12 February--Planes, Ships, and Penguins

Mt. Erebus is truly entrancing.



Pressure ridges near Scott Base.

The pressure ridges continue to form and break up.  Just out of the above picture and to the left, a pressure ridge is growing up under the ice road transition.  The ice road passes over it at an oblique angle; as you climb up over it, the van leans to the left and then on the other, downhill side, it leans to the right.



Flag raising over Iwo Jima?





The freighter came in and off-loaded some 500 containers of food, supplies, and new vehicles and loaded a like number of containers of food waste, recyclables, hazardous waste, construction debris, and other sundry stuff.   Almost everything needed to keep a town of over 1,000 comes in on the ship.  Exceptions? Mail, fresh food, and things of an urgent nature.  Imagine planning all of your needs for a year--one year ahead of time!



20 November--Baslers on the Mind

I've been wondering about Baslers since we got here.  Why Basler?  They're really just DCs or C-47s, right?  Well, sort of.  I got a lot more of the story this morning from a young Canadian who just got in the other day and who works for Kenn Borek Aviation of Calgary.  It turns out that they are indeed C-47s or DC-3s, but with a big difference.  [Later correction: they are only C-47s.  The DC-3s are just slightly enough different that they won't work for this purpose.]

The C-47s and Dc-3s were built during World War II and, according to this guy, they were built knowing that they were likely to be shot down in pretty short order and so why build them too good?  The engines were designed to only last for 1,000 hours.  But it turned out that not only were they supremely airworthy, they had the strongest airframe ever (?) built.  They were what allowed the US to fly supplies over the Hump from India to China to supply the Nationalists against the Japanese and the Communists. And probably a thousand other things, in addition.

When the war ended, there were lots of these that were still flying and they were disposed of all over Asia and many made it to Central and South America, Alaska, and Canada.  I flew in one in the Amazon, as I think I wrote earlier, and thought then that they were pretty old back in 1970.  But that was then and this is now.

Somewhere along the line someone had the great idea to take the basic plane, gut it, and rebuild virtually everything on it.That's where Basler of Oshkosh (B'Gosh!) Wisconsin comes in.  They take a sound airframe and add 6 feet in length to it; replace the landing gear with beefed up replacements; replace the old rotary engines with turbo props for more power; and completely update all the hydraulic, electrical, and avionics.  What comes in an old derelict, comes out as a  virtually new $6,000,000 workhorse.  And that seems cheap to me!

Kenn Borek Aviation scouts these out in out-of-the-way places and gets them to Oshkosh for Basler to convert.  A crew member earlier told me that one of their planes came from the Guatemalan Air Force.  The Guatemalans had 5 or 6 of them and none could be flown.  KBA came in with their infinitely resourceful crews--working in the best bush pilot tradition-- and got them all working.  In return KBA got to keep one of them and take it to Oshkosh.  KBA is supposed to have 55-60 of them.

As an aside, KBA works in Alaska, Greenland, and the Canadian Arctic during the boreal summer flying mining crews around and delivering groceries to First Nations villages.  (Another KBA employee said that most of the groceries they flew in were chips, cookies, soda pop, and white flour.  Sadly, it sounded so much like the situation on the reservations at home.  Nutritional deserts.)  When it comes time to shift to Antarctica for the austral summer, they take a few days and hop down to the US; the Cayman Islands; Guayaquil, Ecuador; Ushuaia, Chile; and Rothera Station of the British Antarctic Survey in western Antarctica.  From there they fan out to various stations on the continent.  The seven that will come to McMurdo will hop to the South Pole one day and then to McMurdo the next.  In February the process runs in reverse.

I asked where their pilots come from and didn't get a real answer.  But I also asked whether they had retired Air Force pilots working on their staff and he said absolutely not, that they don't have nearly enough flight hours to work for them.  Their pilots usually have in excess of 20,000 hours.  My impression is that Air Force pilots might only have 1,500 hours.  I'll check on that at some point.





Scary thought:   I recently heard that the Fuelies get a regular blood test to detect levels of petroleum in their system.  Those folks are so fragrant of jet fuel or diesel that sometimes when I pick them up in a shuttle vehicle, I have to open the windows and crank up the heat to clear out the van.  They have to hang their work clothes outside their dorm rooms to air them out and avoid driving out their roommates.  And to think that I interviewed with Fuels before I got the Vehicle Operator position!

A Skua in its unnatural habitat.

21 October--Goodbye to Sunsets

Yesterday was the last sunset here for the next 4 months.  What a weird thought!  The latitude of 77 degrees and change south latitude brings the sun out full-time until around February 21st, approximately.  That will be about when I'm heading home.  Some local wag has posted a flyer asking for sacrificial virgins for a supposed pagan ceremony today.  I would love to see an atlas to see what the comparable latitude in Alaska and Canada might run.

Because of all the flights into and out of here, there is an amazing array of experts here to give flight weather predictions.  McMurdo is the center of it all, but there are observers in all the remote field camps and at the Pole and a network of automated weather stations all over the continent, including one on the shoulder of Mt. Erebus.  Here's a pretty good place to check out the weather here, but keep in mind that experienced hands here laugh at the predictions even the local forecasters make, so it's hard to know what Wunderground's reliability might be:

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=mcmurdo+station&searchType=WEATHER

These are known as Baslers, which are thoroughly modernized versions of the C-47 (military version of the civilian DC-3 .

One of the interesting things I heard yesterday is that one of the reasons they cancel flights to the Pole is a temperature of -57.  The C-47s are not allowed to be flown into that sort of weather even if the sky is cloudless and the winds light.  The Twin Otters are scheduled to be coming in a few days.

Yesterday I noticed the snow softening up.  Rather than being hard and bearing one's weight, it was soft and you could sink in to it.  Maybe even perfect for snowballs?

The big news is that tomorrow "evening" (what is evening but an arbitrary social construct when it's light all day long?) the entire department is going on a training trip to Cape Evans.  That's the location of Scott's second hut and it's the much better preserved of the two.  It was found some years after he had used it filled with snow and had to be dug out, but it's much truer to the original condition than the nearby one at Hut Point.  The second was  built after one of his ships was crushed by ice when moored off the hut here.  His thought was that, by being closer to the margin of the sea ice and open water, it would be a safer spot to anchor.  There is a large ice berg that calved off last year that is frozen into the sea ice.  It's supposed to be an eerily beautiful color of blue.  Return here to read more about it on Saturday (Friday in the US).

18 October--Daily Routine?

Cold, windy and harsh.  Just what you'd expect from Antarctica. The good weather there for a few days was just a teaser.  But the views are always phenomenal.  The Royal Society Mountains across the Sound are 50 to 60 miles away and you'd think you could ski out to them in a few hours.

I get to drive up to the Golfball several times a day and the views from up there are the best on station.  It's also the windiest.  There is a detachment of 4 Kiwi Army carpenters building a stairway project up there and they're exposed to the worst of the worst weather here.  I certainly can't begrudge them their morning, lunch, and afternoon rides down to the Galley for tea and a warm-up. The gusts up there can drive you sideways as you walk and they don't have much protection beyond their ECW gear.  I love the chance to take in the views of the glacier and Mt. Erebus.  At 12,400 feet, it's almost the height of the San Francisco Peaks at home.

This morning was the first day that the C-47s are here.  They're also known as DC-3s.  They were one of the workhorse cargo planes of World War II, carrying cargo over the Hump from India to China.  I rode one in the Amazon in 1970 and thought it was pretty old even then.  Several companies have been scouting out Third World countries and snatching them up.  One of the companies takes them up to Sandpoint, Idaho and completely tears them apart and refurbishes them.  They're in high demand for places like this, anywhere that needs a tough and reliable tail-dragger.  Not bad for a 70 year old plane!



C-47 or DC-3 on the Ice Runway



The Antarctic Heritage Trust on Scott Base helps preserve the old buildings of the Continent.



The Antarctic version of Banksy's tweaking of Matisse's Water Lillies.