PENGUINS! (and more)

These penguins are hanging out at the 'Halfway House' which is the midpoint of where our fuels lines run betwwn town and the airfield. They still haven't finished molting, which seems odd since the winter is coming!

We had an amazing storm recently and because of that the sea ice has retreated further back into Winter Quarters Bay than anyone can remember in recent history. the ice is breaking up so much that it is encroaching the halfway house and threatening the road to the Pegasus White Ice Runway. From here you can see the Halfway House in the background.

This is the Skua; very big seagulls that will steal food out of your hands or wherever you may be hiding it on your person. I think they know about the Antarctic treaty because they wont ever move out of the way and will sit in the middle of the road.

It's pretty here

Our first sunset! 2/20/11 1:51 am

3 hour tour...

Because I am such an amazing wonderful employee I received a boondoggle despite only being here for a short season. I arrived at work one morning and was told to turn right around, get my ECW (extreme cold weather clothing) and head over to the MCC (movement control center) because I was getting a sleigh ride (a quick trip to the pole to deliver fuel and bring back cargo or waste). I didn't have time to be excited because I was supposed to be at the MCC in two minutes, but by the time I boarded the plane I was pretty giddy!

After getting to a specific altitude, which I believe was 28,000 feet we were invited to come to the cockpit to take pictures!

Some of the amazing things I saw from the plane:

The plane was extremely loud and freezing cold at first, but after a while it was so warm I could have hung out in a kiddy pool. Since the only thing we were bringing was fuel there was plenty of room to mill about and take pictures from the windows. I even made it back up to the cockpit a second time to take pictures.

Upon our decent I was invited back up to the cockpit for the landing. Even though we were seated and couldn't really see anything I was pleased because I have always felt that if I was in the cockpit I wouldn't be freaked out as much about flying. What can I say, I have issues?!

Right before we got off the plane we were told to take it easy because the pressure altitude was pretty high that day, however we only had 30 minutes before we needed to board the plane again.

Midway back to McMurdo we were told that weather had moved in and we were diverting to CTAM (Central Trans-Antarctic Mountains) for a few hours. Well I was as happy as a bug in a rug upon hearing that! CTAM hasn't been a field camp in decades and was only open for the season. It is also the only large field cap that has a view, thus all of the rumors I'd heard about how beautiful it was. CTAM's purpose this season was to find meteorites and fossils. This season they found 3 brand new dinosaur species and over 30,000 meteorites!

When we landed we were told we might not be able to deplane, but almost immediately after that the camp manager invited us to come visit, much to our delight. She greeted us very warmly and told us we were going to get a tour of the town and then snowmobile trips into the mountains! Holy crap, what! This was so unexpected and so wonderful my head nearly exploded!

Inside the shower tent:

An igloo out in Tent City (everyone sleeps in a tent)

Two of the town folk skidoo'd us up into the mountains and one of them took me down to a quartz vein to look for blue quartz. I ended up finding blue, white and rose quartz out there. SO amazing!

After we got back we met up with the flight that landed just prior to us to find out when we would be taking off. However we found out that the weather had gotten worse at McMurdo and we were going to spend the night. YAY!

Immediately the camp rallied to get us tents and sleeping gear, though luckily we only needed to build one tent because they had just lost 30 people to redeployment and were expecting almost as many Carps (carpenters) to come disassemble the camp after we left. We then joined them for dinner which was amazing and then we spent the night socializing and playing games. A few people did chip in to do dishes and help break down some of the structures.

Then we saw a fogbow!

The next morning we ate an amazing brekkie and sat in for their town meeting where we found out we might be leaving in the early afternoon if all went well. So we played some more games, socialized, and ate a wonderful lunch. I also took a bunch of pictures of their outhouses (more on that later).

At 1 o'clock we were on our way back to MacTown and arrived just in time for dinner! I still can't believe that I lucked out so well. I believe we had the longest boondoggle in history and we were the talk of the town for a few days. Lots of people were envious of our luck, but everyone was excited for us. It really couldn't have been better!

rock'n'roll antarctica style

recently we had the waste barn party and i was pretty stoked to go. last season i missed both of the wastie parties because i worked nights, and now i am on days and i could not miss it. it was jam packed in the barn and the music was incredible! we had banana hogs, the muppet band, and porn spill (reunion)!

Line Handler Extraordinaire

So for the past few weeks I have been volunteering as a line handler. Essentially I get paged, go to the ice pier and help tie up or release the ships that have been docking here.

Our first foray into line handling was to release the R/V Nathaniel B Palmer, although first we received a tour of the ship. I was most excited to see the galley because it was themed like a diner! It is a research vessel, so there is a lot of science going on, however its current science mission is to study ocean acidification.





After that we tied up the Oden Icebreaker then released it a few days later.



Right now we have the fuel tanker, USNS Richard G. Matthiesen. I actually missed tying it up because it was at 2 am and i slept right through the page.



These ships are pretty big and it is rather amazing that they can make it through the ice. The research vessel does have an ice rated hull, and obviously the Oden has an icea breaking rated hull, but the Matthiesen does not. Surprisingly it only has a single hull, so the ice has to be cleared out of its way so it doesn't rupture and cause an enormous spill.