A quick hello...

11/21/04
12:17 AM

So I’m back at McMurdo sitting at the desk in room 111 of building 155 enjoying a huge bowl of soft serve ice cream with chocolate sprinkles and little rainbow chip things (they ran out of the crushed oreo topping, that was my favorite). It is delicious. It is late and I have had a full day. I should start from the beginning.
I left camp on Saturday morning. A drilling technician was joining our camp and Dave decided to send me back to McMurdo to upload some of the recently collected seismic data to Greg Baker (seismic guru at SUNY Buffalo). I had mixed feelings about returning. I was anxious to hear Greg’s opinion and to talk with him about the data, but at the same time, I didn’t want to leave camp. I would be all alone at McMurdo and I was afraid that I would have nothing to do. On the other hand, I was looking forward to being naked, having a bed, soft serve ice cream, fresh bread and vegetables, and the internet. I debated the shower issue. It had been a month and I was filthy and smelled like a 22 year old guy who hasn’t bathed in a month. Plenty of incentive to shower. But at the same time, would it be too refreshing? Would I be mocked upon my return to camp for cleansing my buttcrack? Would others be jealous and call me names like soapdish or squeaky? To make a long story short, I went until about 11 PM last night and then after taking care of everything that needed to happen, I showered. It was nice. But when I got out, I still had layers of dead skin that I had to kind of wipe off my arms. It was weird and kind of gross. I don’t think I’ll shower again until I can do it for real and actually follow the “repeat if necessary” instructions on the shampoo.
Anyway, so Saturday morning the helo comes to pick me up from camp. It was a Kiwi huey (which as a sidenote was in much better condition than any of the US hueys). Adam and I walked about a mile from camp to build a new helo pad for equipment drops later in the week. The plan was to have the helo fly a few people around to take pictures for an hour and then land back to camp to take me away. I would build the helo pad and then walk back up to meet them within that hour. So the time comes, and I start motoring back to camp walking over huge boulders and in and out of trenches – not easy hiking. Then when I’m about halfway, the helo lands on our newly constructed pad, picks Adam up and buzzes me on my way back to camp. I catch a glimpse of Jim in the window waving his arm frantically back towards camp. So I ran the rest of the way. It sucked, and boarded the huey a sweaty mess.
The Kiwis were great. I love their accents and they are always so nice. They kept calling me “chap”. The helo looked so empty with just me, a 5 gallon urine barrel and some ice core boxes in the cabin. Kind of like a taxi. They are actually pretty big, you just don’t notice when you’re knocking knees and fighting for over window space with 4 others.
The flight back was unforgettable. Clear blue skies. Not a cloud in sight. Bright sunshine. And we were flying low too. Zooming past huge sandstone peaks and glaciers at 100 knots. It was exhilarating. This really is an incredible place, and pictures or movies just can’t do it justice.
We were in the air for about a half an hour before stopping at Marble Point to refuel. When I got off I couldn’t believe how hot it was. Granted I was still overheated from the run, but it was significantly warmer near the coast. And the weirdest part was the running water. There were streams of murky brown meltwater running everywhere. I hadn’t seen running streams since New Zealand. It was like a warm winter day in January. It was also nice to interact with new people instead of the same 7 all the time. Even smalltalk with the Antarctic gas station attendant was satisfying, and I usually hate smalltalk.
We took off again for McMurdo and I got a view of the Ross ice shelf. But this time it was very different. There were chunks that appeared broken near the coast. There were patches of dirt. And I counted at least 10 clusters of oblong black dots near cracks in the ice – sunbathing seals.
We landed at McMurdo and again I couldn’t believe how hot it was. There were meltwater streams everywhere and all of the snow and ice that covered the roadways when we left for the field had vanished – replaced by mud. One of the helo techs helped me drop off the ice cores to the freezer and I headed for the BFC. I felt very out of place, it was all a little surreal at first. I headed for the housing office, sweating like crazy (I was still wearing two layers of thermal underwear underneath my snowpants and fleece jacket), determined to get a room and strip as fast as possible. The housing lady that really creeps me out gave me my roomkey. They gave me a room by myself and it’s a nice one with an internet connection (which isn’t supposed to exist as far as I know). So my opinion of the housing people has improved. I found my room and just unloaded. I stripped down to nothing and just stood there in the middle of the room for a few minutes. It was the greatest feeling. I haven’t been naked since mid October.
I also smelled really bad. I noticed that I was missing a band of leg hair where the tops of the bunny boots rub against my legs. It looks funny. And man am I pale. My face tan and sunburned, but the rest of my body is pasty.
Then I saw myself in the mirror. I actually don’t think I look too bad. A crazy, disheveled, greasy (very greasy) mop of hair. Facial hair (which is actually pretty light, not dark like the aforementioned mop) in selective patches. A peeling nose and freckles. Pretty much what I expected. I have a feeling that the next time will be a little more drastic.
Peeing in a toilet was fun, but you have no idea how much you’re actually producing. That is the beauty of the pee bottle. You appreciate your kidneys and you know when you’re dehydrated.
The next stop was the galley. FRUIT! I devoured an apple and PB+J sandwich on BREAD! It was delicious. I grabbed three of the leftover peanut butter chocolate chip bar things and headed back to my room.
I didn’t get around to uploading the data until like 3 or 4 and it took forever to document everything properly.
And then I took a shit. Oh was it ever wonderful. I only write about this because it was such a significant experience. A warm bathroom. A warm toilet seat. No wind. The first time I’ve pulled my pants down all the way to my ankles in a month. And 1 and 2 at the same time! I lingered. Just sat there for 5 minutes longer than really necessary.
So I’ve lost feeling in the tips of my big toes. It is really strange, they’re just numb. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I started noticing it Wenesday night. I thought they were just cold then, but they never got better. They look fine, they just feel like they’ve been anesthetized and it’s a little uncomfortable/unusual. I guess they just got too cold one day. Oh well. Maybe it will go away with time.
Before I forget, I weighed myself today – the midway mark – 175 pounds. So I’ve lost 5 so far. Not too bad, considering we ran out of candy bars over a week ago. Before that, I was eating at least 2 a day. I made sure that the new box of snacks is on the resupply flight tomorrow.
So last night I took care of a few more things and had to upload more data. I didn’t have time to relax until like 11 (after the shower). I talked to Dave at 9 pm on the iridium phone and as he started listing off things to do tomorrow I became more and more disheartened. So much for catching up with people, writing emails and reading the news.
Instead I spent the today running around McMurdo trying to get things done when everyone has the day off. BFC to pick up new teeth for the ice corer, an extra pee bottle and some gloves for Joe. Crary to cut 200 new plastic ice core sleeves from a huge roll (which took forever to find). And finally, locate the big ice core boxes “somewhere in the stockyard”, remove the small ice core tubes, and replace them with 120 larger ice core tubes “somewhere else in a mill van in another stockyard”. It took me an hour just to find everything. Fortunately, I found a BFC rickshaw thing and was able to transport 30 tubes at a time, but man was it a bitch. They kept falling out and the wind kept blowing things away or slamming the door of the mill van. It took about 4-5 hours in the end. At least I had my iPod.
Then at the check-in tonight, Dave gave me more assignments. I knew coming back would suck.
But the food has been incredible. Steak and italian roast beef with fresh bread and salads both nights. Eating alone wasn’t much fun, but I could concentrate on savoring every morsel. After dinner, I asked one of the galley workers if there was any way I could take a loaf of bread out to the field with me. She gave me two whole loaves of wheat bread and I snagged 8 pieces of assorted fruit. I feel it is the least that I can do for my comrades. The other night we had a droolfest talking about all of the foods we miss after eating rice and beans for dinner, again. Everyone mentioned fresh fruit and bread. I bought a can of fritos for Doug too – he’s a frito fiend.
They have screwed up the last two resupply flights and we haven’t received any more meal or snack boxes. As a result, the dinners have been getting a little less extravagant, but are still a relief after a long day of work. I made sure that we’ll get the right boxes on my flight tomorrow.
So I’m off again at 10:30 tomorrow morning, by myself again. Originally it was just going to be me and a few food boxes, but now it looks like there will be about 600 pounds of cargo accompanying me on the flight. Dave requested “all of the C-boxes”. Each box was assigned a letter, D for drinks, S for snacks, and C as the codeword for beer (cerveza). I think there were a total of 5 or 6 C boxes and the helo ops people were questioning me about their contents when they saw the weight (>300 lb). What is in these C boxes that weighs so much? I claimed ignorance to play it safe. I don’t know if Dave wants the secret to get out – we may mysteriously lose a C box sometime in the future.
I’ve got a few more things to take care of tomorrow morning. I don’t plan to sleep too much. I’ll put up a few posts and pictures and then catch a few hours before I have to wake up. A quick stop by the mailroom to figure out why my mail isn’t getting out into the field and then a stop at the BFC to pick up some stuff and get some additional teeth for the ice core drill. Then it’s back to the field until at least mid-December. We will be in the same spot until the end of the week and then move camp down into central Beacon Valley. We’ll have a few satellite camps too, so I may get to see another snapshot of the Dry Valleys before the end of the field season.
If you feel like writing, my address is (hopefully):

David Shean
McMurdo Station
Project G-054
PSC 469 Box 800
APO AP 96599-1035

Hopefully I will have some time to write a few letters when I get back out there. As always, I’m thinking about all of you out there and I miss you. I can’t wait to share more stories and pictures with you when I return. This has already been the experience of a lifetime and I can only imagine the adventures I will have in the coming weeks.


A view of the camp during takeoff.



Beacon Valley from the air.



Stormtrooper?



Lazy seals.



Mcmurdo from the air. Big huh? 1100 people there right now.

1 Shean = ~1.1 L

11/18/04

I saw Jim’s bare ass today. We were packing up the seismic equipment and he kind of walked about 15 feet away downwind. I heard a really strange noise, kind of a “bluahh” or something, and instinctively turned around. The image that was seared into my memory will never be forgotten. Jim was facing in the opposite direction, looking downward, with his pants around his ankles like a little boy. His white, kind of old man, ass and legs were fully exposed. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I tried to help from laughing, but let out a little snort and turned away as fast as possible. I would have said something like “Dammit Jim, you need to warn me if you’re going to do that!”, but I was so shocked that the words wouldn’t come.
Like a little boy.
They must have fallen. That is the only explanation.
Subject change.
When we do the seismic surveys and the shot points are over 60 m away, you hear the sound wave travel through the ice before you hear it through the air. It is not intuitive, and still fascinates me. There is a significant delay. Velocity of sound in ice ~3700 m/s, velocity of sound in air ~340 m/s. Pretty cool.
Doug and Dave didn’t get back tonight until 10:30 after putting in hobos (little computers that monitor temperature and such). Dave is nuts.
No clear indication of ice thickness from seismics yet. Kind of frustrating.
So we have a new volumetric measurement at camp. The Shean = slightly more than 1 L. I have been known to fill my 1 L nalgene pee bottle on occasion in one fell swoop. It amazes me. I hold the bottle at my abdomen and visualize how big my bladder actually is.
On his way to the 55 gallon urine barrel, Jim will comment on the puny volume of his contribution as only a quarter-Shean.
I’ve been really tired lately from the 10-12 hour days lately. Just work, eat and sleep.

One of the new seismic lines further downglacier. A slight change from the nice flat lake ice.



Adam. He was hot from walking. I sent this one to his wife.



A view of central and lower Beacon Valley. Out there somewhere is the next campsite. That's where the really old ice is located, some of it may be as old as 12 million years.

Drilling

11/17/04
11:34 PM

I’m exhausted. We were supposed to get a helo this morning to head down valley but the weather was bad - snowy and foggy. The night before, we were up until after midnight, which is when we finished eating dinner. We have been drilling about 20 meters from our campsite and it has been tough. I don’t have the energy to sit here and write all about it. We’re supposed to head downvalley tomorrow morning instead. Another long day of coring and a late night, only to wake up early again for another grueling day. Tomorrow is going to suck.
So we have like $90,000 worth of drilling equipment out here. Four different systems and so far we know that two don't work in this kind of ice. We finally made some progress despite getting the core barrel stuck several times, going down very slowly. The ice cores are beautiful. 1 m long cylinders of glacier. It takes 5 people just to run the drilling operation. When you start getting deeper and deeper, the workload increases. You constantly have to add and remove poles to the "string" that holds the core barrel down the hole.
We did more seismic studies at the lake, although I haven't been getting the results that I would like. I have made a few "business" calls to real geophysicists to discuss possible solutions. I'm starting to doubt whether we will get good data. I have also realized that I really don’t have much experience with seismic surveys outside of lab and class work, yet I am expected to carry out professional seismic surveys. So far it has been going ok and I am learning a lot about what does and doesn't work.
There is a large ice crack that has formed near my tent in the past few days. One chunk of ice is thrusting above another and there is a 1-2" ledge along the crack.
Adam found out that his wife is pregnant again. He was so happy. He came into the tent crying and hugged Doug and I. I was overcome by a strong sentiment of happiness. It is contageous. It is just another reminder of how young I am and that Adam is at a very different stage of life. His experience down here is entirely different because of his family.
Dave, in a lot of ways, is kind of like a little kid. Doug too. In their mannerisms, humor, facial expressions.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the brunton compass mirror and saw my scrappy beard. I think I look older.
I have been having vivid dreams, the other night I found myself in a black ocean with a seat bottom flotation device from an airplane. The sky was very dark but there were yellow lights like at a dock. The seas were rough and there were huge waves. Then suddenly, I was in a Connecticut airport where I met Adam. We drove to his old house which was filled with all sorts of weird shit, including a really strange toilet, and he started doing laundry. It was all very odd.
I've noticed that there is a recurring theme in my dreams – toilets. Dawn, what does that mean?
I think I’m actually gaining weight – I just looked at my belly and I've got some nice little rolls.
I’ve been eating a lot, but lately haven’t been doing much physical labor during the seismic surveys. Sitting at a computer when it’s cold sucks.
Adam is snoring pretty loud right now
I need to sleep.
I haven’t written any letters and tomorrow is the mail drop with the helos. I hadn’t even thought about it until last night.
We’ve been working very hard here. Early morning, late lunch, late dinner, then sleep – no free time to do things like write in journals or write letters. I wonder if that is what Jim and Dave do in their tent while everyone else cooks them dinner each night.


Life in the cooktent. Usually the highlight of the day.



The drilling team with one of the failed drill systems.



I really like this one. Doug and Jim workin' it.



The hole. This one is like 30 feet deep. It gets black after about 10 feet and you can no longer see the bottom. Light passes throught he shallow ice and it is illuminated in a beautiful deep blue over the seeminly infinite black hole. It's also a trip to listen to the reverberations when chunks of snow and ice fall from the surface down into the hole.

Tom Jones arrives

11/13/04
9:30 PM

An early night at Dave’s camp. The weather is shitty again. The winds picked up this afternoon at around 1. One of the d-rings on our tent (the pink fortress) finally gave out. One of the bungee hooks on Joe’s tent actually bent into a completely straight wire from the wind this afternoon. We probably had a few gusts up around 60-70 mph.
Jim, Dave and I did a seismic survey of our lake today. It was very refreshing to finally do something for my project specifically. I measured the lake, it’s actually pretty big, like 200 meters by 85 meters. Setting up the line went surprisingly smoothly, but of course there were issues with the computer. I finally worked everything out and we managed to get some good data. I still don’t think we’ll get exactly what they want, but we can try all we want. Dave swung the sledge while I worked the computer and Jim stood there to prevent everything from blowing away. When the winds really came it was awful. First of all, my hands were completely frozen. I lost feeling in three fingers. They were completely numb. It was weird and a little bit scary. Dave made me put hand warmers in my thin glove liners. I couldn’t wear anything more because I had to use the fucking computer. Oh and you can’t see shit on the screen because it is so bright out. The mouse was impossible to find. I probably spent a total of 20 minutes looking for the cursor over a 2 hour period. At one point a huge gust came that knocked Jim backwards. He landed about two feet from a huge tent stake sticking about 8 inches out of the ice. I don’t even want to think of what would have happened. The same gust dragged me along the ice. The lid of the equipment case was open to reduced glare on the screen and it sort of acted like a sail. I grabbed on with one hand and tried to grab the rest of the equipment with the other so that the cables wouldn’t break. We all moved about 8 feet downwind before the gust died down. At that point we decided to call it a day.
The wind took my pee bottle away this afternoon. I left it outside my tent in the morning and when I returned it was missing. I scoured the inside of the tent and even asked Adam if he had seen or moved it recently. I then set out on a search and rescue mission. I walked all the way around the lake looking at the rocks for any sign of “P”, but saw nothing. I spotted one of our packs that had blown away and grabbed it. As I put it on, about 15 feet away was my pee bottle, nestled beneath a small boulder, waiting to be reunited with its favorite (and only) provider.
This is the third night in a row that I have eaten with Jim and Dave. It has gotten much better. Joe still says some weird stuff and everyone just kind of ignores it at this point. Nobody knows how to respond. After dinner, Dave cooked beers. He exploded one in the pressure cooker and it was reminiscent of the Joe Beals coffee disaster. We laughed a lot. We listened to the entire Tom Jones album twice. Dave is so funny. Just watching him listen to Tom makes me laugh. I can hear it right now, he’s playing the same song over and over again in his tent. The one where Tom starts off talking about love and how if you think for just one minute that you can live without it, then you’re only foolin’ yourself. I can’t help but smile every time I hear it.
This was the first night that they didn’t break out maps and aerial photographs to discuss geology. It was kind of nice. We also “finished” at a reasonable hour, just after 5. Yesterday we went on a hike down to the base of the valley, about where Mullins feeds into Beacon. We stopped about 200 yards from camp to dig pits and spent the next 2 and a half hour there photographing and sampling. Jim has to photograph everything. What is he ever going to do with all of those pictures? We didn’t eat lunch until 2 and that was only after pleading. Jim and Dave were walking so slowly, stopping every ten feet to talk or look at something. Jim is a slow hiker, which is understandable. It kind of irritated me though. I just like to move I guess. Keeps me warm and prevents boredom. We dug more pits at the bottom and then split up into two groups for the hike back up. I was with Jim, Dave, Doug and Joe. We were walking and stopping, stopping, digging, sampling, on and on. At one point Jim had hiked up ahead and I kind of split off on my own and motored back to camp. I didn’t get back until 8:20. At least the weather was beautiful when I did get back. It was so calm and peaceful here on our little lake. I decided to change my underwear. It was long overdue. I haven’t really been keeping a schedule. Whatever works. I guess Dave is notorious for not drinking water, not eating lunch, and working 12 hour days. Fuck. He also ate the dint for breakfast yesterday.
Battery almost dead…again.


The first seismic line...



...and the seismic source.



A view from the base of Mullins Valley of winds blowing snow off the ice down into Beacon Valley.



The team getting ready to move after lunch. Parka, parka, PARKA.

Mullins Camp

11/11/04
10:04 PM

Day 2 at Mullins Valley camp. Today was quite a day. Last night when we went to bed, the wind was whipping through camp at around 40 mph. The tents were really noisy. I put in my earplugs and could still hear the wind, but I slept pretty well. I woke up at around 2 AM to Dave’s voice telling Doug he had just lost a D-ring (little metal rings that connect the lines to the tents). Adam woke up a little while later. It turns out that all three of the D-rings on Dave and Jim’s tent went during the night and one of Joe’s did as well. Our tent managed to get through the night with only some stitching coming undone on one of the front ties. We call it the pink fortress. Jim and Dave had to tie a rope from the top of their tent to a huge boulder so that it wouldn’t blow down. Everyone with blown D-rings had to use bungees, which actually work pretty well.
The ice is still cracking. Probably three to four times a minute. I only seem to notice at night. I think it is caused by the thermal contraction of the ice when it gets colder, so it makes more noise at night (and by night I mean when the sun dips behind the valley walls). It is surprisingly satisfying and a reminder that we are camped on a frozen lake, riding on top of about a hundred meters of moving glacial ice.
I set up the gel cell battery under my cot tonight and have like 5 things charging at once. The damn thing keeps cutting out on me and makes this annoying little beep when it does. It will be very nice to have the generator.
So anyway, when we woke up this morning, the weather was still awful. Up to 60 mph winds (according to Dave, although Adam tells me everyone overestimates wind speeds – he’s probably right, I would have no idea, all I know is that it was really windy). The sky was overcast and visibility was shit because of all of the snow blowing around. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is only 2 miles beyond our camp over the head of the valley, so we were getting all of the cold air and snow off of the ice sheet. The wind was never consistent either, it kept switching directions, which made working (and doing anything outside) very difficult. We woke up at 7:30. The cooktent is literally 10 feet from ours, which is much more pleasant. Waiting inside were Adam, Doug, Kate and Bex. We ate and killed some time. At that point, the day appeared to be a washout. We decided to spend the morning building an ice wall for the shitbox. It was tough with the wind and blowing snow. There were several times when the wind would push you and you would just slide over the ice or snow, helpless. It was fun at first, but got old fast, especially when it pushes you into someone swinging an ice axe. We carved out a 3 foot deep trench while cutting blocks of snow and then build another 2-3 foot wall around the edges. The box is a much more pleasant experience.
We went back and ate lunch. Doug took a nap while the rest of us went out and started digging trenches on the moraine and near the edges of the lake to show the different ices. My wrist was really bothering me. I fucked up my right wrist and my two middle fingers at some point during the past few days. Now it is killing me. I think it is the high impact of picking the ice. And the worst part is that it will only get worse, I won’t have a chance to rest it. I don’t know what tendonitis feels like, but if you get it, you’re not supposed to pick and shovel for 8 hours a day.
We headed up valley, toward the accumulation zone for Mullins. It was beautiful. The entire valley is gorgeous. Dave and Jim were moving so slowly. Jim wanted to take pictures of everything and Dave took forever with his camera. Eventually I just started off on my own because the rest of the group was sort of milling about waiting for Dave and Jim. It was fucking cold. By late afternoon, we actually had blue skies with a few clouds and sunshine, but the wind was still blowing. I have a feeling that is going to be the case most of the time here. I walked all the way up around the rim of the accumulation zone on the moraine that dams the lake. The glacier ice is a creamy aqua, like scuffed light blue tinted glass. It is everywhere up there, with big angular boulders and patches of till here and there.
We got back to camp at around 5:30 and I had to cook dinner for the other tent. First of all, it smells weird in there, I think because of Joe. He kind of smells funny. Plus it is organized very differently than the other cooktent which is kind of annoying. And it seems so much darker because it has a red floor and doesn’t let much sunlight through the walls. I started cooking and he helped where he could. Dave and Jim came in right as dinner was ready. Spaghetti with sausage. Jim brought in a poster tube filled with images…the ice just popped right underneath my cot…of Mullins for entertainment and 4 Canterbury Draft’s (another New Zealand brew). Dave put on The Pretenders. He has a little walkman with tapes and speakers form 1989. They have been out here every season since then. He probably knows each of those tapes so well by now. We ate in near-silence. It was a little awkward. Dave was a little awkward. Joe said some things that weren’t really that funny and a little strange. I tried to make conversation, but eventually gave up. After we finished eating, Jim pulled out the images and we finally had something to talk about – science and planning. Dave put on the “Best of 1966” tape and mentioned that he was four years old then. Jim was born in 1942, Dave in 1962, and me in 1982. Talk about generation gaps. I think Dave still feels a little uncomfortable, or at least subordinate to Jim. Maybe subordinate isn't the right word. I feel the same way about Dave. 20 more years of science. I finally left their tent after finishing my beer with the excuse of getting the camera batteries charged. I popped into the other dinner tent and immediately felt at home. We laughed about the awkwardness. I do feel sorry for Joe. He’s the new guy and always has to deal with Dave and Jim. I found myself saying things to Dave and Jim that I would never say back at school. Talking about gold bonding my ass and shitting for example. I’m at that stage of field crudeness, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet.
The whole dual cook tent thing is really strange and kind of divides the camp. I really hope we get one of the 21 foot endurance tents. It would make things so much more pleasant and we would probably feel more like a team as opposed to a group of people working together, separately.
So my paper was accepted. Jim gave me the reviewer comments tonight during dinner. I guess he wasn’t kidding when he said he’d brought them. The man wastes no time.
I’m about to run out of batteries. Now that we have power, hopefully I’ll be able to do this more often. In the meantime the hand written entries continue to accrue.

A view of Wright valley during the helo flight to Beacon.



A view from the helo of the campsite. We are camped on a frozen lake at the head of Mullins Valley. The frozen lake and all of the rocks are sitting on top of a glacier that fills the valley and spills down into Beacon Valley below. It is unreal.



The helo dropping a sling with tent and equipment from the old camp.



A sound clip of a different glacier, but they all sound pretty similar. The pops and cracks can actually be pretty loud and when the wind isn't blowing they are the only noises at night. It is so cool.


The storm.



Spaghetti and sausage dinner. My second favorite to the chili.



The view from the shitbox. I finally remembered to bring my camera with me one morning.

A short entry and a ton of pictures from Mt. Boreas

11/8/04
10:55 pm

So we’re moving camp tomorrow afternoon at 4:10 pm, a full day before we anticipated. I still have to write home, so this will be short. Yesterday the wind came. I finally got a good katabatic wind. It sucked. Out in the field it wasn’t so bad, because we were working hard. We dug a whole suite of new trenches and pits (which we filled in this afternoon) up on the moraine near camp. But last night the winds really picked up. Like up to 40 mph. It was violent. It is the same way again tonight. The tent flaps like a sail, but it whistles along the side right near my head. The whole wall of the tent near my cot is blown inward, so I’m hugging the wall all night (or the wall is hugging me, depending on how you look at it). The door flaps in and out too. I slept like shit. It was really noisy and I was a little concerned after Adam told us to tie our boots and parkas to our cots in case our tents blew away. At about 2 AM, Adam woke up and started pounding in new stakes at his tent and at ours I guess. Doug woke up. I debated. I was so warm and comfortable. I knew we had done a damn good job putting the stakes in originally, and I figured that Doug and Adam could take care of things. Apparently it was a warm wind and the sky was incredible. I finally got some sleep from like 3-8 and then after waking up got a lot of shit from Adam and Doug for not helping. I should have just gotten up. I didn’t sleep the entire time they were out there. The mornings have been really shitty. I have a lot of trouble getting out of bed and then am usually overtired from lack of sleep. The only good sleep I get is from like 3-8 AM and I wake up right in the middle of it to pee. I think I’ll be better about getting up when Dave and Jim are around. I’m trying to think of what we’ve done in the past few days. We walked around Mt. Boreas to Wright Valley. It was beautiful. The ice falls were unreal. Our stove just ran out of fuel, I need to get into bed. One of these days I’ll transcribe the written notes in my journal (wishful thinking). Oh well, sometimes it’s better to enjoy the moment instead of worry about writing things down.


It's starting to get late now, so I'm just going to throw up a bunch of pictures from the Olympus camp. Most of these were taken along the hike around Mt. Boreas to Wright Valley.

A frozen lake we encountered on our hike around Boreas. I practiced my lutz. The ice was beautiful and in some places you could see down a few feet. Other spots were filled with air bubbles and cracks. So much fun. And really fucking slippery.



Two nearby mountains known as Mt. Circe and Mt. Dido on the other side of Mt. Boreas.



A view of upper Wright valley and Wright upper glacier. The chopped up terrain in front of the glacier is known as The Labyrinth and is pretty incredible. It was carved millions of years ago by glacial meltwater.



The ice falls. Where the East Antarctic Ice Sheet spills over into Wright valley. Yeah.



Lower Wright Valley. I don't know if you can see the little red/black dot on the horizon at this resolution, but that is Adam, about 200 yards away. The valley is enormous.



Along the hike, we came across an old cache set up by Kiwi bedrock geologists in the 1960s. The jerry cans were still full of gas, even though the paint on the outside had been sandblasted off. The white things are actually bleached and windblasted cardboard boxes. We didn't open those. Probably food. We took GPS coordinates and went on our way.



Fossil imprints left by a large worm only found in Antarctica (name is something like Beaconoites). It lived in shallow seas and kind of filtered the mud for nutrients and left all of these impressions that were preserved as more and more sediment was deposited. As the layers above were eroded away, the fossils were exposed. Some of them are huge, like 2-3" across. What up Big Worm.



A view of camp on the way back. Did you catch the Friday reference in the last caption?



A nice shot of Boreas and unnamed peak. Kate and Doug are heading to the snowbank to collect snow for water. All of our water comes from that snowbank.



A fallen soldier during the move.



The infamous shitbox. The view was spectacular, looking right down into McKelvey valley. Notice the lack of wind barrier. To use:
1. Remove big rock.
2. Pull pants down just enough to avoid crapping in pants.
3. Take care of business...quickly.
4. Replace big rock.

Day 8

11/3/04
10:20 PM

Wanted to write a few things.
First of all, you don’t see your breath down here. There’s no condensation nuclei. The only time your see it is when you light a match or when the helo is around. That's when you realize how cold it is down here. The air is that clean.
You also have to thaw everything for dinner. All of the cans of beans or meat are frozen solid. You have to poke holes in the lids and rotate them on the stove until they are warm enough to squeeze from the can into a waiting pot. It takes about 10 minutes to thaw them enough so that the frozen core slides out. The same goes for peanut butter and jelly which are the lunch staples, although we usually leave them in a bag hangint high in the tent (warmer up there) for at least a day before we need them.
I’ve been having really vivid dreams lately. I think it is because I haven’t been getting good sleep. It is too light out and I just can’t get into a deep sleep cycle. I dreamt the other night that I was trying out for Joe Stoltz’s baseball team again, only I couldn’t remember how to play. I kept forgetting things. I ended up giving him the finger as I walked off the field and he told me never to come back. I was upset but proud.
Tonight was fun. I made chili again and we laughed a whole lot. We talked about celebrity jeopardy, Mourmons, Conan, fuckbuddies, anal sex, chimpanzees and MC Hammer vs. Jackson. Doug actually put up an argument that Hammer was a better dancer. I was offended. We debated for a few minutes and then Adam interjected with "I can't believe you guys are still talking about this." We teased Kate about a few things, including the topic of vibrators. We do team up on her sometimes and she is usually a really good sport, sometimes even comes back. But it has to get old when it is pretty much constant. I stopped when I sensed her getting upset, but Adam and Doug didn’t. I kept looking her in the eye trying to show her that I understood and I was sorry, but I don’t know if the message got across. She probably just sees me as another asshole.
Adam was protesting about using a vibrator with a woman and I said “So you’re not into the machines?” in a pretty serious tone. Doug burst out laughing and almost vomited because he had just taken a drink and it went down the wrong pipe. He couldn’t stop laughing. He thought I meant machines like cyborgs. Terminator 3 style. It was hilarious. So for the rest of the night we kept coming back to cyborgs. I played Mr. Roboto, so that was sung a few times as well ("Secret secret, I've got a secret"). Then right before everyong was about to leave, we were talking about the morning radio check-in to McMurdo and how Dave was going to be in town. Then Adam told Kate that during the call, she should say “Macops, this is G054, we have 4 souls at camp, no cyborgs, over”. I laughed straight for like 90 seconds. It was the funniest thing I think I’ve heard since we’ve been here. Maybe I'm slowly going crazy.

Day 7

11/2/04
9:29 pm

End of day 7. Another beautiful day. They wind comes and goes, and the temperature difference is incredible. We spent today in the lake basin again, digging. I spent about 7 hours digging a trench that is probably 25 feet long and maybe an average of 1.5 feet deep. It is a workout. Digging works best with two people. One swings the pick as hard and as fast as they possibly can until they get noodle arms and then the other jumps in with a shovel to throw out all of the loose dirt. You really sort of focus when you’re doing that type of work. Everything else just sort of melts away. After lunch today I spent about 5 minutes in the cook tent alone, just thinking about friends and warming up after shitting.
So I’ve been farting like a madman. I really don’t know what it is. Maybe my stomach just doesn’t deal with change well, because that’s about the last thing that I can think of. I thought it was the powdered milk (Milkman (TM) with "A kiss of cream" written across the package), but after cutting that out, while there was some reduction in number, there is still a problem.
Yesterday we went on another long hike down the valley. My ankle was bothering me today. I really hope that it will have time to rest before the next big day. The hike back up the valley was another test. I just got in a rhythm and the right mental state and took off. It felt really good. Made me think of hiking Mt. Everett with Charles.
We found out yesterday that the Red Sox won the World Series. I wish I could have been around to see it. I am actually glad it happened so that all of the talk will end.
Tomorrow is election day. It’s hard to believe. I think back to where I was four years ago. I have changed so much since then. If you had told me November 1, 2000 that I would be in Antarctica on November 1, 2004, I would have thought you were crazy. I remember that night vividily though, staying up, waiting to hear the final results. The sun just went behind Mt. Boreas and it got much darker in the tent. Here comes the cold. I remember saying “we’re going to have a war” after they finally announced that Bush had won. If only I had known.
I can’t imagine what another four years of Bush will be like. Age 22-26. Plus a who knows how many years of after-effects and "recovery". That is primetime for me. I will be getting a real job, maybe getting married, maybe starting a family. And all of the shit that Bush is doing will affect me directly. It is kind of scary. What is even scarier is that I can do absolutely nothing about it.
I haven’t really sat and reflected about how simple life is out here. It is wonderful. It is a blessing to be thousands of miles away from all of that bullshit. Politics in particular. But then again, I miss my friends and some things about life in Providence.
As I was humping up the hill yesterday, I was thinking about Vietnam. 30 years ago, I would probably be there. Actually, I could probably look up the draft dates and find out precisely when I would have gone. Being down here is like being in the service in some ways, ok, very loosely. It at least makes the war in Iraq a lot more real. Thinking about what those guys are going through over there. Isolated in a strange place. But then again, nobody is trying to kill me down here, just the continent itself. In some ways, this is a service to my country. I serve in the name of science! (imagine a voice like William Wallace).
Tonight we ate Ramen stir fry with canned chicken, frozen Japanese vegetables and chunks of tofu. After a long day, it was delicious.
Adam makes fun of Kate when she wears her fleece headthing. He thinks she looks Muslim. He called her Fatima and kept talking about how she prayed to Allah for a miracle and was granted the Raro (a New Zealand version of kool-aid). He was also using a Chinese accent and talking about “eyes like dinner plates”. He is well educated and said something about wanting to bring the Koran down here to read. He does know a lot of little random tidbits about religion, among other things. I don’t know. Doug loves it. I guess the real world is a little less PC than Brown. I just think of my friend Fatma and what a wonderful person she is. What if she overheard someone saying things like that?
I'm still waiting for my sleeping bag to dry out. It is almost an excuse to have the stove running in our tent. I feel guilty doing it, but I guess it’s just a small luxury. We listened to Johnny Cash tonight during dinner. He is great. A legend.
My nose has really been bothering me lately. Yesterday I had big black spots on it that I interpreted to be freckles. I hadn’t been wearing sunscreen, so I’m assuming it was burned. It runs constantly when we’re outside and I have to wipe it with my leather work gloves which really irritates it and results in a huge frozen snot patch on my index finger. I also think it got burned from below due to reflection off the snow. Antarctica is not a place for good complexion.
I wrote a letter yesterday. I have about 8 more to write before we leave here. Time. At least we are done early some nights.
Tomorrow morning is bacon and bagels for a change instead of cream of wheat or oatmeal. It should be a treat.

Day 5

10/31/04
10:13 PM
Olympus Range, Mt. Boreas

So we’re in the field. This is day 5. I finally got a chance to warm this thing up. I guess it's Halloween. I wrote about the first few days by hand. I am starting to fall into the routine. Wake up at 8, eat breakfast, get warm, go out in the field, eat lunch, work until 7 or 8, eat dinner, go to bed.
I’m in the tent right now after a pretty good day. We now have a stove in our tent to help dry our wet clothes and warm things up before bed. It is a luxury. Those first few nights were brutal. The stove makes a huge difference. It is probably 70 or 80° at the top of our tent, while the floor is still at -5° F. We don’t have a tent floor. Our tents came from Marble Point, which is a small refueling and storage camp and apparently they forgot to check the tents for floors. So there is just snow and rocks beneath our cots with the tent sleeve between them as a floor. It’s actually not too bad.
The mornings are definitely the worst. It is so hard to get out of a warm sleeping bag to a freezing cold tent. There is frost everywhere inside – on the walls, on hanging socks, on sleeping bags, on pillows. But again, I’m getting used to it. So far I am satisfied. The cold sucks at times, but other times I don’t even notice it. I’m definitely getting tougher, both mentally and physically. Mentally is more important here. It actually feels pretty good. I feel as though I am doing something healthy for myself.
As ar as the science goes, things have been going slow. Yesterday, Adam and I found a continuous layer of fossil mosses in some lake deposits near our camp. He things they are over 14 million years old and indicate that there was a time period before then when climate conditions in the Dry Valleys were warm enough to allow the mosses to grow. We have been digging pits and trenches into hillsides to find the stuff and search for ash layers to obtain dates or glacial tills to obtain stratigraphic information. The first pit I dug yesterday had the mosses. We stopped immediately and sampled them. We started carefully brushing like archaeologists around the mosses and realized that they were continuous. We became less and less careful as our pit extended for over 20 meters. It was pretty incredible and very exciting. This is all unknown. I love science.
The digging part sucks, but at the same time, I am enjoying it. It makes me feel satisfied with myself, like I’m doing real work for a change. I am getting stronger at the same time.
Also getting pretty dirty with all of this digging. It’s been 6 days so far. I’m starting to smell, especially after the mountain climbing session the other day. Hair is pretty greasy.
Today was a relatively easy day. It was windy and there is still a lot of snow on the ground, so we couldn’t get much done out in the field. I dug a few trenches and then Adam sent me off to look for more lake deposits. I didn’t find any, but got a chance to walk a few miles away around the valley. It is beautiful out here. It was especially cold in the morning, considering the wind chill. It’s all relative at this point. No matter what the wind is doing, it is fucking cold. Dinner tonight was spanish rice. We ate early, like around 7. We had a few beers (after cooking them on the stove) and laughed a lot. Kate was drinking screwdrivers and Adam said something about Kate rubbing spanish rice all over her busom. It became a theme for the night. We decided that rice was way down on the list of things to rub on breasts. I said gravy was #4. They joked that my top 10 would all involve some sort of butter or butter product. We listened to Kenny Rogers and then I got my iPod for some James Brown. High spirits. And another day over. I’m getting pretty cold. It is amazing how much colder it gets when the sun goes down. Every night at about 10 PM it dips behind Mt. Boreas, each day a few minutes later. It looks like the battery on this thing will do better than I had imagined, so I will probably be able to write when I’m not too tired. Unfortunately, the solar power charging system isn’t working, so once I run out of juice, I’ll have to wait until we’ve got generators in Beacon Valley. It is going to be weird with 4 new people out here. Especially since two of them are Jim and Dave. I give it a week and then it will be just like it is with the four of us now. Maybe with a little less crudeness.


Camp. The tent in the foreground is the cooktent and the others are for sleeping. The pinkish one is mine (and Doug's). The mountain in the background is Mt. Aureas (sp). It is deceptively far away. The wooden boxes in front of the tent are the food/rock boxes.



I really like this picture of Mt. Boreas. The contrast with the blue sky is so crisp. It just towers over our camp.

Farewell civilization

10/25/04
8:02 pm

So this will be the last post for a while. I don’t know how long it will be. The one thing that I know for sure is that I will be out of contact until at least mid-December, possibly later. There is a small chance that I will return to McMurdo for a night to upload some data, and if that is the case, you will see a flurry of activity. I will bombard you with blog entries, emails and phone calls, even if it means I get no sleep. But my only reliable source of communication for the next two months will be the United States Postal Service.
We are headed out on two huey helicopters tomorrow morning at 8:45 for the Olympus Range in the Dry Valleys. We will be there for about two weeks and will then pick up camp and move to Beacon Valley, where we will spend the rest of the field season. No showers, no toilets, no laundry, no beds. Just rocks and ice, a few tents, good company and a bottle of jagermeister.
I love you all and I will be thinking about you out there. I will talk to you again soon.

This is a little map of the Ross Ice Shelf area and the Dry Valleys. I put little dots and numbers for where we're going to be. McMurdo (1), The Olympus Range (2) and Beacon Valley (somewhere near 3).



This is a landsat image of the Dry Valleys area. Click to make big.



My backyard for a month in Beacon Valley. That rock-covered, lobate, flowing kind of glacier-like thing on the right in the foreground is called Mullins Valley. That is my baby. That sweet little collection of rock and ice is why I'm here. I'm going to expose it repeatedly, drill it repeatedly and hit it with a sledgehammer, repeatedly.

This morning we had to load all of our gear onto a truck to bring it down to the helicopter pads. I was up in the truck securing the equipment as people threw it up to me. Doug had just thrown me the two big urine barrels that we will use in the field for the next two weeks. As the second one sailed through the air into my arms, Matt (my roommate, who just got a really nice camera and is learning how to use it) pulled out his camera and said "Dave, do something!".
This just came naturally:

A flashback to freshman year...

10/24/04
8:23 pm

So I slept for 13 hours last night. I woke up at around 11 this morning, feeling great. After I fell asleep, I was woken up again when Matt came into the room. He was just sitting there reading and then Byron showed up. He was tanked. I forgot to mention earlier that he kind of looks like Chong, of Cheech and Chong. I heard him banging into things and he started talking to Matt. It was pretty funny. He couldn’t really form coherent sentences. Slurring every other word. Matt said he grabbed a beer on his way to bed. I heard him come into the little nook where our beds are, stumbling and banging. He kind of stood there for a minute, I guess considering the task at hand – getting up into his bunk. He turned around and asked Matt for a blanket. Matt gave him one. He threw it up onto the bunk and then tried to climb up himself. I watched it unfold. He was kind of hanging there by both arms kicking his feet until he finally found the dresser next to the bed. With his foot planted he pushed up a little and managed to slide up onto the bare mattress a bit more. He then stayed in that position for around 10 seconds. I thought maybe he had passed out. Finally, he gave one more last ditch effort to get up and in the process swayed backwards. I thought he was going to fall for sure, possibly on me. But then I caught my last glimpse of his feet and I knew he had achieved his goal. There was some additional rustling and his gloves and a few papers came raining down between the bed and the wall. Then silence.
When I woke up this morning he was gone. I looked up on his bunk. Matt’s blanket was there, neatly folded at the foot of the bed – I guess he never managed to open it up. I went and sat down on the couch to watch the news for a little while and he came stumbling in with another case of beer. He started throwing it into the fridge. It was around 11 at that point. He grabbed two six packs and on his way out the door, turned to me and offered me a beer, something like “hey, you want one of these before I head down?” It was very tempting, but I declined, playing the “I don’t like to drink before breakfast” card. He said “breakfast, what the hell is that? I think I heard about that in a movie or something” and proceeded “down”. I chuckled.
Apparently they ran out of booze at the south pole station before the winter season was up. Byron was making up for lost time.
I went and had brunch with the crew and then went to Adam and Doug’s room to watch game 1. My feet were getting cold, so I went back up to my room to grab a pair of socks and I find Byron sitting on the couch with a plate of breakfast talking with Matt. As I walk in, Byron is in the middle of a tirade, “If you fuck her right, there outta be giblets when you’re done”. Matt started laughing. I headed out the door shaking my head. I wonder what Byron’s life has been like. I get the sense that there is a lot of misogyny and womanizing here, that Byron is not alone.
So anyway, we watched the first half of game 1 over a few Speights. Adam always says “Speight’s Gold” in this kind of half-pirate, half-mad-Kiwi kind of accent. It makes me laugh every time I hear it.
Doug and I decided that we wanted to get out and do something, so we tried to go bowling. There is a two lane bowling alley here that apparently dates back to the mid-50s. It is an antique, one of the few remaining manual pinsetter alleys on the planet. Adam was telling us that Brunswick (or whoever the bowling manufacture actually is) has repeatedly offered contracts to ship the lanes back to the US in exchange for a brand new bowling facility and quite a bit of money. But I guess it is kind of a landmark down here too. When Doug and I walked in, there were already like 12 people there bowling and they all kind of ignored or scowled at us. There were two men in short shorts and black and white horizontally striped socks at the end of the lanes operating the big metal pinsetters. It was actually kind of funny to watch them drop down every time the ball came through. The would roll it back and take care of the pins. Since there was no chance of us getting a lane, we headed back, picked up Adam and Kate and went over to the Coffee House for a game of Risk. We had scoped out the board games the night before and saw that they had two Risk sets. Both of them are from the late 50s. I imagine that there are quite a few games that have been around since the early days at McMurdo. I had never seen that version of Risk before. The board is square, but the map and territories are all the same. The pieces were little plastic roman numerals or kind of 3-D asterisks. We had a quick game and I ended up winning after a few hours. It was a lot of fun, and probably one of the most laid back Risk games I’ve ever played. We reconvened for dinner where we discussed our nicknames. Kate’s temporary name is bandicoot. She was banding food boxes the other day when Adam first called her that. It seemed fitting because she is kind of small and marsupial-like in nature. I can’t remember what Doug’s original nickname was supposed to be, but he was talking about changing it to Striker. I guess he was tired of Doug. He’s a funny dude. They had decided that I was The Duece because I’m Dave II after big Dave. So Doug and I are Striker and The Duece. We sound like a team of F-16 pilots or some Burt Reynolds wannabees. I can foresee some good times in the field with the shitbox (our field toilet) and my nickname being The Duece. Apparently if you do well in the field, you get a chance to sign the wall of fame in the cage, which among other things, has the toilet seat from the ‘98-99 field season, signed by those who made it on the wall.
After dinner, we kind of hung around, I got on a computer for a little while and then we watched Kill Bill II. Great movie.
I came back and Matt and I talked for about a half an hour, laughing about Byron and talking about what we would be doing in the field, rock climbing, and being 21, among other things. I’m really starting to like him. He’s a good person. He told me he’s been going to the science lectures and has really been out exploring McMurdo. I have a feeling I would be doing the same if I was stuck here for a little longer. Surprisingly, there’s always several activities or things to do here (at least during the summer). It’s important and I think they do a pretty good job of providing those options. There must be an entire office down here that plans and publicizes activities and other social gatherings.
OK, well tomorrow is another 6:45 AM morning. A few tasks to take care of, and then I need to pack everything I’ll need in the field and bring it down to the helo pads for loading.

thirsty?

10/23/04
10:40 PM

I’m back in my room after a short night of barhopping in Antarctica. After dinner, we went to the “non-smoking” bar called Galligher’s for a few beers. Speight’s Gold to be precise – a New Zealand brew, the self-titled “Three Star Beer”. We had a few rounds. Kate opted out and instead took shots of tequila “with training wheels”, meaning the bartender gave her a saltshaker and some lemon juice in a small cup. Limes haven't come in yet. We played some air hockey. I cleaned house. I love that game. I was perfectly happy there, but more people started to show up and it was getting crowded and noisy. I think it is more of a place for the workers to take off their carharts, drink beer and unwind. Adam looked uncomfortable. He suggested we leave to go to The Coffee House – one of the other three bars - a little coffee shop and wine bar. When we walked in I understood. It was more of the scientist crowd or at least the “high society” of McMurdo. At first, I was hesitant and felt a little uneasy. A lot of people drinking wine. It was in this little wooden halfpipe. I can’t remember the actual name of that particular type of building, but they're really warm and do well in harsh conditions. A band named Soup was playing there tonight. They were pretty bad. The started off with a Floyd cover and then moved into very slow, drawn out, crappy acoustic music. Ok, so it wasn’t that bad. During the first song, I kind of got lost in the moment. I forgot about everything else. Then after a few minutes, when I started thinking about where I was, it made me happy and I realized that for those people who live and work at McMurdo, this is all they have to get away for a night. It could have been any little bar in a small town, USA. Inside you couldn’t tell the difference. It is their way to feel normal, to forget about the bitter cold and lack of civilization for a few hours. The social dynamic was interesting as well. A lot of dudes. A few women.
Anyway. Soup. We ended up looking at the cheesy romantic novels on the bookcase next to us before their set was over. Adam left early. There was talk about getting another bottle of wine, but nothing ever came of it and we left early. I’m definitely with older people - nobody wants to stay up late.
At lunch yesterday, I left my parka on one of the community coat racks and when I went to pick it up, there were two coronas in one of the pockets. I threw them in the room fridge. Later that night when I got back from Crary I offered one to Matt. I pulled them out of the fridge to find that they were still warm. The fridge was unplugged and smelled like ass. We drank them anyway and talked for a little while.
Matt and I have two new roommates who just got in from the Pole. They had wintered there for over 7 months. The same three buildings, the same 70 people – for seven months. I can’t imagine. Last night when I got back, someone else’s stuff was in our room. At about 11:30, after I had gone to bed, I hear someone come into the room and climb up onto the bunk above me. When I woke up this morning, there was a scary looking dude on the couch putting on his boots. I looked up at his bed – no sheets and a briefcase as a pillow. Hardcore. His name is Byron.
I met the other new roommate this afternoon. His name is Donald. He is the chef from the South Pole station. We talked for about an hour. He is from Baltimore and was on a submarine for 20 years. He’s been all over the world. This was his third year in Antarctica, but he claims it is his last. During our conversation, he kept coming back to how much play he was going to get and how he couldn’t wait to get to Christchurch and Bangkok for the hookers. It was funny. I couldn’t tell how much was real and how much was stretched or just plain out false. Regardless, it was an entertaining conversation with an interesting person. We talked about crabs (the kind you eat), baseball, football, Antarctica, women, Tennessee (and the country line dancing bars), traveling and drinking among other things.
I saw two crab seals today. We stopped into Crary to fill out some paperwork, and from the second story computer lab, we could see a pair of seals on the sea ice, not too far from the base. They were just laying around, soaking up the sun. I wish we could have seen them up close. Apparently they knaw through cracks in the ice using their lower teeth to make a hole to squeeze through. And when they get older and their teeth are so worn down that they can no longer make holes, they die.
We took a walk down to Scott’s hut this afternoon. It was a beautiful day. The hut is in pristine condition, the same way that they left it in 1902. Crazy to think that over 100 years ago, people were already building permanent establishments down here. They came here in sailboats that could break through the sea ice in the late summer. There was a dead seal sitting outside the hut, lying on some scrap canvas that had been preserved by the cold. You could still see its whiskers and flippers. It was as if they had killed it yesterday. We couldn’t get inside because it was locked (we forgot to get the key before we left), but could peer in through the windows. Everything is just as it was when they left. Food, furs, sleds, tables, stoves, everything. A snapshot into the early days of Antarctic exploration. Not too far from the hut is Vince’s cross. Apparently one of the men drowned nearby, so they built a 6’ wooden cross for him on top of a small hill.
Donald said something earlier in the afternoon along the lines of “if all of this ice melted, you’d find bodies everywhere – people, dogs, horses, all sorts of animals”. He’s right. Who knows how many people and animals have just disappeared, fallen in crevasses or frozen to death over the past century. Nowadays, the chances are really slim, but before the days of radio and GPS, it was a serious risk.
So it turns out we couldn’t get the helicopter flights out to McMurdo until Tuesday. It sucks, but at least takes a little pressure off and gives us a weekday to take care of stuff like laundry and last phone calls. I have a feeling that we are going to get pretty bored tomorrow. At least we can watch the world series. And I can get one more post in before I'm cut off from communication.
I felt awful this morning and thought that I was coming down with the crud (how they refer to a cold around here). I was overtired and after a little nap before lunch, I felt even worse. I couldn’t eat much. I kept feeling like I was going to throw up. But after relaxing for a little while and talking with Donald, I felt much better. I forced fluids all day. Mom would be proud. We’ll see how I feel again tomorrow morning. I really hope I’m not sick. Maybe I just need a good night’s rest.
I started looking through one of Matt’s photo books earlier this afternoon. It was a collection of photos from the guy who took the famous National Geographic cover of the Afghan girl with the eyes. He is an incredible photographer (the book photographer, not Matt, although I haven't seen Matt's photos). And the material he was working with is equally as incredible. It made me feel very fortunate for what I have.
And then tonight Doug, Kate and Adam were bitching about Dave (their advisor) and the shitty social life as a grad student for at least an hour. I just sat there silent. It was really weird. I thought about getting up and leaving. They didn’t even look at me or make an attempt to include me in the conversation. At one point they acknowledged me and I spoke my mind. I told them that I had actively avoided the grad student social scene because of what they were doing. That is all grad students ever talk about, their conversations almost always devolve into bashing their advisors in some way or another. I told them that I understand why it happens, I’ve done it myself before - it is the one thing that they all have in common so it is very natural to talk about it, but that it gets old to sit there and listen to it. They agreed with me and continued to do it. Whatever. I’ll be there in a year. Maybe I’ll understand more then. It was just interesting to juxtapose a malnourished child in Nigeria with three, well-fed, whiney, educated Americans who have nothing better to do (or at least, no problems large enough) than to sit there and bash the man who pays them and got them to Antarctica in the first place. It seems very disrespectful. Maybe I’m just trying to criticize. Fuck. I don’t know. I’m going to bed.

A view of McMurdo station. The hut in the foreground is Scott's hut. They built it in 1902. Apparently it is the archetectural style used by Australian sheep herders and is ideal for blocking low sun and keeping a constant temperature within (because it is always in the shade)



Vince's cross.



A view from Crary at around 11:30 pm. A beautiful Antarctic sunset (about as low as the sun gets at this point in the year).

hungry?

10/22/04
8:48 PM

Another long day. Woke up again at 6:45 for breakfast and then had to go to a waste management and evironmental training class at 8. It turns out that we have to record every environmental disturbance that we create while in the Dry Valleys. That is going to be an incredible pain in the ass, considering that nearly every pit that we dig is considered a disturbance. And there will be many, many pits.
We spent the rest of the morning in the food pantry, figuring out what we are going to eat and drink for the next two months. It was really difficult and incredibly tedious. I finally see why Adam was dreading this part of the preparations. We had about 30 wooden crates, maybe 1’x2’x1.5’ that we had to fill. We had a sort of ad hoc system for boxes divided up into breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and beverages. It is tough to think about cooking meals in the field for 8 people at a time on December 8th, when you don’t know everyone’s preferences or how much they will be eating. We settled on six main dishes for dinner. Chili, bean burritos, spaghetti, a mashed potato/stuffing/gravy/chicken/ground beef concoction, stir fry, and a rice dish. Then on day 7, we will have something special like steak or chicken patties. Then the cycle repeats. For the next 8 weeks. Not too bad for camp food.I was assigned to pack the chili and spaghetti boxes. I couldn’t believe how much food we are actually going to need. Granted, we will be working hard under cold conditions and burning calories, but even so. I gathered what I thought would be necessary to make a pretty hearty chili for 4 hungry people. Adam looked at it and told me to double it. When I kind of looked at him blankly for a second, he said, “just do it, you’ll understand when we get out there”. It took about 4 hours just to gather and pack all of the dry foods. Each box ended up weighing 50-60 pounds. The food pantry itself is worth writing about. It is filled with a lot more than I expected, from dehydrated green peppers to oreos. They tell you not to look at the expiration dates on anything down here. You see, the dry foods that come down here are usually bought directly from the source as surplus or rejected products, in bulk – dirt cheap. And they don’t throw them away for a few reasons - mainly because a very hungry person in the field will eat them at some point without thinking twice and because waste management is a big deal down here. I found out today that 68% of "waste" from Antarctica is recycled. By far the highest anywhere on the planet. I’ve heard that sometimes things will sit in the pantry for years. You’ll open up a box of Ritz crackers and then see that they “expired” in 1999. I guess it's just one more form of environmental conservation.
Anyway, we ate a huge lunch and then spent another few hours preparing boxes and filling a few coolers with frozen meats and veggies. We miscalculated a few things and ended up with 180 tortillas for two weeks. We have another appointment tomorrow morning to return 120 of them.
I can’t believe that I just got here on Monday. It has only been four days, but I feel as though I have been here for a few weeks, at least. We have packed so much into those 96 hours, it is really hard to believe. And the crazy thing is that I have been getting 7-8 hours of sleep every night. Maybe it is just the early starts.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the BFC getting things ready and testing our equipment. Dinner tonight was a feast. King crab legs, prime rib, steak fries and mixed veggies. I had two full plates. And then a bowl of soft serve ice cream. I have been eating very seriously lately, trying to store some energy. I’m actually gaining weight, both muscle and fat, adding a little girth. I'm already up to around 178ish. The goal is to be 180 before we leave. The only thing that I am afraid of is that once we’re in the field, I will be this uncontrollable eating machine because my body is used to such a high caloric intake. Like my Uncle Dave used to say, "gotta feed the boiler". Adam has told us that we will probably be consuming 8000-9000 calories a day out there. It is amazing how much energy it takes to keep your body at 98.6°F. There’s a lot of water in there that has to be maintained at 80-90 degrees above the ambient tempearture. And Adam pointed out that I have the highest surface area to volume ratio of the group. Hence the name LankyPoobah. Actually, they say your core temperature usually drops a few degrees after being out in the field for a little while. That will be fun.
I keep forgetting to bring the cable for my digital camera when I come here. I will have more pictures soon.
I hope everyone is doing well. I have been thinking about you all.

A few thoughts about TV.

10/21/04
4:50 pm

TV down here is interesting. There’s probably about 8 channels total, some informational, one for sports, one news, and a few for movies. It is all through the military, or at least they are the same channels that are fed to ships in the Navy or the international military bases. There are no commercials. The breaks are all filled with public service announcements or propaganda. There are those ads telling you to stop smoking or stop drinking and that drugs are really bad for you. Doug made an interesting point about the anti-drug ads – they may be to get servicemen and women who are away from their families to pay more attention to keeping their kids back home off drugs. But then there are ads that are clearly propaganda. 30 second chronicles of the great things that the military is doing. How the missile defense laser system technology was used for laser eye surgery. Personal narratives by people in the military about why they love what they do. Chronicles of famous US military achievements on this day in history. A mini-documentary on the proud men and women who work at the ICBM silos in Wyoming “hopefully they will never actually fire their missile, but if the order comes, they will be ready” (that one particularly bothered me). A news break with a young sailor in uniform highlighting the lastest acheivements by forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.
I don't want to be inappropriately critical of the military, but it just seems like brainwashing to me. If you are constantly told that what the US military is doing is always good and just and the right thing for the world, and that is your main (only) source of news and information, then it is hard to believe otherwise. I understand that is essential to maintain morale and that it is important for servicemen/women to feel that what they are doing is important and the right thing, but it just seems wrong. I guess that is what propaganda is all about, and it is frighteningly effective.
Sorry, sometimes the idealist in me comes out and I can't help but share my thoughts.

And yes, the Red Sox are going to the World Series. I managed to catch bits and pieces of the games, sometimes even live. Only here it was already lunchtime on the next day. A little strange, but at the same time kind of cool. There are three TV's in the main hallway in the main building with dorms and the cafeteria. There were always groups of like 10-15 men in Carharts with full beards standing around watching the games - most of them pulling for the Red Sox.

Chris, it was epic. One to remember. I wish your boys the best of luck.

A night on the ice

10/20/04
9:24 pm

I just read through this one and some parts are a little crude. Sorry Mom.

So I’m back at McMurdo after two long days of “Snowcraft 1: Field Safety Training” (AKA Happy Camper Training School). I just showered for the first time since leaving NZ and it feels pretty good. I even powdered my feet. So tingly. Here’s what stands out in my mind from the past 48 hours:
Breakfast is served from 5:30-7:30 on weekdays, so we had to get up at 6:45 to go eat. We then sat around for a while and headed over to the SSC (Science Support Center or something) for class at 9. We had a little over an hour of class taught by a woman named Suz who was rocking a sort of female mullet. My first impression of her was one of these people who loves to talk about all of the outdoorsy type stuff they have done, “I was a NOLS leader for 16 years before I came here, but then I quit to hike the AT 5 times and then I lived in a lean-to in the Rockies for the next 3 summers, then I killed small deer with my bare hands to survive the winter, etc, etc”. But she knew her stuff. And in the end, I really got to like her a lot. Anyway, after the class, all 19 of us suited up in our ECW and boarded a delta. Now a delta is like a diesel cargo/people transporter, Antarctic style – with bigass monster truck wheels, probably about 4-5’ tall. At the right speed, the whole thing kind of gently rocks up and down a few times a second. It’s actually pretty fun. A quick stop at the cafeteria for lunches and we were off. We headed up the main road and over the mountains that makeup the backdrop for McMurdo. Background info time. So McMurdo is located on Ross Island, which is made up of two huge volcanoes, Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror. The base is on a little peninsula that jets out into the Ross Ice Shelf. On the other side of the peninsula is the New Zealand station, Scott base. It is almost entirely made up of green buildings. We drove for about 20 minutes, and as we did, things got more and more white. The brown volcanic rock that is everywhere at McMurdo was gone. We pulled up to a little stop with two buildings in the middle of nowhere and the back door swung open. We were on about the flattest, whitest place that I have ever seen (the Ross ice shelf). We made our way to one of the buildings, the I-Hut, the equivalent of a blue Iroquois Long Cabin. Inside, we ate lunch and were briefed on what we would do for the afternoon. We leared how to use the stoves and then started walking toward “Snow Mound City” where we would spend the next 24 hours.
Snow Mound City is the spot where the Happy Camper Training School is held, so there were several generations of ice walls, igloos and quinzees (hollowed out snow mounds). We started the day by setting up two of the big yellow Scott tents and learning how to anchor them properly with “dead men” (a clever name for a buried weight). Then, all 19 of us made a huge pile of our sleeping kits and started to bury them with snow. After about 45 minutes of shoveling and patting, we completed our giant mound of snow, probably 8-9 feet tall and probably twice as wide over the pile of sleeping gear. After the snow had fully set, the other trip leader, Alan started digging out a hole and pulling out the bags. A few of us continued digging out the inside, leaving a nice warm shell of packed snow with a spacious interior. A home. Next we had to build two ice walls to shelter several smaller tents that we had set up earlier. We grabbed saws and shovels and started quarrying – yes, quarrying – blocks of snow, which were on average about 24”x12”x18” and weighed about 30 pounds each. Sawing the snow was a real bitch. The saw kept getting stuck and we would hit patches of ice all the time. Physical activity really gets your body heated up too. I had to strip down several times and was walking around comfortably in a long sleeve shirt at one point in 5°F weather. Underarmor is a godsend. I didn’t feel sweaty once, even though I know that I was sweating like crazy at times. As the blocks started to come out, some of us started building the wall. We laid out a roughly semicircular wall around 20-25 feet long, which involved some precision adjustments to the block shape and size. It was a beautiful thing. In the end, the wall was about 4’ high and took around 3, maybe even 4 hours to complete. We had several reject ice blocks leftover and some of us took the liberty of decorating our wall. They started making ice turrets or castle towers. I decided to take an alternate route. I grabbed an ice pick and began sculpting a 12” idol head that slightly resembled its larger relatives from Easter Island. I told people it would ward off would-be invaders. They really liked it and were impressed with my sculpting skills. I didn’t tell them that I had been professionally trained in Sculpture I, where I learned to make plaster dildos.
So we finished the wall at around 5:00, when Suz and Alan took off and left us to fend for ourselves. Some people set about constructing ice shelters or igloos while others build a little kitchen area with a counter. As the water was put on to boil, we all started gathering in the little “kitchen coliseum”. We had some hot cocoa and started telling stories and laughing a lot. Everyone was in high spirits. It had been a good day and we had all worked together to set up camp so a bond had already been formed. As more water was heated, we broke out the dinner packets. I ended up with Sierra chicken. Inside was pasta, dehydrated chicken, a lot of red powder, some corn chunks and a “freshness packet”. I added some hot water, sealed it up and stuffed it in my parka for 5 minutes. It came out a little crunchy, but hot and somewhat tasty, so I wolfed it down with another cup of hot water. After dinner, Doug and I scoped out a place to sleep. We checked the older quinzees and igloos. It was like shopping for a new house. Some were too small, others had a tight entrance, others looked like they were about to cave in. We finally settled on what appeared to be a decent-sized quinzee and after a few issues with actually claiming sleeping bags, brought our stuff over and planted a flag, making it official.
A big group of us, warm, full and happy decided to go for a walk. We headed towards the Ice Falls, an incredible display of crevasse-ridden blue glacial ice not too far from our camp. We walked a loop that was probably around 2 miles long and got a chance to see our surroundings. Along the way, we came across a 1/2” crack in the path that extended as far as we could see in both directions. Proof that the ground beneath us was very much alive and moving. While I enjoyed the walk, I was also getting extremely tired and burning much-needed calories. When we got back I was getting ready to go to bed and then had a half hour conversation with a guy named Josiah who is heading to the South Pole in a week. I felt like I was talking to Win. It was a good conversation, I haven’t had a chance to talk with anyone like that in a while. I took one last trip to the outhouse and crawled up inside the quinzee to join Doug and Kate. After some debate about sleeping arrangements and whether or not the three of us could even fit, we decided to try. I remember thinking, “I could sleep in one of the tents, but when else am I going to sleep inside a mound of snow?” We laid out our pads and bags and dove inside (well, climbed up) sequentially. I should mention that the roof of this particular quinzee was not very high, probably 3 feet above the sleeping platform in the center. The Interior was maybe 8 feet in diameter, so it was really tight. I’m glad I’m not claustrophobic. But one advantage is the smaller the space, the warmer it will be. We were really giggly. Overtired, cramped and excited at the same time. I was farting a lot. They call me “Shean”. After a 10 minute laughing session, Kate said something along the lines of “The Midnight Sun will make ya crazy”. And that was just one night. It’s hard to imagine what two months would be like. I was pretty cold at that point, since we had essentially been sitting around on ice for 20 minutes. I quickly threw off my boots and parka and climbed into my sleeping bag. It took another 15 minutes before I started to warm up, but I quickly fell asleep. After about a half hour, at like 11:15, Kate sat up and announced that she couldn’t do it and was leaving for one of the mountain tents. I took her spot. So she scurried off and Doug and I slept.
The next thing I know, it is 2 am and I have to pee like no other. I spent 15 minutes trying to decide whether or not to get up. I was so warm and cozy and I knew that if I got up it would be awful. The outhouse was like 50 yards from the hut and I would have to put on my ice cold boots and parka. I finally couldn’t take it any more and got out of my bag. It was freezing. I couldn’t get my boots on because the rubber was so cold and stiff, so I had to completely unlace them, all the while my feet are losing all of their heat. When I finally got them on I threw on my parka, spilling trail mix all over the entrance to the quinzee in the process, and ran to the outhouse to pee. At least it was light out (the sun never sets). Man did it feel good to pee. I ran back, cold as hell and reversed the process. I tried to munch on some chocolate and drink some water to help my body warm up. I climbed back in my bag and fortunately, most of my body heated up again within 15 minutes. But my feet were still cold. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get them warm and that is the way it was until 8 am the next morning. It probably didn’t help that the entrance to the quinzee was right in front of my feet. I tried massaging my feet, putting my parka over the bag down there, but nothing really worked. It was a little bit frustrating. I got some broken sleep, but woke up again at 6:30 with morning wood and having to pee again. I wish I had control over where the blood went in my body. I remember thinking, “Why the hell is warm blood in my penis and not in my feet?”. I finally got up at 8 and put on the ice cold gear again. It took a good 20 minutes before I started to warm up. It was pretty miserable. Oh and I forgot to mention that every time I tried to sit up in the quinzee, I hit my head on the ceiling and threatened its integrity, sending shards of ice and snow raining down into my jacket and sleeping bag. At one point, I was questioning whether I could make it through 6 weeks of this. At least we will have cots and good sleeping pads for our camp. Staying in a big yellow tent on a cot will be luxurious compared to the quinzee.
We had some hot cocoa and oatmeal to start the day. People were pretty tired and cold, but still happy. We had survived the night. We broke down camp and Alan showed up at 9. We made our way back to the I-Hut for the day 2 instruction.
We talked about planning and logistical issues of field camps, ate some lunch, and then did radio communication training. We learned how to use VHF radio to communicate as well as HF radio equipment that was surplus from Vietnam (seriously). Next was a white-out simulation. We had to don white buckets over our heads, and using only a rope, the 9 of us had to find one of our instructors who had “gotten lost in the storm” going to the bathroom. It was pretty tough and there was a lot of confusion, but we managed to do it, and according to him, we did a damn good job. My bucket fell off as I was bending over to help lift him. I caught a glimpse of everyone else in their buckets, we looked pretty ridiculous, it made me chuckle a little. Finally, we had to set up emergency camp using the basic survival gear that we are required to have with us at all times and did some mock simulations to deal with cases of hypothermia.
We were all pretty tired at the end of that, and were happy to return to McMurdo. The ride back was less quiet than I had hoped – one annoying girl kept talking to people. We had to sit through a helicopter safety training video and then learn how to buckle the seatbelts. Finally, Alan talked for a few minutes about the Dry Valleys and emphasized the importance of having a pee bottle. While in The Dry Valleys, there is a “leave no trace” policy – which means everything you take into the field, you take out (EVERYTHING). Even if it wasn’t for environmental reasons, I would have a pee bottle in the tent with me after the experience from last night. So much more practical than getting suited up to run 50 yards to a big, shit-filled pit in the ice to pee.
And then we were free. I got back here at around 3:30 and slept soundly until around 5:30 when I met everyone for dinner. After dinner we went back to the BFC to get some gear ready. I was loopy and farting a lot. Adam said he was originally worried that Kate would be the problem in the field, but now was concerned that it was me.

The delta.



Building the quinzee and one of the Scott tents.



Doug with one of the ice walls.



The artist.



A view of the camp. The big snow mound is the finished quinzee. I slept in that thing.



The Ice Falls. Pictures can't do them justice.



A view from inside the quinzee. Those are my feet.



The first signs of insanity begin to appear. (and that's ice in my nose, not snot)