1 December--Let the Holiday Madness Begin



An LC-130 taking off from the Ice Ski-way.

The Ice Runway (or  Ski-way) is built on annual sea ice. The temperatures are getting up to to the point where its strength is diminishing.  On December 3rd the Ice Runway will be closed and all operations will move to Pegasus Field.  The entire Ice Runway Town will be disassembled; Pegasus Town is currently being built.  The advantage of Pegasus is that it is on the Ross Ice Shelf, a glacier floating on the Ross Sea.  In places the ice shelf is hundreds of feet thick.  The disadvantage is that a trip from McMurdo to Pegasus Field can take an hour.  That's why it is worth all the effort to keep the Ice Runway operating as long as possible and not just permanently using Pegasus. 

You just can't keep those kids down!


Over the Thanksgiving weekend I hiked over to Scott Base and returned via the backside of Ob Hill.  Among other things, that is where the Americans go snowboarding.  The Kiwis have their own slope and it's rumored to be much better.

1. 

I think this is what is called a ventifact, a piece of rock shaped by the wind.  It is a piece of sandstone found on a slope that is otherwise almost entirely basaltic.  That in itself is a bit odd.  The wind doesn't seem to have the same effect on the basalt, perhaps due to hardness, but it's created a form of desert pavement by blowing away the fine materials.

People had told me that I wouldn't believe what a special meal food services would prepare for Thanksgiving.  They were right!  But it was nothing short of astonishing.  People were all dressed up for the occasion, some in outfits like you'd expect back in the states for a big family get-together and others in McMurdo chic.  Like a dress and basic issue, blue Asics Tiger FDX boots (these are issued for people going to the really cold places like the Pole or people going to be out all day long unprotected.)  There was a definite style and flair.  The line began outside the galley at least 30 minutes before dinner and there were 3 scheduled sittings at 2 hour intervals.

There were both turkey rolls and 2 carvers slicing off birds recognizable as turkeys.  Several different iterations of mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes.  Gravy, of course.  An apple and sausage stuffing that was phenomenal. Fresh roasted asparagus.  Several other vegetables.  Rolls and fresh breads.  The vegetarians were not forgotten, either.  The dessert table rotated during the evening but I'd guess that there were at least a dozen different desserts, including the traditional pumpkin and apples pies, torts, cakes, fresh strawberries and fresh strawberries dipped in chocolate.  There was a dark chocolate layer cake with cherries between the layers, topped with a dark chocolate icing/glaze.  That one was so good that I had to go back just to convince myself it was as good as my first impressions said it was.  And it was.  Most people had wine and it flowed freely (the galley is normally dry with the exception of Saturday nights.).  sorry, Kathi--no tomato aspic.  No Mama Stamburg's relish, either.  The cooks were brought out to the galley by a long and extended standing ovation.  They certainly deserved it.  We were finally scooted out after 1.5 hours so that they could strip the tables of the linens and do the whole thing all over again for the next sitting.

The only downside: a person from the kitchen was discovered drinking on the job and immediately fired.  Flown out two days later on the first flight north.  As they say, it's a harsh continent.

Imagine a holiday dedicated to glorifying gluttony!

I went back for a sixth and seventh visit to the Ob Tube.  Good thing too since they removed it on the 30th.  The quality of the sea ice was deteriorating on the approach and it was only a matter of time.  There were white, 6-inch jelly fish propelling their way past the window.  Lots of krill.  We heard the calls of seals but another friend actually saw a seal pass by the tube 5 feet away.  When we surfaced, a seal was hauled out and completely oblivious to us.  They generate enough heat laying there that they melt a shallow indentation itno the ice.  Even with the tube removed, this will be a great place to come back to to watch the seals.



Weddell seal.  Blissfully unaware of the bloody seal genocide of 100 years ago.  Rest sweetly.



Scott Base

Only Flagstaff is missing.

Scott Base holds a certain fascination for the Americans here.  They take a shuttle over on Thursday evening for American Night at their bar.  They take a shuttle over on the half hour on Sundays to visit their shop.  They tramp over every day to shop some more during open hours.  Is shopping genetic?   A drive for the less familiar and more exotic?  To fill an empty niche in our souls?

The entire base is painted a single color.  It's much more modern than McMurdo and the various parts are mostly all connected by enclosed hallways, so there's no need to bundle up and scurry between buildings.  I suspect the reason is that it was either much more recently established than McMurdo or it recently replaced something much older.  McMurdo has been stitched together piece by piece over the years with little central plan.  Thus the Mine Shaft Modern Eclectic style at McMurdo.

As the open water of the Southern Ocean gets closer and closer, there is more tidal action on the sea ice and open pools are created along the shore in places.  This one gets used by the Weddells from time to time.

Holiday Greetings!


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.

1 November--Condition 1

I took Ivan the Terra Bus and a load of Polies down to the Ice Runway.  Being as this was at least their third attempt to fly to the Pole, they were getting frustrated and a few were slightly abusive.  Some have been waiting for at least 2 or 3 weeks for the weather to clear.  I remember some of them from a few days ago.  We had had to wait on the apron for a long time and then I moved them to the Ice Runway Galley to wait some more.  After that we went back to the apron for yet more waiting.  A few were whining that they shouldn't have to stay out here and that I should take them back to the better meals at the Galley in town.  While they had been issued  box lunches, things were not helped when it came over the radio that they couldn't actually eat in the Ice Runway Galley since the Galley staff had not prepared food for so many people, but that I, as the vehicle operator, could eat there.  Definite bad vibes!  After an interminable wait, that flight was also cancelled.

Ice Runway Galley



Ice Runway Galley





Ice Runway sewage outfall empties into the Sound.


So on the first I was again taking these people out again for the third try.  We waited again on the apron and
the flight was yet again cancelled and had to take them back to town yet again.  Only this time I was to also pick up a group of Australians that had just arrived on the Airbus and whose conecting flight out to the Australian Casey base was also cancelled.  They were to be delivered to the Big Gym to sleep on the basketball court.  And yet their attitude was uniformly positive and upbeat.  Contrasts!

The afternoon was perfectly calm and almost balmy by Antarctic standards.  The Royal Society Mountains across the sound were perfectly and sharply focused.  Razor sharp focus.  Talking to a weather guy on the shuttle, he was mentioning that something strong was coming in later in the afternoon, something with strong winds and a slight chance of snow.  Almost like clockwork I noticed out the van window thin streaks of snow snaking and meandering across the ice road.  Not too bad and visibility not reduced at all.  But over the next few hours it went from fingers of snow blowing along the surface to a layer of blowing snow several feet deep.  If you were to have been standing in it, you would probably not seen your boots.  Looking out over the Sound from town it eventually became so deep that the vehicles out at the Ice Runway were obscured and then--as the layer became thicker--the huts and towers.  MacOps announced that weather conditions were Condition 2 in most areas and deteriorating.  The radio began to crackle with orders to evacuate all personnel from the Ice Runway before it went to Condition 1 and all personnel were to be confined to whatever building they were in at the time.  The wind--like you've read so many times before in this blog--became cutting and penetrated almost anything you could wear.  People were leaning heavily into the wind as they walked and would be thrown around slightly by the gusts.  And yet this morning, the day after, it is again clear and not so windy, though still much colder.

If you want to take a look at current conditions down here, here's the link to the McMurdo webcam:
http://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/mcmWebCam.cfm

If you'd like to see the criteria for what cosntitutes Conditions 1, 2, and 3, follow this link:
http://intranet.mcmurdo.usap.gov/documents/WeatherConditions.pdf

Errata:  I earlier said that penguin has its origin in Latin for fat.  I just finished a book on Antarctic exploration and that's just one of 4 explanations for the origin.  Still, I like that one the best.

31 October--Fog



A Delta vehicle in the fog..



The last few days have been a fog and have blended into one another like the McMurdo Sound fogs.  It's become difficult to sort out one day from the other.  Day? Night?  What separates the two?  Two days ago I remember being taken back when I dropped off a passenger at her dorm at 1700 and she said good morning.  And a few minutes ago, a colleague in Shuttles said good night at 0620 to someone else.  She had just come off the night shift.  Our shifts at McMurdo go round the clock, the Sun is always up, and it's always bright out--except when there's an exceptional fog.  Very disorienting.  The concepts of day and night at this time of year are more determined by our work schedules than by the physical reality. 

The closest I've come to this is during our house exchange in Mikkeli, Finland during June.  The latitude there was just short of 62 degrees North latitude, not quite as extreme as McMurdo at 77 degrees South. In June the "nights" were a sort of gray twilight at midnight and thereabouts.  We went up to the Arctic Circle on June 21st, my birthday, and, at that latitude, the only day when the Sun never drops below the horizon. n That was magical!  But here at McMurdo the same phenomenon  goes on for 4 months! 

The only clues come from where the Sun is in the sky, not from lightness or darkness.  If it's in the East, it's morning.  If it's in the West, it's evening.  If it's anywhere else--well, we'll have to think about that.  And if you don't know where the cardinal directions are at a particular place, you are truly lost.  The only other clue I can think of as to whether the galley is serving breakfast or dinner foods.  Socially constructed reality.

An LC-130 taking off from the Ice Runway.  The Air National Guard calls them Ski-ways.

There is apparently a distinction between drifting snow and blowing snow.  If I have this right, drifting snow, as in this image, is snow blowing along perhaps 6 or 12 inches above the ground.  Blowing snow is perhaps up as high as 6 feet above the surface.

One peak of the Royal Society Range looming up over a ground blizzard.

The galley out at the Long Duration Balloon facility.  It's situated in a Jamesway shelter and cooks 3 meals a day for up to perhaps 50 people on shift here.

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.

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).

13 October--Views of Mt. Erebus

Blues skies,
Nothing but blue skies,
Nothing but blue skies, do I see.

Wow!  What a stellar day!  For here it was darn right balmy and easy to get over-heated.  Mercifully no wind to speak of.  A day to have Big Red unzipped for part of the day, no neck gaiter, wear sunglasses underneath the Ozone Hole. 

Managed to get 2 longer drives today.  The first was back out to the Ice Runway, where I've been many times already, but this was for Airfield Operations, something much more complicated than you'd ever expect, even on this small runway/ski-way out on the Ice.  At its peak, there may be 6 Hercules LC-130s (C-130s with skis, making the landing strip at ski-way in military parlance), several Twin Otters, and other planes.  A very steep learning curve on this!  But the views from the Ice Runway were to best yet of the mountains, of McMurdo, and of Mt. Erebus.

Later we got to go out to the LDB (Long Duration Balloon) site to see that and learn the road ut there.  It's out past Happy Camp and the roadway to Pegasus Field (another field we'll be using when the Ice Runway starts getting too warm).  On the way in to LDB there are a bunch of black flags, which normally mark danger zones.  In this case they mark buried buildings, one of which you can still see the roof of.  The accumulating snow buries them when they're no longer in use and the money hasn't come through yet to remove them as is required under the Antarctic Treaty.  The LDB site sends up 4 or 5 balloons each year that circle Antarctica in 4 or 5 days and stay up for up to 47 days before they have the balloon jettison the 5,000 pound payload to retrieve its data.  Physicists are the big users of the data generated. 

The views of Mt. Erebus from the LDB site were stunning with clouds part-way up the massif and the ever-present steam cloud emanating from the summit.  Again, wow!  What a planet we live on!


On the Ice Road from the Ice Runway to McMurdo Station



Ice Runway with buildings for various offices, 3 towers, and a galley.



Mount Erebus



Ice Runway



On the Ice Road back from Happy Camp



8 October--A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Happy Campers to Happy Camp.  Such a nice group of instructors.  One of them splits his time between here instructing in winter survival and sea ice procedures and back-country ranger/climbing ranger for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska.  I think that that might be the largest park in the system.  There was a beautiful moment when the clouds were the exact shade of gray of the ice and the only way to distinguish them was a thin slice of the most subtle lesser shade of gray.  Driving I missed the opportunity for the photo.  This place is a black and white, Ansel Adams photography paradise or a minimalist painters heaven.  Often it's all the same and very disorienting.
We later drove 18 people out to the Ice Runway and 102 came in.  Station count must be getting close to 800, perhaps more.