the New Zealand Scott Base at McMurdo Sound, was to be done at a daily performance of 35 kilometres.
Despite the bad state of Fuchs' feet, the two ice travellers thought they could improve their speed by almost 50 per cent, by making use of the wind blowing from the Pole with kite sails. The calculation soon went awry. Difficult sections, lack of wind and bad snow slowed them down. The recommended route over the Mill Glacier proved itself to be ideal. On account of horrendous crevasses, however, the diagonal crossing of the Beardmore Glacier was extremely dangerous. Standstill or short stages they compensated with whole-day marches, the longest of which was 104 kilometres. At last a favourable wind got up and on 12 February 1990 they arrived, thin but well at Scott Base. In ninety-two days they had covered 2,800 kilometres, an average of 30 kilometres per day.
For the first time in the history of Antarctica the ice continent had been traversed on foot without the help of dog sledges, as well as with the minimum of air support and in a fabulously short time. In 1911-12 Amundsen had achieved the same daily performance with his dog sledges. Steger and Etienne, despite constant dog changes and better equipment, did not much better. Fuchs and Hillary had been some 5 kilometres per hour faster with the gigantic material use of their snow tractors. Shackleton, the most successful ice traveller of former years and easily the earliest comparable with the present author, made 21 kilometres per day on his almost successful march to the Pole - pulling the provisions sledges himself over a long stretch like Fuchs and Messner.
* See Messner and Fuchs' Expedition Equipment List