Life at the South Pole
My McMurdo interviews temporarily caught up, I was manifested for another flight. At long last, a childhood dream was about to be realized. The Pole at last! Once more I would be taking an Air National Guard LC-130 from Pegasus Airfield.
First though, we had our safety briefing. If cabin pressure goes whoosh, the pilot, when he can, will start to drop to a lower altitude. (Given the size of some of the mountains en route, not too low I hope. Some of the Transantarctics are just shy of 15,000 feet.) Until then the plane reached better altitudes, in an emergency we had plastic baggies to stick over our heads, with temporary packets of jiffy-pop oxygen inside. About half probably wouldn’t work so if there were a real emergency, we were encouraged to keep trying—there were plenty of extras on board.
We took off on time and begin the climb towards the Polar Plateau. Some read, some slept, others went back to snatch a lie-down among the cargo pallets.
For me, the magnet was the porthole. Our course to the Pole ran a diagonal transect through the huge, sprawling Transantarctic Mountains, one hundred miles wide and two thousand miles long, and each minute of flight took us past unclimbed cliff faces, over immense ice falls that could swallow a city skyline, and along side glaciers flowing onto other glaciers. Who knows what is buried under all of that ice? A hundred new Yosemites wait to be discovered—and, maybe, diamond mines and oil fields, one reason the various research nations (China, Russia, Chile, Australia, and so on) want to keep a presence “on the ice.” The U.S. base at the South Pole is a premier science lab but it is also a factor in a geo-political chess game. None of that mattered on this flight.
The immensity of it all defies narration. You could set Switzerland down in the middle of this mountain range and it would be as small and lost as a child’s sneaker left behind in the mall parking lot. Antarctica is bigger than the mainland United States.
After three hours, we landed at the South Pole.
As with the WAIS-Divide camp, the plane delivered AN-8 fuel, which had to be pumped off, and as that was being done, ground crews began to reload the plane the outbound cargo, a mix of leftover construction materials from the new base (2008), materials from the previous two bases (going back to the 1950s), and the simple, expected things like trash and science cargo, including more meteorites—and about them we will talk in just a moment.
The main station is on stilts so that it’s not buried by accumulating snow. (The previous shape, a lovely Logan’s Run 1970s dome, had not worked out.) With the right control of air flow (manipulated by sculpted berms up- and down-wind), the wind scours out the snow around the footings. The whole complex rests on hydraulic jacks, so as the inevitable snow does accumulate over the years, the buildings can be raised up another few levels to stay above it.
Just in case anybody might suspect that I am actually in Hawaii, listening to Don Ho on my iPod while I download South Pole images off the internet, here’s the obligatory self-portrait at the geographical Pole proper. This “is” the South Pole. With windchill, air temp is just touching -40 degrees Fahrenheit. I did not leave my face mask down for long.
Adjacent to the geographical Pole, there is a symbolic photo-op South Pole, with flags of polar-associated nations and a chrome-ball topped barber pole. This shot below is sort of a double self-portrait, since you can see the tip of my bunny boot in the bottom foreground. You also can see the flags, just barely, reflected in the edge of the mirror ball.
Inside the U.S. station the floorplan is a modified “W”; here are the dorm pods. Additional summer berths are in huts out of view from this shot. In the main building the rooms are small but Ikea nice, with a bed, closet, nice work table, plenty of electrical outlets, and (best of all), no roommates. South Pole workers (and some visitors) get their own rooms.
During the summer there are 200 on up to 275 people working here, though anything past 250 really begins to feel a bit too crowded I am told—not enough bathrooms, not enough space in the galley to get lunch. The winter-over crew tallies in at 25% of this, fewer and, I would say, braver. They spend a winter in darkness—no sun at all, just the eirie light of the aurora australis turning the sky into curtains of blue and green—and a winter in isolation, since no planes can land, except in the most extreme medical emergencies. All their mail, their groceries, their change of hair-color dye—anything they need has to come in either before the flights close for the season or else wait until next year. One thing they do get to do in the winter is to grow their own fresh food.
Welcome to the greenhouse at the South Pole. No soil is used: plants are rooted in little cubes of sponge and given water and nutrients under growth lamps. Music plays and there is a sofa, so when the endless snow and endless winter get you down, you have a place to come and try to re-center. I think it must be one of the most coveted spots on base, any time of year.
If the green house is in use, still, diversion abounds, all year long. Many of the summer-only employees at the South Pole will go do interesting jobs up north in the off season. They might be rangers in Alaska, deep sea fishermen, scuba instructors, or archaeologists. Crewing yachts is one casual, low-paid, but always interesting way to see the world, and this poster advertises a “how to” information session.
Music is popular (one of the first things I saw when I walked in the front door of the base was a Sousaphone); behind this closed door I could hear the Grateful Dead cover band rehearsing. I am pretty sure that Jerry Garcia is looking down from his rainbow in Heaven, taping his foot in encouragement.
This notice on a lab door caught my eye. It’s hard to read but it’s a subtle spoof on light spectra; note the range set aside for Google secret projects, and also for Death Star lasers. In the galley, a computer monitor scrolls a packet of information, including in-bound flights, timelines of when satellites will be overhead so that Internet access will be available, and today’s weather. On the weather page, for the graphics part, there is a seemingly endless set of adventures with Star Wars storm troopers, who rappel of toilet paper rolls, fight with dinosaurs, and host tv game shows. Gotta love the energy and humor of these people.
Why a bowling ball? Somebody (now redeployed?) used to drink shots out of the finger holes at parties. Why is it still in the dorm hall? No answer. Maybe it’s a legacy thing: perhaps the successor to the bowling-for-shots game is due in soon.
Outside, the arts also flourish. Spoolhenge was very dear to my heart, since some of the AVC faculty have been over to see “Hoodhenge,” an eight-foot tall limestone sculpture in my back yard. Legend has it, it used to be taller. I like it just like this.
Ducts and tubing from previous bases have been made into a kind of open air sculpture: part barn, part sci-fi movie set. This is also part of the best Frisbee Golf route in the world. Just through the end of the tunnel (rather blown out in this exposure) you can see a goal basket.
Here is a better shot of the course.
Not having a Frisbee with me (that so was not on the NSF approved packing list), I had to use snowballs.
Fun is fun and work is work, and sometimes the two mix well. With the arrival of a Twin Otter from a remote field camp, that meant a meteorite crew was back. This was a reconnaissance team out scouting new sites; they still in one austral summer were able to bring back over three hundred meteorites. Main teams, working elsewhere, brought back 900 this field season.
They let me hold one of the large ones, which was unexpectedly heavy. (Well, duh, Hood, you know how dense iron is?) It was probably made of chrondite and was most likely around four and a half billion years old. AVC can get its own meteorite by putting in a request to Johnson Space Center; we maybe have oodles already in the Geology Labs on campus—I must confess my ignorance of what rock samples we archive—but if not, I know now who to contact at the meteorite center to ask for some for us. Once I check with my colleagues over in geology, that’s on my to-do list when I get back.
The woman in this picture has just come back from living on a glacier for five weeks. She is married and has an eight-year-old son. She’s a Ph.D. planetary scientist whose main job is working with missions to Mars. Antarctica always interested her. At a conference, she met some of the meteorite people, and wrote a letter asking to come along as a volunteer. The next year she wrote another one. The year after that, she wrote another one. I want to put something in bold caps here, since this is important: PERISENTENCE pays off. Good things are happening in her life because she went out and made them happen. Nobody is going to hand it to you for free—ask Dr. Fisher, our college president. You need to put up with set-backs and just work through it. In my case, the fellowship I am traveling on I first began working on just under four years ago. I talked to former award winners, I did research on what was being done and had recently been done, I lined up academic sponsors, I got publishers’ endorsements, but most of all, I kept my résumé active: I had a list of projects and artist-in-residencies already completed, to prove that I was worth their time. If you want something, go out and make it happen.
Staying active and being involved may something as simple as helping to offload fuel drums. Just out of view in this shot is one of the most senior meteorite guys of all, somebody who’s been doing this for thirty years. If anybody deserves special treatment, he does. Yet he and I interrupted the interview a number of times just to do something basic like help carry loads. Team work means helping out, no matter what work has to be done.
Back from five weeks the field, the meteorite crew was not done. They had showers, grabbed some dinner, then agreed to meet in the lab. There was a lot of GPS and GIS date to download and transcribe. (We have a certificate program specializing in this, just in case you want to know one way an AVC education ties in to cool future job plans.)
Other kinds of science happen here too, more than I can list. Taken on a less sunny day than the other shots, this facility shown below is the famous IceCube neutrino lab, using sensors buried in ice cores in a one kilometer x one kilometer grid. The sensor strings are a mile long. The IceCube project does cutting edge work in particle physics. There have been tv specials and entire books about it; if you want to find out what a neutrino is and how we see them, there’s a good summary on Wikipedia under “IceCube Neutrino Observatory.” Note the spelling (all one word): get it wrong and you’ll dial up entries on the rapper Ice Cube or the kind you put in your iced tea.
A variety of astronomy projects take place at the Pole. I have a really, really good overview article on it from a technical journal . . . I have it at home, that is. Back in Palmdale, in my home office, my files bulge with articles and the bookshelves bend under the weight of my polar library. Coming here, I just brought down a stripped down sampling of materials with me. This photo is the astronomy building and inside here, um, somebody does something interesting, I just can’t remember what.
Taking pictures at 40 below zero is probably not my favorite thing I have ever done. There are reasons why I took a job in a desert and not, say, Fairbanks. Several people have emailed to ask me what I wear here. When I am suited up, I have about all of the grace and dexterity of an intoxicated astronaut, and so far I have been very glad not to drop a lens cap, since Nikon lens caps cost 27 bucks a go, and I could easily see myself unable to pick it back up.
The white halo around my face in this shot is condensed breath freezing onto my parka ruff. Authentic polar parkas should be trimmed with wolverine fur or wolf fur, since supposedly your breath won’t freeze when it hits those products. The under-fur of the musk ox makes a kind of ultra-soft, hyper-warm wool called qiviut (Scrabble players take note of the spelling), ideal for scarves. NSF is an animal-cruelty-free employer, so no baby seal mittens or musk ox fur face masks for us. We make do with “Government Issue,” starting with the Korean War white bunny boots visible in a lot of these shots. I wear them with three pairs of socks (light, medium, heavy, just in case I have to share with Golidlocks). For the legs, I went out the day of departure to Sport Chalet and upgraded my Patagonia long-john bottoms to a heavier weight of fabric (and am glad I did). Over that layer, at the South Pole I wore a pair of regular fleece pants (on sale at a discount barn in Bishop, years ago), and over that layer, a pair of very thick pile fleece pants that were part of my gear issue in Christchurch. And on top of that goes double-heavy bib overalls, uninsulated but windproof.
Top-side I have two wicking mesh t-shirts, and from a shop in New Zealand, a wicking synthetic fabric field shirt. I bought it because it has large, zippered chest pockets, so I always have a (thawed) pen and sketchpad on one side, and on the other, my reading glasses. Over that goes the heaviest wind-proof pile jacket that Patagonia makes, and over that, “Big Red,” the program-issued down jacket that weighs something like 15 pounds and leans in a corner, standing up, it’s so stiff. Spare camera batteries were kept inside the Patagonia pile coat. Nimble ice climbing gloves by Black Diamond go inside generic Thinsulate mittens. I could photograph in the mittens but not well, and to change settings at all, had to work with just my glove liners on. My hands got cold quickly but so far, so good: look ma, no frostbite.
From the shoulders on up, we top off the outfit with a thick pile neck gaiter, a windproof balaclava (named after a site of the Crimean War, the war that gave us the Tennyson poem “Charge of the Light Brigade), and last, my own private snowboarding goggles, also from Sport Chalet, because they’re polarized and new and hence not scratched up, none of which would have been true about the goggles the program issued me. I am a fiend about top-quality optical glass, and have with me two back-up pairs of very expensive, very top-end glacier glasses. (I also have four back-up pairs of gloves, most with me most of the time, and who knows how many piles of dry socks. My wife was very firm when I left, about the not-coming-back-with-frostbite part of the agreement.)
After two days at the South Pole, I checked in with the comms center to see the status of the inbound LC-130 flight. Despite a grey day and blowing snow, they were en route and on schedule. I had just enough time to grab lunch and pack up.
As the new arrivals were taken in for the briefing, the outbound "pax" (passengers)—myself, a mechanic, and four meteorite researchers—practiced our Spanish at the edge of the fuel dock
And then it was just the long droning propeller flight back to McMurdo. We are given earplugs, and boy, do you need them. At last we landed. Wind was up, temps were down— with windchill, it was a surpising 2 degrees below zero when we set down. Normally that might have felt rather bitter, but compared to the Pole, I hardly bothered to zip up Big Red. Nice day we’re having! Who’s up for beach valleyball?
If this blog has made people want to come down here, McMurdo almost always needs dishwashers for $350 a week, room and board and flights included. When I came into the Galley for dinner after my return Pole flight, I saw these new spa posters put up, advertising for dishwashers. (At least, I think that is what they are advertising for.) Hmm, a long time ago I used to wash dishes up at Sequoia National Park, so perhaps like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, I maybe ought to think about getting back to my roots and simplifying my life. But do you really think it will make me look younger?
My McMurdo interviews temporarily caught up, I was manifested for another flight. At long last, a childhood dream was about to be realized. The Pole at last! Once more I would be taking an Air National Guard LC-130 from Pegasus Airfield.
First though, we had our safety briefing. If cabin pressure goes whoosh, the pilot, when he can, will start to drop to a lower altitude. (Given the size of some of the mountains en route, not too low I hope. Some of the Transantarctics are just shy of 15,000 feet.) Until then the plane reached better altitudes, in an emergency we had plastic baggies to stick over our heads, with temporary packets of jiffy-pop oxygen inside. About half probably wouldn’t work so if there were a real emergency, we were encouraged to keep trying—there were plenty of extras on board.
We took off on time and begin the climb towards the Polar Plateau. Some read, some slept, others went back to snatch a lie-down among the cargo pallets.
For me, the magnet was the porthole. Our course to the Pole ran a diagonal transect through the huge, sprawling Transantarctic Mountains, one hundred miles wide and two thousand miles long, and each minute of flight took us past unclimbed cliff faces, over immense ice falls that could swallow a city skyline, and along side glaciers flowing onto other glaciers. Who knows what is buried under all of that ice? A hundred new Yosemites wait to be discovered—and, maybe, diamond mines and oil fields, one reason the various research nations (China, Russia, Chile, Australia, and so on) want to keep a presence “on the ice.” The U.S. base at the South Pole is a premier science lab but it is also a factor in a geo-political chess game. None of that mattered on this flight.
The immensity of it all defies narration. You could set Switzerland down in the middle of this mountain range and it would be as small and lost as a child’s sneaker left behind in the mall parking lot. Antarctica is bigger than the mainland United States.
After three hours, we landed at the South Pole.
As with the WAIS-Divide camp, the plane delivered AN-8 fuel, which had to be pumped off, and as that was being done, ground crews began to reload the plane the outbound cargo, a mix of leftover construction materials from the new base (2008), materials from the previous two bases (going back to the 1950s), and the simple, expected things like trash and science cargo, including more meteorites—and about them we will talk in just a moment.
The main station is on stilts so that it’s not buried by accumulating snow. (The previous shape, a lovely Logan’s Run 1970s dome, had not worked out.) With the right control of air flow (manipulated by sculpted berms up- and down-wind), the wind scours out the snow around the footings. The whole complex rests on hydraulic jacks, so as the inevitable snow does accumulate over the years, the buildings can be raised up another few levels to stay above it.
Just in case anybody might suspect that I am actually in Hawaii, listening to Don Ho on my iPod while I download South Pole images off the internet, here’s the obligatory self-portrait at the geographical Pole proper. This “is” the South Pole. With windchill, air temp is just touching -40 degrees Fahrenheit. I did not leave my face mask down for long.
Adjacent to the geographical Pole, there is a symbolic photo-op South Pole, with flags of polar-associated nations and a chrome-ball topped barber pole. This shot below is sort of a double self-portrait, since you can see the tip of my bunny boot in the bottom foreground. You also can see the flags, just barely, reflected in the edge of the mirror ball.
Inside the U.S. station the floorplan is a modified “W”; here are the dorm pods. Additional summer berths are in huts out of view from this shot. In the main building the rooms are small but Ikea nice, with a bed, closet, nice work table, plenty of electrical outlets, and (best of all), no roommates. South Pole workers (and some visitors) get their own rooms.
During the summer there are 200 on up to 275 people working here, though anything past 250 really begins to feel a bit too crowded I am told—not enough bathrooms, not enough space in the galley to get lunch. The winter-over crew tallies in at 25% of this, fewer and, I would say, braver. They spend a winter in darkness—no sun at all, just the eirie light of the aurora australis turning the sky into curtains of blue and green—and a winter in isolation, since no planes can land, except in the most extreme medical emergencies. All their mail, their groceries, their change of hair-color dye—anything they need has to come in either before the flights close for the season or else wait until next year. One thing they do get to do in the winter is to grow their own fresh food.
Welcome to the greenhouse at the South Pole. No soil is used: plants are rooted in little cubes of sponge and given water and nutrients under growth lamps. Music plays and there is a sofa, so when the endless snow and endless winter get you down, you have a place to come and try to re-center. I think it must be one of the most coveted spots on base, any time of year.
If the green house is in use, still, diversion abounds, all year long. Many of the summer-only employees at the South Pole will go do interesting jobs up north in the off season. They might be rangers in Alaska, deep sea fishermen, scuba instructors, or archaeologists. Crewing yachts is one casual, low-paid, but always interesting way to see the world, and this poster advertises a “how to” information session.
Music is popular (one of the first things I saw when I walked in the front door of the base was a Sousaphone); behind this closed door I could hear the Grateful Dead cover band rehearsing. I am pretty sure that Jerry Garcia is looking down from his rainbow in Heaven, taping his foot in encouragement.
This notice on a lab door caught my eye. It’s hard to read but it’s a subtle spoof on light spectra; note the range set aside for Google secret projects, and also for Death Star lasers. In the galley, a computer monitor scrolls a packet of information, including in-bound flights, timelines of when satellites will be overhead so that Internet access will be available, and today’s weather. On the weather page, for the graphics part, there is a seemingly endless set of adventures with Star Wars storm troopers, who rappel of toilet paper rolls, fight with dinosaurs, and host tv game shows. Gotta love the energy and humor of these people.
Why a bowling ball? Somebody (now redeployed?) used to drink shots out of the finger holes at parties. Why is it still in the dorm hall? No answer. Maybe it’s a legacy thing: perhaps the successor to the bowling-for-shots game is due in soon.
Outside, the arts also flourish. Spoolhenge was very dear to my heart, since some of the AVC faculty have been over to see “Hoodhenge,” an eight-foot tall limestone sculpture in my back yard. Legend has it, it used to be taller. I like it just like this.
Ducts and tubing from previous bases have been made into a kind of open air sculpture: part barn, part sci-fi movie set. This is also part of the best Frisbee Golf route in the world. Just through the end of the tunnel (rather blown out in this exposure) you can see a goal basket.
Here is a better shot of the course.
Not having a Frisbee with me (that so was not on the NSF approved packing list), I had to use snowballs.
Fun is fun and work is work, and sometimes the two mix well. With the arrival of a Twin Otter from a remote field camp, that meant a meteorite crew was back. This was a reconnaissance team out scouting new sites; they still in one austral summer were able to bring back over three hundred meteorites. Main teams, working elsewhere, brought back 900 this field season.
They let me hold one of the large ones, which was unexpectedly heavy. (Well, duh, Hood, you know how dense iron is?) It was probably made of chrondite and was most likely around four and a half billion years old. AVC can get its own meteorite by putting in a request to Johnson Space Center; we maybe have oodles already in the Geology Labs on campus—I must confess my ignorance of what rock samples we archive—but if not, I know now who to contact at the meteorite center to ask for some for us. Once I check with my colleagues over in geology, that’s on my to-do list when I get back.
The woman in this picture has just come back from living on a glacier for five weeks. She is married and has an eight-year-old son. She’s a Ph.D. planetary scientist whose main job is working with missions to Mars. Antarctica always interested her. At a conference, she met some of the meteorite people, and wrote a letter asking to come along as a volunteer. The next year she wrote another one. The year after that, she wrote another one. I want to put something in bold caps here, since this is important: PERISENTENCE pays off. Good things are happening in her life because she went out and made them happen. Nobody is going to hand it to you for free—ask Dr. Fisher, our college president. You need to put up with set-backs and just work through it. In my case, the fellowship I am traveling on I first began working on just under four years ago. I talked to former award winners, I did research on what was being done and had recently been done, I lined up academic sponsors, I got publishers’ endorsements, but most of all, I kept my résumé active: I had a list of projects and artist-in-residencies already completed, to prove that I was worth their time. If you want something, go out and make it happen.
Staying active and being involved may something as simple as helping to offload fuel drums. Just out of view in this shot is one of the most senior meteorite guys of all, somebody who’s been doing this for thirty years. If anybody deserves special treatment, he does. Yet he and I interrupted the interview a number of times just to do something basic like help carry loads. Team work means helping out, no matter what work has to be done.
Back from five weeks the field, the meteorite crew was not done. They had showers, grabbed some dinner, then agreed to meet in the lab. There was a lot of GPS and GIS date to download and transcribe. (We have a certificate program specializing in this, just in case you want to know one way an AVC education ties in to cool future job plans.)
Other kinds of science happen here too, more than I can list. Taken on a less sunny day than the other shots, this facility shown below is the famous IceCube neutrino lab, using sensors buried in ice cores in a one kilometer x one kilometer grid. The sensor strings are a mile long. The IceCube project does cutting edge work in particle physics. There have been tv specials and entire books about it; if you want to find out what a neutrino is and how we see them, there’s a good summary on Wikipedia under “IceCube Neutrino Observatory.” Note the spelling (all one word): get it wrong and you’ll dial up entries on the rapper Ice Cube or the kind you put in your iced tea.
A variety of astronomy projects take place at the Pole. I have a really, really good overview article on it from a technical journal . . . I have it at home, that is. Back in Palmdale, in my home office, my files bulge with articles and the bookshelves bend under the weight of my polar library. Coming here, I just brought down a stripped down sampling of materials with me. This photo is the astronomy building and inside here, um, somebody does something interesting, I just can’t remember what.
Taking pictures at 40 below zero is probably not my favorite thing I have ever done. There are reasons why I took a job in a desert and not, say, Fairbanks. Several people have emailed to ask me what I wear here. When I am suited up, I have about all of the grace and dexterity of an intoxicated astronaut, and so far I have been very glad not to drop a lens cap, since Nikon lens caps cost 27 bucks a go, and I could easily see myself unable to pick it back up.
The white halo around my face in this shot is condensed breath freezing onto my parka ruff. Authentic polar parkas should be trimmed with wolverine fur or wolf fur, since supposedly your breath won’t freeze when it hits those products. The under-fur of the musk ox makes a kind of ultra-soft, hyper-warm wool called qiviut (Scrabble players take note of the spelling), ideal for scarves. NSF is an animal-cruelty-free employer, so no baby seal mittens or musk ox fur face masks for us. We make do with “Government Issue,” starting with the Korean War white bunny boots visible in a lot of these shots. I wear them with three pairs of socks (light, medium, heavy, just in case I have to share with Golidlocks). For the legs, I went out the day of departure to Sport Chalet and upgraded my Patagonia long-john bottoms to a heavier weight of fabric (and am glad I did). Over that layer, at the South Pole I wore a pair of regular fleece pants (on sale at a discount barn in Bishop, years ago), and over that layer, a pair of very thick pile fleece pants that were part of my gear issue in Christchurch. And on top of that goes double-heavy bib overalls, uninsulated but windproof.
Top-side I have two wicking mesh t-shirts, and from a shop in New Zealand, a wicking synthetic fabric field shirt. I bought it because it has large, zippered chest pockets, so I always have a (thawed) pen and sketchpad on one side, and on the other, my reading glasses. Over that goes the heaviest wind-proof pile jacket that Patagonia makes, and over that, “Big Red,” the program-issued down jacket that weighs something like 15 pounds and leans in a corner, standing up, it’s so stiff. Spare camera batteries were kept inside the Patagonia pile coat. Nimble ice climbing gloves by Black Diamond go inside generic Thinsulate mittens. I could photograph in the mittens but not well, and to change settings at all, had to work with just my glove liners on. My hands got cold quickly but so far, so good: look ma, no frostbite.
From the shoulders on up, we top off the outfit with a thick pile neck gaiter, a windproof balaclava (named after a site of the Crimean War, the war that gave us the Tennyson poem “Charge of the Light Brigade), and last, my own private snowboarding goggles, also from Sport Chalet, because they’re polarized and new and hence not scratched up, none of which would have been true about the goggles the program issued me. I am a fiend about top-quality optical glass, and have with me two back-up pairs of very expensive, very top-end glacier glasses. (I also have four back-up pairs of gloves, most with me most of the time, and who knows how many piles of dry socks. My wife was very firm when I left, about the not-coming-back-with-frostbite part of the agreement.)
After two days at the South Pole, I checked in with the comms center to see the status of the inbound LC-130 flight. Despite a grey day and blowing snow, they were en route and on schedule. I had just enough time to grab lunch and pack up.
As the new arrivals were taken in for the briefing, the outbound "pax" (passengers)—myself, a mechanic, and four meteorite researchers—practiced our Spanish at the edge of the fuel dock
And then it was just the long droning propeller flight back to McMurdo. We are given earplugs, and boy, do you need them. At last we landed. Wind was up, temps were down— with windchill, it was a surpising 2 degrees below zero when we set down. Normally that might have felt rather bitter, but compared to the Pole, I hardly bothered to zip up Big Red. Nice day we’re having! Who’s up for beach valleyball?
If this blog has made people want to come down here, McMurdo almost always needs dishwashers for $350 a week, room and board and flights included. When I came into the Galley for dinner after my return Pole flight, I saw these new spa posters put up, advertising for dishwashers. (At least, I think that is what they are advertising for.) Hmm, a long time ago I used to wash dishes up at Sequoia National Park, so perhaps like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, I maybe ought to think about getting back to my roots and simplifying my life. But do you really think it will make me look younger?
I think it will most definately make you look younger and so much better. I love your post as well as your writing. Thank you such an amazing post.
ReplyDeleteNice posting.Thank you for sharing this post such a useful information.
ReplyDeletePadded Jacket for Golf