27 October--Emperor Penguins!

The biggest event for me today was getting to see 4 Emperor penguins walking and sliding on their bellies across the ice runway.  The were about 200 yards away and past the "Stop--Entering Active Runway" sign.  I had heard that you could attract their attention and perhaps get them to approach by waving your arms like a bird flying, but they were very intent of going their way.  I could have gotten closer but would have had to radio the control tower for permission to enter the controlled space.  I would not have had a very justifiable reason for doing so--obviously.  They were heading south and away from the zone of open water.

Within an hour of this, Shuttle Jen and some others were back out at the Ice Runway and a group of Emperor penguins came right up to them.  They (the humans) got down on their knees and the penguins, being curious, came to within 2 feet of them!  Penguins have been known to enter aircraft and need to be shooed away.

Later today the first LC-130 that I've seen landed on the Ice Runway.  They are the snow version of the C-130, but they have retractable skis for take-off and landing.  They can land on either wheels or on skis.  If they land on skis, they can then retract the skis and taxi on the wheels.  This one and the others to follow are from an Air National Guard unit in upstate New York and they fly people and supplies to the Pole and to remote field camps.



You can see the retractable front ski in front of the person standing near the door and below the cockpit.  Pretty cool piece of technology.



26 October--Hoarfrost

This was something new to me.  Hoarfrost is freezing fog that grows into nice looking crystals on 
different surfaces.  Why some surfaces and not others?  I have no idea yet.  As the zone of open water gets nearer to us, this may become more common.

Van antenna covered in hoarfrost.

There were also some times of incredibly beautiful lighting--almost gauzy and very soft.

25 October--The OTHER Scott Hut

This was a day for a hike that got a bit longer than intended.  The original and first Scott Hut is only a half mile or so away from the station.  The first time I visited it, it was so extremely cold and windy that I was in some danger of frostbite or worse, so this was a perfect day for a quick visit.  Much warmer and no wind.  There wasn't much more to see but it was much more enjoyable.  There is a cross nearby for a person who fell through the ice and drowned.

It was such a beautiful day that I decided to follow the Hut Point Ridge Trail, though I wished I had had a map and a partner to hike with.  Accordingly, I kept my bearings fixed on where McMurdo Station was at every step.  As I ascended the ridge, the wind, no longer blocked as down at the Hut, was blowing hard, but not dangerously so.  It was a wonderful hike with great views all around.

If Cousin Andy is reading this blog, this is for you.  They have full staffs for both Winter and Summer and man both the active air strips and the town.

Interesting tidbit: things are so acronym laden here that one letter of one acronym is actually an acronym in its own right.  The "S" in SOPP is an acronym for a humungously long office in the Navy.

Correction: I earlier wrote that McMurdo Station is the second most remote US Post Office, behind the South Pole.  I learned that the South Pole is not an official US Post Office and is manned entirely by volunteers, making McMurdo the most remote post office.

Finally, we've been told how it important it will become to beat icicles off our vehicles before we go onto the Ice because the dark, cindery ones will melt deep potholes in the ice road.  Hard to believe, given the extreme cold.  Yesterday I actually found some in one of our parking areas.  They are about 3 or 4 inches deep and an inch across.  Photo follows.

24 October--Wow! What an Evening!

Today we went out to Cape Evans.  The preparations were intense.  There were 3 Deltas (two of them towing emergency equipment, such as stoves, sleeping bags, food and so on) and a tracked vehicle called a Challenger.  Its function was to tow out any of us that might get stuck or break down.  Nominally, the purpose of the trip was to train some new guides for leading recreational trips to Cape Evans and the rest of us were there solely for the recreation as a "morale" trip.

We drove out around Hut Point and almost to the Ice Runway before heading north for about 2 hours along a flagged route.  There are research huts at the Cape and the road must get maintenance from time to time to facilitate travel there.  If you were to go another 10 miles north past Cape Evans you would reach the current limit of open water of the Southern Ocean, an ocean you probably didn't learn about in school but which is now generally recognized.

The group split in two and our group went first to the Scott Hut.  Actually, it was his second hut, the one he built for his second and ultimately fatal expedition.  It's been preserved by the Kiwi-based Antarctic Heritage organization.  They maintain historic sites all across the continent, including--I found this out this morning--a hut in the Dry Valleys.  Only 12 people are allowed in at a time and backpacks are not allowed because of the close quarters.  Everyone needs to scrape their feet before entering to prevent moisture and gravel from entering and wrecking the wooden floors.  We were issued flashlights to illuminate the rather dark interior.  Touching anything is forbidden and it gives you the impression that they just stepped out for a moment and never returned.  According to the Kiwi woman we talked to in Lyttleton, this is not actually the case.  Things have been moved to more perfectly compose an image.  Other things have been brought in that would have been part of their equipment but which might have been stolen over the years.  The darkroom looks just like it might have back then.  The living quarters feature a long crew table with several lamps. The bunk-beds still have the animal fur sleeping bags (caribou?) laying there, as well as shoes, boots.  There are wooden crates and cans of various food items. The stable, which is built under the same roof, still has the sweet, acrid smell of a stables.  In one part of the stables area there is a forge and smithy for making or repairing items.  A pile of dead penguins is in another corner.  I'm not sure if it was Scott's expedition which did this, but there was one expedition that burned penguins in their furnace when their coal or fuel oil ran out.  Interestingly, one of our newest shuttles operators found that the Latin derivation of the word penguin comes from the word "fat," which would make a lot of sense.

What a magical, time-warp place!  I'm feeling very fortunate to have been allowed to get to this seldom visited spot.

The other group came from the iceberg and we took some group photos of the Shuttles department draped all over a Delta.

The iceberg was our next stop.  It apparently calved off last summer and didn't get too far before being frozen into this winter's sea ice.  Maybe it will get much further this coming summer.  It stood maybe 50 or 60 feet above the flat surrounding sea ice, meaning that probably 450 to 540 feet of ice were suspended below the ice.  Wow!  The stuff of which you read in school!  The colors ranged from robin's egg blue to a very dark royal blue.  The play of the light on it was marvelous!  We walked around the circumference of it and saw a seal basking perhaps 150 yards away near its hole.  It didn't move in the slightest in our presence.

All too soon it was time to go, but I was struck by the faint resemblance of the flat ice expanses surrounded by mountains with the scene on the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, only this was even more extreme and there was absolutely no vegetation here.  The ice was analogous to the salt pans, now being mined since my visit in 2003 for lithium.

We got home around midnight and I had to work at 0600.  Worth every bit of missed sleep.  I was a wreck the next day at work.

23 October--McMurdo Station, An Industrial Landscape

The setting is gorgeous, though stark in a way that only certain people can appreciate.  Zen priests and black and white photographers would perhaps do best here.  The town itself is, despite their best efforts over a number of years of clean-up, a totally industrial landscape.

Electrical wires run overhead, typical to most towns, but there are also sewer and water lines running above-ground through most of the town, reminiscent of most towns and cities in Russia.  They inhibit vehicle traffic and require pedestrian cross-overs.

Rows of shipping containers (known here as milvans--no idea why) containing every possible construction material, general supply item, and spare part are in huge flat areas carved into the slopes, awaiting uses in support of science projects and maintenance of the town.  When something is needed, you can't just run to your local hardware store for a spare part.  They have to be stored on station in preparation for most eventualities.  They have undergone a lot of progress over the years, but it still looks pretty ragged to me.  At one time they were stored willy-nilly all over and with no apparent system, but there is now a computerized system that tells the Supply folks which of the containers a certain thing should be located in.  Because of the huge expense of flying things in, most of these things are brought in once a year by ship in January and everyone must anticipate and plan for what will be needed.

In other areas there are piles of materials awaiting shipment back to the US.   These might include general trash, various separated recyclable items, old equipment to be disposed of or resold, food waste, and even the solid sewage sludge from the treatment plant.  These are taken out as space on the ship permits.  Even the old nuclear power plant here has been removed and most of its building torn down.  Over some more years the last of that will be removed.  Interestingly, all of the food waste and other materials that could rot are sent out in refrigerated containers because they must pass through the tropics on the way back to Port Hueneme in Ventura County on their way to disposal.  Without refrigeration the smells and gases produced would be overwhelming.  I don't know why they aren't sent just to New Zealand, but maybe the Kiwis don't want to be our dumping ground.

On a different note, here are some details of the cab of a Delta.



Gear shifters on a Delta.  Forward and Reverse on the left; individual gears on the right.






Dashboard of a Delta



22 October--Socked In and Flights Canceled. So what's New?

This is what we woke up to this morning.  Foggy, snowy, and socked in.  It was noticeably warmer and the wind was calm.  Trips up to the Golfball on the hill were like going through tule fogs in the San Joaquin Valley in Winter.  The snow has never been hard--certainly Flagstaff can snow much, much harder than what it did today here.  There are two main directions the storms come from.  This one came from the North; these come over warmer water (relatively) and carry more moisture and snow more.

The other direction the storms come from are from the South, from the South Pole.  These are so cold that they can't carry much moisture.  Instead the heavy winds blow the existing snow around along the ground.

 Needless to say, all the flights were canceled early this morning.  People are getting cranky, either wanting to get out of town and to the South Pole or to the remote field camps.  People in town are hoping they will go and make a little room in town.

There was an odd feeling for me this morning.  It felt with the snow and fog like a scene from the movie Chronicles of Narnia.  Only without the trees, witches, and children.

The weather also forced cancellation of our training trip to Cape Evans tonight, too.  They will reattempt it on Sunday.  Saturday night will be the ATO party (Antarctica Terminal Operations) Department, of which Shuttles is a part.  Tuesday is the shuttle's pizza party and soon after is Halloween, a big deal down here.

The demographics: the number of people in town are 985 as of yesterday.  They're broken down into about 68 percent males and 32 percent females.  Most are young, but there are a surprising number of people in their 60s and even some in their 70s.  Last year there was a shuttle operator who was 81, did 50 pushups each day, and ran 7 or 8 miles daily.  A surprising number of people are married (about one third in Shuttles) and either have their spouse here or back at home.  There is a woman in Shuttles whose husband and daughter are here and whose father was here in the 1960s.  Three generations!  A number of people have their grown children here.

The joke here is that if you ask where someone lives, they will ask in return if you mean where their storage locker is.  A larger number spend their off Ice time somewhere in Asia.

The ethnicity is overwhelmingly white with a very few blacks (5 or so) and a very few Asians (maybe a like number).  There is one Apache from Arizona, too.

The reasons for being here are varied.  For many it's the adventure, pure and simple.  Others have been coming down for years; it's something that gets into their blood.  One woman from Idaho at a meeting this morning said she'd been coming down for 23 years.  One person said that he was itching to get out of McMurdo because he felt uncomfortable around so many people. 

One fellow said his electrical contracting firm in Colorado was almost bust and he mothballed it to come down here.  A large number of people are seasonal Park Service employees bouncing back and forth.  One my my roommates is a horse wrangler in Rocky Mountain National Park in his other season.  Another person is the back-country ranger in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska.  The number of park service people goes on and on, but Montana and Alaska are both heavily represented.

Three windmills supply all of the electricity for the Kiwi's Scott base and supplements the power here. More are in the works, I'm told.

At the meeting this morning I learned that we will be getting really serious about knocking icicles off the vehicles when we cross the transition zone onto the Ice Roads.  The vehicles pick up black cinders that are spread on the roads (again, like Flagstaff) and if they fall off on the Ice Roads, the black color heats them up and can seriously melt a major pothole in the road.  One person spends part of his day patrolling the roads looking for black icicles to help fend off this threat.