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.