The $12,000,000 Martini

Air National Guard LC-130s Do It All

The story behind today’s blog begins in Denver, about a year ago. While we were attending a conference, AVC Language Arts instructor Nicelle Davis and I went to see the USGS core sample repository. As part of geological research and in search for oil deposits, field teams use a modified oil drill to bring back a sort of biopsy of deep layers of rock. These cores, about as big around as a fat hot dog, are sliced in half and measured, then laid out in boxes with the depth levels marked. It’s like a library of the earth’s crust, neatly organized in a box. Anybody who wants to see a piece of Central Utah, say, down about half a mile under the dirt, can come to Denver and inspect the physical specimens.

Ice cores work the same way. Instead of information about coal seams, they trap climate histories in their isotope signatures and (sometimes) pollen counts, flawlessly preserving climate information as far back as a million years. According to Wikipedia, this includes data about “temperature, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent, and forest fires.” Not bad for something that looks like the ice in your Coke.

The same core sample facility shown above is the final archive for ice, too. First though, crews need to get the ice cores out of the field camps, back to McMurdo, and on to Denver.

To follow that process, I joined an Air National Guard mission. They fly ski-equipped cargo planes called the Hercules or LC-130 out of Pegasus Field, the main icefield runway half an hour past McMurdo.

Their home base is in New York, but during the austral summer these men and women of the Air National Guard bring their planes south. They fly New York to Travis Base in California. From there they cross the Pacific in two stages (Hawaii then Pago-Pago), landing in Christchurch, New Zealand. Slower than the C-17 that I came in on, these turboprop planes make the crossing to Antarctica in about eight hours. Once here, they provide support to a variety of field camps, able to haul immense loads while landing in very rugged conditions.

This Lockheed-designed plane was originally an Antelope Valley gal. The first prototype’s maiden flight was from Burbank out over Canyon Country and on to Edwards AFB. The plane I rode in had been built in 1976, and may yet be flying many years from now. The basic C-130 is a workhorse used by air forces around the world. Besides the ski version, other variations are used for search and rescue, firefighting, as gunship platforms, and as aerial refueling tankers. It is in service with 60 nations.

Mission D024 left on time, at 3 p.m. The crew chief had a treat for me: for the first hour of flight, I could ride in the cockpit. Doesn’t everybody secretly want to be one of three things: a cowboy, a fireman, or a pilot? Today I got to be up in the cockpit with the cool people—and with the cool view.

Usually the passengers ride in webbing seats along the sides of the fuselage, back with the cargo. Earplugs dampen the noise and there’s no little tv-tray meal, but you can walk around or try to find a pile of boxes and go to sleep.

Our destination was a field camp on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, called in local acronym-land “WAIS Divide” (pronounced as if it were a man’s last name, “Way’s”).

We landed three and a half hours later.

It was flat and cold and big and wild and unearthly. I struggled in my notebook to find the right words. It was like nothing I could compare it to. I wanted to say “Nebraska in winter times infinity”—just huge, huge, huge—but the winter landscapes any of us have seen have had, somewhere in them, grain silos or fence lines or contrails overhead from passing jets or the far-off dark fingers of leafless winter cottonwood trees.

That it just goes on forever with nothing besides the sastrugi lines of wind-sculpted snow is a new thing. Tiny ice crystals caught the snow, blowing past, filling my visual field with tiny brilliant flashes of light, not like diamonds exactly, but more like the electrons inside of diamonds: very intense and very brief.

The British Romantic poets (Blake and Keats and Coleridge and company) went into nature to see the Sublime—to access an exalted, spiritual feeling, triggered by grand views and wild weather. As many occasions as I have been to Yosemite, being at WAIS Divide was one of the few times when I felt that I was fully and deeply immersed in the Sublime on all sides. It was amazingly beautiful, in its own austere, endless way. The closer you look, the more variations of white there are.

About 40 people live here, supporting the ice core drill team. This shot below is the main mess tent. It will seem especially amusing for many of the AVC faculty. Our German instructor (on sabbatical this year) has also been the president of the faculty union, Heidi Preschler. She is well known on campus...and apparently in Antarctica, too. Happy Birthday, Heidi! (Even if your birthday not this time of year, you will have one enventually. Happy Birthday, whenever it comes.)

Camps like this run off of the same fuel as the plane engines fly on. For the South Pole, an overland traverse brings some supplies once a year, but most things, fuel included, have to be flown in. Other camps are strictly supplied by air. Here in this shot, the Herc that I came in on had reserve fuel it does not expect to need on the return flight, so it is being pumped into the WAIS Divide storage tank, to run their generators and gas up their snowmobiles.

All too soon it was time to load the cargo and head back.

While on the ground, the engines had been kept running, which meant that the props had been kept spinning—four very large, very powerful circular saws. As we had landed, the crew chief had made me promise not to walk into a prop and turn my head into red sawdust. As he pointed out, he had just washed this airplane and wanted it to stay clean a long while. Others apparently had a similar concern (for perhaps other reasons) and the drillers coming back on this flight were, like me, carefully herded through all-clear zones.

On the flight back I read a biography of Roald Amundsen, first man to reach the South Pole, and interviewed the crew. When we landed at Pegasus Field it was late at night but the sun was still up. A van came out to the meet us on the flight line to take us to a waiting shuttle. Pegasus is named not directly for the flying horse of mythology but for a type of aircraft that crashed here. Is that name bad luck or a cocky defiance that brings good luck?

Ice cores are expensive to get, and just as expensive to keep frozen in transit. One of the crew members on this flight told me that a full pallet-load of ice cores represents about 12 million dollars of infrastructure and research. I was reminded of the fad some years in Japan of using glacier ice in cocktails, ice that was mined in Alaska and flown to Japan in order to make a ten dollar cocktail be a hundred dollar cocktail. How much would somebody pay for a piece of million-year old ice? In McMurdo to maintain their purity, the ice cores kept in a locked freezer.

It turns out, a lot of very cool things are being stored at McMurdo. Another fascinating project here is the recovery of meteorites from snow-free glacial ice. While there may in theory be lots of meteorites everywhere, here they are a lot easier to find, and they’re still intact and pure—they’ve not been contaminated by people messing with them. Field parties doing non-meteor work are given instructions on how to document their finds and how to deliver them to the recovery teams. There’s even a web-based publication called The Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter, published twice yearly. (Boy, did I go into the wrong profession. How cool is a journal like that?)

Problem is, people are curious as cats. I quote now from the instruction pages prepared by the meteorite team for other Antarctic scientists.

"By virtue of having been kept in a natural deep-freeze, Antarctic meteorites preserve significant chemical information lost in finds from other regions. Ideally meteorites should be kept frozen at all times.

It’s probably a good idea to keep the meteorites in a secure place, and not overtly labeled. People are naturally curious about meteorites and sometimes the desire to handle them can overwhelm their sense of responsibility.

This is particularly a problem once you’re in McMurdo; a box in a cargo yard labeled METEORITES can be hard for many to resist."

Reading that made me start wanting to poke around all these boxes stored beside the Crary Science Lab, where I work. Some of these must contain some pretty mysterious things indeed. What’s in that one, right there?

No, I will be good. It’s probably just a barrel of urine from the Marble Point camp described in an earlier post.

Meanwhile, there’s work to do. Other kinds of planes do research support flights in Antarctica besides the LC-130. Here, mechanics overhaul a Twin Otter, specially suited to remote landings on unprepared strips.

I want to find out about it all, plus I still hope to get manifested for the ultimate round-the-world destination of all: the South Pole itself.

I wonder where my next flight will take me?

Derelicts, ATMs, and Ice Cores

Another Day of Hash Browns and Cat Food

Here in McMurdo, as with any small town, little events have seemingly great significance. I don’t know what Congress is up to or even how the Lakers are doing, but I do know that after many days of anticipation, the NB Palmer has arrived.

This is a “Jacques Cousteau” style research ship that has traversed across to McMurdo from the other side of Antarctica, where a small US base called (appropriately enough) Palmer is located. Nat Palmer was an American captain and seal hunter who was the first American to explore Antarctica, discovering new land at age 22. (If you’re that age and have yet to captain your own sailing ship or discover any continents, stop slacking and get busy.) He later helped design the fast clipper ships that carried cargo swiftly before the Panama Canal helped increase trade.

Usually a ship here means that Wal-Mart has arrived. Today’s ship has not brought us any supplies—no fresh fruit, no new videos—but the human scientists are swapping out (some getting off and flying out, some getting on board), and there’s a general air of excitement. Maybe we all just like the idea of setting off in a small ship for the unknown, sort of that romantic idea of coasting up and down South America in a tramp steamer. A ship promises the romance of the open seas.

In the background of the shot you can see a second ship. That is a chartered Swedish icebreaker, the Oden, which is helping to clear the channel for the arrival of two tankers later in the month, one with fuel and one with next year’s groceries. I hope the kitchen manager is good at planning out the menu in advance!

Some of the arriving passengers may need to arrange for a shuttle out to the airfield. If so, they may wait for their van here at the bus stop, Derelict Junction. Whether the sign refers to the vehicles or the people is open to interpretation.

Humans are the same anywhere. Are your Christmas decorations still up? If so, join the club. Theirs are too.

Life at McMurdo, as I say, revolves around small crisis points, just as it used to in elementary school. This includes who likes whom (there is a bowl of condoms in the restroom, along with directions), along with the ever-pressing question, “What’s for lunch?” Coming into the cafeteria, the notice board usually tells us what to expect. Today’s entree is cat food.

(A note to any Congressperson reading this blog: (a) your work is really important and I apologize for not knowing what is going on in Washington right now. And (b) please do not call for a hearing on the food quality at National Science Foundation-funded research institutions. WE WERE NOT EATING CAT FOOD. It was a joke! It is okay! Please don’t get anybody in trouble! It was not cat food . . . no, actually it was dog food. NO, IT WAS GOOD FOOD. That was another joke, about the dogs. There was no pet food involved at all. Please, everybody relax—it was a joke.)

A true crisis has arisen though, in that everybody’s favorite part of dinner, a trip to the self-serve dairy bar called Frosty Boy, will not happen today. Frosty Boy has broken down again. This is even featured in Werner Herzog’s documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. This 2008 film has a mixed reputation here on the ice, but as a Herzog fan, I am in love with it. He was able to make a very Herzogian film and to do something that I suppose the upper-ups at NSF were not that keen on. He too was on a Artists and Writers Grant. As a general rule, stay away from artists and writers, as they’re usually trouble.

Another aspect of art are some lovely landscape paintings around base, including the cafeteria and the science labs. These are quite fine, and are roughly four feet by three feet. I like looking at them every morning when I have my cat food for breakfast.

Flights come and go at all times of the day here, and the preparation for departure is called the bag drag. You don’t board any flight without wearing or having with you your ECW gear—this stands for Extreme Cold Weather and is the red program-issued parka and white bunny boots and so on, necessary in case the plane goes down on the ice half-way to point B. You can tell the people about to catch a shuttle since they have to schlep around town with their ECW bags in tow and their bunny boots on their feet.

In some senses, all day and every day is bag drag. Buildings are heated; the outside sky is not. You’re always putting on something or taking it off and finding a place to hang it up.

Inside the main cafeteria building there is a barber shop, a computer lab, the human resources department, a small market for t-shirts and (when supplies are in stock) six-packs of beer, and to pay for it all, an atm. How did Wells Fargo get the contract? I am not sure—maybe there was a sense that if the lines go down, they can deliver some money by stage coach or maybe dogsled.

Whimsy helps make any day go smoother. On the side of a recycling dumpster is this inexplicable stencil. It has no meaning, as a sign—there is not an Inuit playground nearby—somebody just had a sense of fun. Right on. The world would be better off if we did more of this.

Housing is dorm style, from two to twenty to a room. My current roommate has just come in from two months of living on a glacier, and seems a bit overwhelmed to have a room. He has dumped out all of his duffle bags in piles on the bed and floor, like a parody of a teenager’s bedroom where you can’t open the door because there’s so much stuff pyramided up everywhere. My little corner of the room is tidy, so right now we are the classic odd couple. A communal laundry room lets us do our own personal laundry ourselves, with soap provided. (An old-timer gave me a tip, before I came: bring a ziplock baggie of Bounce sheets, since those are not provided.) When you’re ready to fly out at the end of deployment you strip the bed and the housing staff will take care the bed linens. Some mornings it looks like any Motel 6 at 10 a.m.

Up and down station, things have to be washed, cataloged, and put away. The infrastructure to support science in not unlike the supplies that the AVC Math and Science Division has to manage.

For me though, today there are no lab flasks or Frosty Boy dinners on the schedule. Today I am manifested to go out to the great West Antarctic ice sheet, flying a thousand miles from McMurdo to land on a glacier with a ski-equipped cargo plane. Our intended load? It’s time to bring back ice cores. I spoke about time machines in an earlier blog, but what about a time machine that goes back one million years?

Ice and airplanes, two very cool subjects. I hope to post an entry tomorrow with the details of this next part of the great science project.

The Last Trailer Park on Mars

The Strange Magnificence of Marble Point Refueling Station.

After visiting field camps in the Dry Valleys, I was dropped off at the refueling station called Marble Point. On the map, there is an actual Marble Point (with real marble among the rock strata) but the Marble Point Station that exists today is closer in location to a place called Gneiss Point (gneiss being another kind of rock). Why did the military name the Gneiss Point base “Marble Point” if it’s by Gneiss Point, not Marble Point? Who knows. Maybe like some geologists, they could not decide if it’s pronounced “nice” or “neese.” (The dictionary says that “gneiss” should rhyme with rice and Zeiss and do-it-in-a-trice.)

No matter what rock you name it after, this location was used a staging depot by the Navy in the 1950s and 60s, and then in 1970s it was considered a potential site for the relocation of McMurdo Base, complete with a projected 10,000 feet of paved runway—big enough for a 747. Maybe they even were going to have a McDonald’s and a Cinemark 22, who knows. Plans were drawn up and budgets drafted, all to come to nothing.

We’ve seen this before, around AVC. Older Antelope Valley residents will remember the grand plans for Palmdale Airport and adjacent properties. Out here, we were to have replaced the too-small LAX site as the main Los Angeles regional airport. We would all get rich on the real estate boom and the twenty-buck-an-hour jobs at the terminal and from being tour guides for the Japanese vacationers wanting to experience the Mojave Desert firsthand. Of course, nope, never happened. Now the gates are locked. After the final few-days-a-week schedules to San Francisco and Las Vegas, that airport is once more shut down.

Marble Point, by contrast, still has a role to play. True, the grand McMurdo International Airport never came, but in trade it’s small but cozy, and highly functional. Just the essentials here: fuel storage tanks, a generator for electricity, a mobile-home unit to cook in and where the staff of three sleeps, and an adjacent bunk house—converted from an old walk-in freezer—for weathered-in pilots. Water comes from melted snow and the waste water such as from washing dishes (called in the recycling trade grey water) is evaporated away in a special outdoor still. No leach pits or cesspools, so the outhouse is self-service: bag it and take it to a bin for disposal. A funny note on the instruction sheet says to show your baggie of #2 to your supervisor first, to demonstrate your productivity.

Three people live here: the station manager and a cook, here for the full field season, and a fuel tech who rotates in from McMurdo on a two week cycle. Marble Point is an odd little collection of buildings in the middle of an odd landscape. When I stepped off the helicopter, I said to myself—with all affection and wonder—welcome to the last trailer park on Mars.

I said there were three people based here, but because of bad weather, this past week the base had four, not three, since they had to put up with me for four unexpected days. Of the four of us, I got the better end of the deal, since these were three fabulous human beings. I think they represent a typical cross-section of who comes down to make science happen here in Antarctica.

Take for example Tonya. I think in HR on her contract she’s called a Lead Fuel Technician, but down in the ‘hood she and all the others are just called fuelies, and on average, they are a proud and independent bunch. Tough folks: think about working outside in a climate like this all the time. Like many support staff in the polar program, even though she has what’s often called “just” a blue collar job, Tonya’s background includes a Master’s degree in geology. Among other passions she supports various sports teams, and for football her college team is Auburn—if you ask her at the right moment, she’ll confess that once upon a time she was a cheerleader. I arrived on the same flight bringing in the tivo’d copy of the Auburn-Oregon bowl game. It had played the day before over Armed Forces tv, and somebody had copied the game for her and sent it out with a delivery of food and spare parts. That night as a cozy little family we all watched the tape—the game went down to the wire, but just in the final seconds, Auburn won by a field goal. Go Tigers!

The Station Manager is Bodie from New Zealand. (Yes, he knows there is ghost town in California with that same name up past Mono Lake, and yes, he’s been there and thought it was cool.) His parents represent two former British colonies—one parent is Australian, one American—and they split the difference and made a home in a third former colony, New Zealand. Bodie was raised off the grid as we say now, eating organic food and being taught that Oreos were the work of the Devil. Being on his own or making do with simple options suits him fine. Long duty list to be stationed here. He keeps the generators going, maintains the com links with helicopter ops, drives the bulldozer, checks the weather, and even can make a darn artistic plate of lobster sushi. Like others working in the Antarctic program, he has been all over the world and has been a fisherman in Alaska as well as sold Christmas trees in Orange County.

The cook, Karen, is (in my humble opinion) the most essential person on station. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana and helped to establish a butterfly sanctuary that by delightful coincidence I will be visiting in April. While in Africa she had a pet pangolin, an animal few people even know about, let alone have touched. (It’s sort of a slinky, ant-eating armadillo. I would dearly love to see one.) She too has been all over the world but is wondering if Alaska might be the place she finally buys a little home. There’s an openness there—wide spaces, literally and socially—that she finds fits her personality. That’s true for many people who come here, be they scientists or bush pilots or even just the cafeteria workers. (It’s even true for me; I have been to Alaska three times, and the first two times I just took my ice axes and a backpack and hitchhiked around. The third time I stayed with an Inuit family on an island halfway between Siberia and Nome. No wonder Antarctica feels good to me.) One night Karen felt we should celebrate and so we had a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, including homemade hard cider. I especially liked this since I had been traveling this past Thanksgiving and in Botswana it’s not a holiday they celebrate. It felt good to be sharing this special occasion now, albeit just a few months late.

Life here is simple but not always luxurious. To avoid contaminating the frozen soil, we have to containerize all waste, from granola bar wrappers to our morning pee. Behind the pilots’ bunkhouse was a simple, open-air urinal: you stand on the steps and use the funnel, right into the pee barrel. It reminded me of when Hemingway and Picasso were together in Paris in the ‘20s. There used to be cast iron open-air facilities then, sort of a fountain surrounded by a half wall, so men could do their business in the middle of town and then go on to the next bar or café to get ready to write the Great American Novel. Maybe these features will make a comeback, as I recently found this reference online: “In the south of England, cylindrical pissoirs which are hidden during the day, telescope out of the ground at night, for the relief of marauding drunken hordes.” I’ve not seen this myself; it may be more essential on days when Manchester United is playing. Also according to the Internet you can order a replica pissoir for your own back garden, though I suppose zoning laws may be some cause for concern. Here at Marble Point, things are direct and utilitarian. For those of you who remember the tongue sticking to the flagpole in Christmas Story, yes, this is a plastic funnel.

Karen was the one who found the penguin tracks on the beach and, during a break in the storm, took me there. We dropped down off the plateau through a rocky, snowy kind of tundra (a tundra that has soil only, no grass and not even any lichen), ending up a few miles away at the shoreline where the sea ice had pulled back a few yards to leave a moat of open water and clean, grey sand beach. We could see one lone penguin far out on the ice, bopping around and maybe wondering what those two tall ugly things were on the beach. The tracks though told us that more were around, just that we couldn’t see them. Maybe they had dived through an open lead in the ice to go fishing.

For me this intersection of sea ice and land ice, soil and snow, air and water was a magnificent landscape full of vibrating potential. Even with windchill pushing the temps down towards zero I came back the next day anyway, just to be able to linger among the twisted shapes and gorgeous colors. This shot below shows a chunk of chandeliered sea ice that has been left on the beach by a falling tide and later will be picked up and taken somewhere else once the tide comes back in. For now just call it found art, the gift today to enjoy a fabulous and all-natural sculpture. Philosophers tell us each day is gift; scenes like this easily confirm that truism.

On my return trip no penguins were visible but I did have one companion, the only bird besides penguins that makes it this deep into Antarctica. It’s called a skua (a good word to remember when playing Scrabble) and it’s a cross between a seagull and the playground bully. On its own it can and will catch fish, but it prefers to scavenge around seal kills and, further north, to chase regular gulls and try to bash them so that they vomit up their last meal, which the skua then pirates. Get too close to their nests (some of which are just a mile from the Marble Point base) and they’ll dive-bomb humans, going for the head with a very vigorous determination. This one seems indifferent to me though and didn’t mind that I sidled ever closer in order to get a full-frame shot. It did not even swoop at me, hoping I would produce a handy pile of vomit. Skuas might be useful birds to have following those drunken hordes mentioned above, the ones urinating all over the landscape while looking for the hidden, pop-up bathrooms.

Those of us past a certain age will remember “the old days,” and one aspect of that distant past was the fact that lots of things came in cans—motor oil and tomato juice and Schlitz beer for example—but those cans had to be opened with a one-two punch with a bottle opener. First you made a small hole for the air to escape then rotated the can around and made the larger hole for drinking. In 1964 in The New Yorker novelist John Updike wrote a farewell to the old cans, as pull-tops had by then begun to come in. He asked, “Who can forget the small, symmetrical thrill of those two triangular punctures, the dainty pfff, the little crest of suds that foamed eagerly in the exultation of release?” Hiking back from the ice sculpture beach I found a bit of cast-off military debris in the form of a 1950s beer can—a fun connection to my childhood. Mom did not approve of drinking but sometimes on Sunday afternoons Dad was allowed one beer (though usually one only). For me to see the hand-punched holes is to be a kid again, marveling at the elegant simplicity of the opener itself: squared off on one side for pop bottles and then with a downward curving beak—the weapon side—that could bite like a pterodactyl into any can in the pantry. We all still have them, though most people don’t know what that sharp part is for. This can reveals how essential that pointy part used to be, even in the military—lose your opener and you’ll be trying to open your beer with a bayonet.

Do we think of the military guys knocking back a six pack or two when we think of Antarctica? Probably not. Yet their service is history too. So many landscapes are like this: we have one cliché (the “desert” for example) and then we have a reality that is infinitely more complex (and infinitely more interesting). In Brazil, a well-known brand of beer is called Antarctica, pronounced “ohn-urr-TEE-cuh.” Penguins are one symbol (and a popular one at that), but the visual complexity of Southern latitudes is much more interesting than just the too-easy symbol of black and white pelagic birds.

Just to prove that assertion, this next shot is from the same beach as had the penguin tracks; it may just be me, but I think these stalagmite layers of ice are way, way cool, maybe even as cool as—or even more cool—than the penguins themselves. (Maybe most people wish they were in a tropical bar in Brazil, ordering a glass of Antarctica and being nowhere near his little bay and its wrecking yard of has-been icebergs. Makes sense. But I still think this looks cool.)

After four days at Marble Point the weather lifted and helicopters began to fly. Bodie was going back to the main base too but graciously told me to go first. It may not have been gentlemanly but I accepted—since I didn’t have a toothbrush or even a clean t-shirt with me, I was ready to come back to the relative decadence of McMurdo, a place with hot showers and dry socks and where my little dorm room had about ten clean shirts waiting for me. In the afternoon the sun came out and at last I could hear the bugle calls of the cavalry coming to rescue me . . or more exactly, I could hear the whappity whap of approaching rotors, which meant the same thing.

Good bye Marble Point, hello bright lights and big cities (or at least the “city” of McMurdo Station).

Helicopter Rodeo

Aviation and Science in the Dry Valleys

Just under an hour away from McMurdo by helicopter is a landscape that looks like Death Valley, or maybe what Death Valley would look like if that national park had been magically sheared off, flown north a few thousand miles, and dropped down in the middle of Banff, Alberta. This area is called the Dry Valleys.

Interesting hydrology and geology happens here—there are brief, seasonally flowing streams and even some trace amounts of life. It is a good place to come if you want to imagine extraterrestrial ecosystems or even just the early days of life on Earth. A series of camps are opened up at the start of the Austral summer and then closed down at the end of the field season. Very strict environmental controls stay in place: all the food scraps and waste oil drips and human poo and anything at all that comes in because of people, goes out with those same people at the end of the season. For ethical and scientific reasons, the idea is to keep the ground utterly pristine. That means a lot of loads by helicopter, and almost all of it moved around with 1/10th horsepower engines called human beings.

One interesting aspect of this landscape is how huge glaciers spill down from adjacent high ground, then just stop off shear, leaving open ground at their terminus walls. The view below shows the Commonwealth Glacier, and is a clearer shot than some of my aerial work because the helicopter for that leg had a side window that opened up. I could open up the window and stick the camera through, so that I was not trying to shoot the landscape through an inch of scratched Plexiglas. The Commonwealth Glacier was named and mapped by Scott on his 1912 expedition, since he believed that exploration should always be joined with basic scientific research. The first people to stand here were wearing reindeer fur underwear and eating the kinds of biscuits shown in the time machine photos back in the last blog post. I think I prefer the helicopter method myself.

The field camps are perhaps a hybrid between the early explorers’ huts and the space-age materials our field gear is made from. This camp at Lake Bonney is being prepared for winter storage, and also carpenters are upgrading the windows and doors for next year. As they pulled off one of the older sections, the Army’s serial code showed that this building was manufactured in 1946, just at after the end of World War II. It is older than some of the worker’s grandfathers.

 

Yet the modern world chases us everywhere, and if you have a camp, you’ll need radios, satellite phones, camera battery chargers, and even the Internet. The main tent may be from the Second World War, but these solar panels are much more recent.

And with or without their email accounts, people are still people. Ever drop in to visit a friend and clearly they were not expecting company, so that their house is a disaster? That may have happened in the shot below, since maybe nobody warned the construction crew that a journalist with a Nikon was due in on the next helicopter load. I took several pictures of this table, up and down, and each shot shows a different brand of wine or hootch. Live hard, play hard: I for one do not begrudge somebody an evening cocktail if he or she has been working outside in Antarctica for 14 hours, building (for example) a solar-heated outhouse. I had better not—I may be the person using that outhouse next day.

There’s a whimsy to most camps in Antarctica, whether it’s giving workers nicknames or making a “Penguin Crossing” sign. (There are no penguins in the Dry Valleys, though over the hundreds of years, a few misguided seals have wandered up from the McMurdo Sound area and forgotten which way to go to get back. Their ancient and mummified bodies can be found here and there, a good reminder to carry a radio and check for dry socks before you leave on a hike.) Here is a nice summer day at Lake Bonney.

For me, I had come up not to enjoy the views of the glaciers or penguin crossing signs but to understand better how the helicopter support network functioned. The pilots have amazing finesse and precision as they pick up loads mid-hover then take them off to staging areas down-valley. In the shot below, the person making the hook slot in the right hole is Rae Spain, manager of the Lake Hoare camp. I am not sure I could ever be that brave, to stand still as the helicopter settles on top of my head and waits for me to make the hook. Some of our AVC students have done their service in the Middle East, so if you’ve ever been around helicopters in the dirt, you know that the prop wash sends grit shooting out like a Gatling gun full of BBs. If there ever is some kind of helicopter rodeo, I know that these pilots will be the ones who will win.

From here, I was about to go to someplace a bit odder and a bit more wonderful. I also was going to go there for longer than planned (four days instead of one), because bad weather and poor visibility grounded the helicopters for an unusually long period. This time of year usually has a lot of good flying days, but even so, it’s still God’s world, not ours, and sometimes human plans just have to be put on hold. From the sling load camp, my next stop was Marble Point, which as Alice would say, was a very curious place indeed. When you land, here is who's waiting to greet you....