Snow Day!!

Current Conditions
Temperature: 15F
Wind Chill: -6F

More of a half day, really. We had a fantastic storm roll in last night, which drove most of the area into Condition 1. Except, of course, town. There is a running joke around here that when bad weather rolls in, town is inevitably spared so that we can all still work. Those of you who've been here will appreciate this:

No joke. Been that way all day. Which means I can't go up to Arrival Heights for my daily rounds. Instead, I have time to post this blog. And I have something to write about. Bonus!

Last night was pretty bad: Condition 2 in town, whoa! Blowing snow completely filled the spaces between buildings. Even the streetlights were obscured to a general orange-ish glow. It was fun to stand out there for a few minutes, and wrestle in the snow. On their walk to Dorm 209, Brody and Katie disappeared into oblivion only 20 yards from the 155 doorway. Surreal.

Town is definitely looking more Antarctic today. The weather's been coming and going all day, and I took a couple shots during a calmer moment. Here's my workplace, Crary Lab:

I like this view of the snow-blasted firehouse, with a sunny Ob Hill in the background:

I still haven't asked anyone what that strange vehicle on tracks is. I'm assuming it's a very odd fire engine.

In other news:

We passed the equanox a couple days ago, so the sun has set at the South Pole, and it is up for less than half the day here. In the late night quite a few stars are visible, though the sky is still clinging to a deep blue.

Even with the population drop, the days are still just packed:
Monday: Volleyball
Tuesday: Risk!
Wednesday: Volunteer at the library
Thursday: American Night at Scott Base
Friday: Free for now (soon to be Open jam night)
Saturday: Party
Sunday: Recover, hike, watch Deadwood

We still have some amazing musicians here. Two bands played on Saturday: Level 5 and Muschknuckle (who you may have seen on the Today Show). I'm not much into their pop-cover-band style, but a lot of folks eat it up. Before the main acts, I played a couple songs with Shawntel on the violin, which was way cool. She just plays by ear and feel, so it's full of soul. Next, Kish and Russell joined in for a half hour of improv that was fantastic. More on that later...

On Sunday morning, every door was graced with a small basket of candy. I'm not sure who the Easter bunny was, but they were creative. In the absence of actual baskets, they took the paper hats that are used to cover your hair while working in the galley, flipped them over, colored them, and added a basket strap.

I had my first Dining Attendant duty last week. In the winter, everyone on station takes a turn working in the galley for half the day. This includes washing dishes and pots, and general galley cleaning duties. It was a fun change of pace, though I certainly wouldn't want to do it everyday. I think it will be once every few weeks.

All for now!

...And the Winter is Just Beginning

Current Conditions
Temperature: -6F
Wind Chill: -25F

Before I get to the meat of this post, I just wanted to drop in a few photos I like that never found a home here. First is the Palmer again:

It's just not everyday that you see a ship drop out it's gang plank onto a sheet of ice.

This next one is of the cargo vessel, with Mt. Discovery in the background:

You can see the turning basin that was carved out for this ship pretty well here.

Lastly, a cool shot of part of the Royal Society Range one day last week when the sun decided to peek through momentarily:

It's too bad I couldn't capture the whole panorama. It was completely overcast everywhere but for a perfect strip that lit up the entire mountain range. The distant glaciers were glowing in orange sunlight, sandwiched perfectly between a uniform steel gray sky above and 30 miles of shaded blue ice below.


I'm going to shift gears now. I'm going to tell a story. I hesitated to include this story because like all good stories it contains bad taste, sexual references, hilarity, contraband, foul language, and weapons of mass destruction. Well, not all of those things, but the first few, at least. I hope many of you are drooling with anticipation, and I hope this story will measure up to this lead-in. The purpose of this lead-in, though, is not to make some of you drool, but to warn those of you who may not want to know. (go ahead, it's still safe to read on)

That said, I decided to include this story because it is a decent sample of the culture and the open-minded anything-goes attitude here. It's not that this wouldn't happen anywhere else; the point I'm trying to make is that stories like this one are commonplace here, so much so that bystanders consider them normal occurrences. Honestly, it's not that bad and I'm sure most of you can handle it. And by now, there's no way it can equal the hype anyway.

Once upon a time... (by that I mean "stop reading now")

Thursday, actually. Lunchtime.
A good friend, Katie, had rented "Another Gay Movie" and brought it to lunch. It's supposed to be another of those funny teenster stereotype satires, I think; I didn't actually watch it, it looked awful. But I did read the description, and next to it was a picture of an appallingly large butt plug, which I laughed at and commented on, but no one else at the table knew what it was. So, I immediately became the butt (pun intended) of a bunch of plug jokes. On a side note, and for my own sanity; so far, everybody not at that table knows what a butt plug looks like.

Katie works in the galley. She chops, dices, tosses, mixes, spices, etc. She disappeared into the kitchen area and returned to present me with a large plastic kitchen tool that was once used to feed some kind of food into some kind of processor, I don't know. The point is that it has a handle and a shaft and no one uses it anymore, but everyone refers to it fondly as, of course, the butt plug. So I had the joy of being asked repeatedly on my way out of the galley, "What is that?"

Saturday. Dinnertime.
Being that turn around is fair play, I thought it would be fun to cover this thing with melted chocolate and return it to Katie, being sure to thank her for letting me borrow it. It was absolutely disgusting: dark chocolate dripping down the shaft in gloopy chunks that honestly resembled their intended substance much more than chocolate. Gross. In hindsight, I should have added peanuts or corn. Anyway, it was good for a laugh, and I thought, naïvely, that the damn thing was now out of my hands for good and back in the possession of the galley, where it belongs.

Saturday. Evening.
Let me set the scene here. We're at the bar. It's packed for open-mic night (imagine that! any live music is good music here). Katie is sitting front and center. Unsuspecting, I'm on stage singing none other than "Lola" (oh, the irony). I look up from my own world of concentration to see a chocolate-covered butt plug waving through the air like a lighter at a concert. It immediately starts flying up and down into the air. I found out later that it was Katie's sole intention to try to get me to stop playing.

I lost it, totally. I had to stop playing in the middle of the song and keel over with laughter for what seemed like a long time before being able to completely recompose myself. The whole room laughed with me, though few of them knew what was going on, aside from someone tossing a bizarrely lewd and disgustingly dirty looking implement into the air. I wonder if ever before in the history of open-mics everywhere, anyone has ever muttered the phrase "nice flying chocolate-covered butt plug" into the microphone?

...and the winter is just beginning . . . . . .

I just found out I can post video, so here's a short snippet of the end of "Lola." Someone must've been into it, because he started in on another chorus when I was finished.

Cheers!

Transition to Darkness

Current Conditions
Temperature: 3F
Wind Chill: 3F

The darkness is coming! And more quickly than I expected. The first sunset here was on February 21st. But because the sun was barely below the horizon, there was still plenty of light in the middle of the night for at least a week after. Now, three weeks after the first sunset, we actually have a somewhat normal day and night, though the days are still a bit long, and the nights not completely dark. I found a great chart that shows what the transition will be like:

So if you draw a vertical line in early March, you'll see that we are in Civil Twilight from 10PM to 5AM. It's been pretty cloudy lately, making it a fairly dark twilight. Any day now it might clear up so we can actually see a sunset! So far, I think this shot of the Palmer is the best sunset I've seen. It's just been too overcast.

For comparison, here's a chart for Christchurch, NZ:

If this thing is right, at lower latitudes, the transition from daylight to dark takes about 1.5 hours each day. For the next few weeks here, that transition will take 6 hours each day, but we won't make it completely to 'dark', so we'll give up and spend the next 6 hours returning to daylight. Basically, half of our day will be dusk, or some stage of it. Sometime in early April, we'll reach total darkness for an hour or two. That darkness will grow quickly in length, about 15 to 20 minutes a day, while the daylight wanes.

Then, on April 24th, the sun will set for the last time. It won't be the sunset we're all used to, where you can see the whole sun... turn to half a sun... turn to a sliver... and disappear. Instead, only the sliver will rise, slide along the horizon for about an hour, and then set. And we won't even see it, because it will be behind the mountain.

Once the sun is gone, the night will continue to grow in length until it consumes nearly all the hours of the day. But even in the dead of winter, the solstice, we should still get an hour or two of Nautical Twilight around noon, though I'm not sure if it will be noticeable or not. Somehow, I don't think so.

Things are a little different at the South Pole:

At the pole, the sun circles the sky and drops towards the horizon at an imperceptible rate each day. Then there is one long sunset per year. Nearly two days long; once the bottom of the sun touches the horizon, it will take almost 2 days before the top finally disappears, technically. The reality is that the atmosphere bends the light of the sun to it's whims, so who knows what the sun may appear to do. It may rise and set randomly over the course of many days. The following month will be a slow transition from dusk to dark.

The Super Banana Sled

Current Conditions
Temperature: 22F
Wind Chill: 22F

Most of us get the first Saturday of every month off through the winter. Of course, there are a lot of swing shifts that work a little differently, like the firehouse, power and water plants, galley attendants, etc. Basically all the things that need attention every day. I get more of a half day, because I still need to check all my instruments. I work for an hour or so every Sunday, too. But my hours during the week are shorter and more flexible than most, which makes it worth it.

This past weekend was our first two-day weekend, and after a dreary and overcast week, the sun came out guns-a-blazing. I hiked up to Castle Rock again with a small group: two on skis and three on foot. We didn't climb it this time. Instead we hiked the full 9 mile loop. For safety reasons, we are required to sign out when traveling this route. Raytheon has a handy on-line form for doing this, called the e-foot-plan:

It's actually a really nice interactive page that shows you all the hikes in the area (shown in green) overlaid on a satellite image of Hut Point Peninsula. You can even see the pressure ridges over by Scott Base. The site gives trail descriptions with distances, approximate hiking times and requirements like "solo travel not permitted", "radio required", "signout required", or just plain "closed".

The Castle Rock trail is the big loop in yellow above. It is the most ambitious hike we have, so all the rules apply. This includes an Estimated Time of Return. If you haven't signed back in or radioed for an extension, the Search and Rescue team will mobilize exactly 5 minutes after your ETR. This gives them just enough time to call everyone in town to make sure you're actually still out there; very embarrassing, I'm sure.

I say "ambitious", but Castle Rock Loop is really just a long walk in the cold with some great views. Unless, of course, you spice it up...

The first part of the trail is a slow and steady uphill from town. It climbs to almost 1000 feet in three miles, most of which is on glacier ice. This section can be spiced up by using a kite for propulsion. I'll have to try that later. The optional climb up Castle Rock itself is another 400 vertical feet or so. At the base of the Rock, the trail takes a sharp right back downhill all the way to the ice shelf on the east side of the peninsula. It sheds 1000 vertical feet in just over a mile. We chose to do our spicing up here. We call this a banana sled:

It is generally used in field camps for schlepping gear around, I think, and I suspect from its gurney-like shape that SAR uses it also. It rides on two thin wooden rails to minimize friction. We found that it seats three nicely for a mile-long, 1000-foot-drop sled ride. For you flatlanders, the Empire State Building is 1250 feet, and the Sears Tower is 1450 - without the antennas.

I'm not sure how fast we were actually going, but I can say for sure that it was much faster than my ski ride down the hill, and certainly fast enough to make all three of us just a little nervous, not that you could tell over my incessant laughter! Turning was a bit of a trick, and there were a few moments when we weren't sure if we were going to stay on the groomed trail or go flying off onto the glacier, shattering bamboo flags as we crossed. Every bump meant a second of thrillingly precarious hang time. Woohooo!

At the bottom, we were all completely white except for our dripping wet faces, and I had to shake out all the snow that had blown up inside my windpants. By far, the best sled ride of my life! Can't wait to go again.

P.S. Thanks for the sled, Skippy, we'll fix it again as soon as we find some more of that plastic sheeting you used. I don't think it appreciated landing as much as we did!