High Summer in Antarctica

-
It's been a long time since I've posted! It's also been a pretty full month since Christmastime, and I'm excited to give a little snapshot into one of the most interesting times to be at McMurdo.


The Holidays came and went. Here's my Christmas tree and some holiday cheer from the dining hall seal.

Icestock, the southernmost music festival in the world, came and left, ringing in 2019 in its wake....
And the dining hall seal helped us celebrate 2019, too.

A beautiful hike on New Years Day brought in the new year right....

And a tour out to see a Navy plane wreck from the 1970s on a perfect Antarctic evening was high on my list of best experiences in Antarctica. 

The day was perfectly still, so warm that we could strip down to T-shirts, and a sighting of emperor penguins made that day a perfect day.


The warmer height-of-summer days have provided lots of good opportunities for enjoyable hiking weather.....

...with fun times in the shelters (called "apples") along the way.



We also learned how to use our pee bottles (leave no trace is on a different dimension here at the bottom of the world).













Antarcticans are some of the most interesting, educated, and creative people I've ever been around. McMurdo Alternative Arts Gallery was a fun night to see the talent in town.

The perfect weather has appeared more often, making for hikes that I will remember for the rest of my life....
 ...and different views of familiar sights, depending on the weather of the moment.




Now we are beginning to enter a new phase of life at McMurdo, "vessel season." It has begun with the advent of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker, which may be docking today.
The icebreaker is creating a path in the sea ice for our resupply vessel. With it brings a burst of activity and lots of new people on base. This is the last month of the summer season, and it's going to go out with a bang!

With the close of the summer season fast approaching, everyone is planning their trips after the ice, and their plans for life after ice. I have some plans shaping up that I'll be sure to share later. Some travel plans and then some life-plans. No matter how it all works out, my season on the ice has been a life-changing experience, and one I'll carry with me forever. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Antarctica

-
Image
I'm going to Antarctica this year.  People ask me, "Why do you want to go?" I say, "Why not go?" I currently live in the Pacific Northwest, in a city with an elevation of 50 feet, an average yearly precipitation of 36 inches, and average winter temperature of 54 degrees Farenheit. I'll be traveling to McMurdo Station, Antarctica, on the Ross Ice Shelf, elevation 33 feet, average yearly precipitation of 8 inches, and it will average a whopping 27 degrees Farenheit in the warmest month, January. Not too different from those nice brisk January days in good old PNW! Surprised? Antarctica is full of surprises! Read on for more surprising facts! It's the highest continent in the world. The South pole is at over 9,000 feet (close to the altitude of Mt. Thielsen). The highest point in the continent is Mt. Vinson at 16,000 feet (2,000 ft taller than Rainier!). It's the driest continent in the world. It is a super-arid desert, a category
Read more

Holding Pattern in Christchurch

-
Image
Greetings from Christchurch! I am writing from a very nice business hotel in downtown Christchurch. I am a sucker for hotels, as I rarely get to stay in them, and all the hotels I stayed at as a kid were those sketchy motel 6- types. So a nice hotel with comfy beds and room service is the way I pretend to be rich. Why am I not in Antarctica? I underwent training and tried on all my cold weather clothes that the program issued me, and was supposed to fly out today. However I'm sipping tea in a hotel and procrastinating packing my suitcases so I can be moved later today to a new hotel. What's going on? The answer is a Condition 1 storm on the continent. Flights have been cancelled and we are getting backed up. Once the storm is cleared and the runway is re-cleared of snow, flights will begin again, but that means I have to wait to fly until the delayed folks ahead of me have been safely delivered to Antarctica. I might be able to leave tomorrow or I might end up in New Zea
Read more

Hello from the Ice!

-
I'm writing this from the computer lab at McMurdo Station, Antarctica!  I wish this post had some pictures to prove it, but I'm working on that - hopefully pictures to come! In my last post, I talked about being delayed because of storms-and those storms ended up resulting in me being delayed about 2 1/2 weeks! It was not a historic delay, but the longest delay for the program in decades, according to the news articles I read. It was great to get to explore Christchurch but I was ready to start my job and get down to the ice. I rode a C-17 down to the ice, operated by the U.S. Air Force. This was a new experience for me, and a new type of aircraft - after all the small planes in Alaska and the various passenger jets, it was a completely different experience to be in a large plane with no windows. It was a remarkably smooth flight down to the ice and the crew did a great job handling us. I can't really describe the moment I stepped out of the plane. The white
Read more