Picture number 1: A Piston Bully with a high frequency radar mounted on a 30 foot boom, commonly known as snuffelufugus (or snuffy). This brave soul will lead the traverse and hopefully detect any large ITASE-endangering crevasses, booby traps and/or pirate treasure. (yes, that's an inner-tube on the end.)

Picture number 2: The ITASE camp, with the galley in the foreground (used for eating), the blue room in the middle (science stuff/sleeping), the polarhaven in the back (more sleeping), the honeybucket to the right (ummm... yeah) and lots of fuel barrels/cargo/junk that needs to be retroed/food boxes all around.

~G

After landing, there were several more flights that day to take passengers, supplies and fuel in and out of Taylor Dome. The weather had been shutting down flights for the last week, so many folks were particularly excited to see the otter.

I wish I could say that the last picture was of me in a hard-core extreme Antarctic blizzard with 70 mile per hour winds, but it was actually just the prop wash from the plane.. hehe... cool picture though.

~G

I'm back home from taylor Dome! Woo Hoo, what a trip. I've got a lot of pictures, so I guess I'll have to spread them out over the next few days, maybe in chronological order.

Overall, the trip was amazing, filled with lots of good work, good company, good food and good weather. I spent most of my time building things around camp for the ITASE folks and when I ran out of things to do there, helped the environmental camp out with their clean up/digging operations.

The photos of the flight out don't do the trip justice, but I will say that I've never seen such amazing scenery in my life. The third photo is of camp, with the ITASE group on the left and the two stray polarhavens and outhouse marking the enviro camp to the right.

One of the best things about landing was seeing my friend and roommate Ben, who had been out for 17 days and was on his way back to town.

~G

As the ice continues to thin and creep closer to McMurdo, more and more visitors are showing themselves around town. The first sighting was the killer skua, then the sleepy Adelie down by the transition, and just a few days ago a whole flock (are penguins considered a flock?) of emperors was spotted out on the runway.


If weather cooperates, I should be heading out to Taylor Dome tomorrow. A few things on my to-do list for the crew are: build some boxes, a few tables, rig up some sleds for pulling instruments and construct a ski-mounted shower. It should be pretty luxurious, with a cedar floor and a nice little bench to sit on. Hopefully they'll get plenty of sun to heat the water... I think that's about the last place on earth I'd want a cold shower.

The photo above is from an earlier ITASE voyage.

~G

I felt the urge to post some old photos, so here's a look back into the timecapsule.

1. A view back towards town over the ice runway while flying west to the dry valleys
2. Long Duration Ballon (LDB) camp, which was the first place I worked upon arrival
3. The Hut Point Sunday tour
4. The film crew at snow school

It's been stormy here in Mactown for the last several days and the only thing landing on the runway is lots of snow. Hopefully the weather will clear up soon, though, I'm scheduled to fly out to Taylor Dome (popularly called Taylor "Doom", due to the extreme weather) on Thursday to help the International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) crew tie up any loose ends with science equipment, testing, construction and repairs before they leave for the south pole.

The ITASE project is a pretty neat thing that has been happening for the last 10 or so years. Basically, the team is 10- 15 people that drive to the south pole every year from varying locations in a big tractor while towing a little city on skis consisting of a galley, a sleeping shack, a science tent and a honeybucket. The trip takes about 2 months and they take ice cores and all kinds of other fun data along the way.

It sure would be neat to go out there and meet some of the people going, but it seems like nothing's fore sure round here

~G

Here's some more photos from my trip to Cape Evans and Scott's hut. Enjoy!

~G

You may not be able to notice, but this is a photo of the first actual snowfall event since I've been here in McMurdo. Usually the wind just blows snow dust around everywhere, but this morning there was no wind and the flakes were falling from the sky.

Well, other than a sleepy penguin on the sea ice at the edge of town and more and more skuas, I don't have much to report.

~G

Here's an aerial view of Mactown with some added informative highlights in green.

A typical day in the life of a Carp Shop GA would include (but not necessarily be limited to) the following events:

Wake up at 6:30... snooze until 6:45. Do some rejuvenating yoga and go for a one hour jog at a brisk pace... HA! yeah right... more like; sleepwalk downstairs and eat. Breakfast is usually lots of canned fruit, an egg/flour based product (ie. waffle, french toast, pancake) possibly bacon, eggs if I'm feeling adventurous, water and apple juice.

Then it's off to the shop for the good morning meeting at 7:30 where the foremen line us out for the day. Stretching for fifteen minutes, then work, work, work. This could be anything from building boxes for scientists, to shoveling snow, to going out of town, to fixing something that's broken or possibly tiling a nasty old shower basin. The station takes 15 min breaks at 10 and 3 and lunch can occur anywhere between 11:30 and 1:30 for an hour or so.

Lunch is usually a chicken product (guaranteed at least one meal a day of poultry) somethin' else, vegetarian dish of sorts some A-juice and there's a sandwich bar (usually with a long line since lunch can be... "sketchy" at times). So far, I would have to say that the food here is absolutely wonderful, we get seafood at leat 3 times a week, today was a scallop, muscle, halibut and salmon casserole!!

Post lunch work is usually a bit slower pace due to rapid food-coma onset (RFCO), but picks up in pace, especially around 5:00 when shop clean-up begins and timecards are filled out. 5:30 is dinner time, but usually 6 for me since the chances of me exercising at the gym post dinner (remember RFCO) are pretty bad. Dinner is the best meal with lots of variety, fresh salad greens, really good baked breads and desserts and as always; all the apple juice you can drink.

Possible evening activities could include calls to my lovely fiance, coffee-shopping, reading, making things out of wood up at the shop, science lectures, emails, evening strolls, picture taking and that rare hygiene ritual known as "showering."

Aside from Sundays, where all of the above is substituted with sleeping in, Sunday brunch, church and relaxing, that is pretty much it. Lately the weather has been around 10-20 degrees with variable wind and mostly sunny... 24 hours a day.

Well, hopefully everyone can feel a bit closer to me now that you have such detailed insight into my life down here. Thanks for reading!

~G

To clear up any questions... Skua Central: a little building kind of like a Salvation Army, except everything is free! Hotel California: a dorm, located next door to the Mammoth Mountain Inn. Ice pier: a 36 foot thick ice cube created to work like a dock for the ships. And yes, there's a bowling alley.

PS Sorry for the bad picture glare, it's a photo of map in the hallway.

The Antarctic Skua (Catharacta antarctica):

Shown here, this oversized relative of the sea gull spends its austral summers in Antarctica and flies north for the rest of the year. A typical clutch size for a skua consists of two eggs in a nest built from rocks, with an average survivability of 50%. They are extremely territorial birds and excellent scavengers, feeding primarily on Adelie penguin eggs and in McMurdo, sandwiches and cookies from the galley. The New Zealand Maori word for skua is Hakoakoa.

I saw my first skua last week while skiing out to the runway and since then there has been one recorded attack involving an unsuspecting first-year and a roast beef sandwich.

~G

References:

Bird Life International (2004)

Wikipdia (2006)

I went for a little hike up the hut point ridge trail this afternoon and got some nice views and a good bit of wind... Actually, make that a LOT of wind... like windiest it's been since I've come here.

All of these shots are looking to the west across the sea ice towards the Royal Society Range. Hopefully in about 2 months all of this ice will be broken up and blowing out to sea. It hasn't happened in seven years, but since the B-15 iceberg finally broke apart and moved out of the way there's a good chance the ice will go out. And when the ice goes out, that means whales in the bay, seals on the shore and curious penguins wandering the streets of McMurdo!

~G

Well, here it is... this will be my life for the next few weeks. If you can't tell from the photo, this is a stinky old shower room that has been leaking and molding for the last 20 years. I spent several hours smashing out the concrete foundation to get down to the rotted wood below.

It should be a neat project, though, once the dirty work is done. I think we're going to redesign the whole thing, make individual stalls and put all new tile in. Should be a blast! (Hopefully a quite one, though, for the sake of the night shift folks that are trying to sleep next door... oops.)

~G

Life here in McMurdo has been going on at a bit different pace, now that most of the field camps are installed and the majority of the work to be done is here in town. So instead of glaciers and neat scenery photos, I'll probably be posting pics of broken door repairs, wooden boxes for science camps and the endless shower tiling project I've began here in building 155.

But be sure and stay tuned, because you never know when I'll get lucky with a shot of a helpless victim being attacked by a hungry skua outside the dining hall, or maybe some more exotic wildlife as the sea ice begins to melt.

Believe it or not, in 24 hour daylight, I still get to see the moon sometimes. If you look just at the peak of the Scott tent, you can see it.

~G

Here's a few photos from my trip to Lake Bonney from a while ago. The first ventifact (fancy word for wind-carved rock) was probably about 25-30 feet tall and maybe 50 wide. All the pockets and holes were carved from blowing sand. It was a pretty neat sight, kind of foreign to the eye. The one in the second photo really caught my eye because of its amazing likeness to a small coffee table. I inspected it for several minutes and found the little rock to be perfectly level as though it had been carved by a stone mason. It was really pretty wild.

~G

Hey Dad, does this remind you of your old snowmobile? Believe it or not, we use these things a ton out here. They're tough to start but sure do a lot of work.

~G

Here's an old Tucker snow cat, the same model used on the first ever trans-Antarctic vehicle voyage in the late 50s. It's been updated a little bit, but is pretty much the original thing. We've got at least 3 or 4 of them in use down here and they are pretty neat looking. This particular one lives at Siple Dome and is used to groom the runway.

~G

This picture shows the site of a fuel spill that occurred over last winter out at Siple Dome. Over 70 barrels (20 fuel, 50 slush) were hauled out of the sight after an intense two week clean-up dig. In the background you can see a large fuel bladder with a secondary containment layer identical to what used to be in the foreground location.

The folks that closed out the camp last year were not properly instructed on how to close the fuel bladder and over the winter, the weight of the snow forced fuel to seep out through a vent. Luckily, most of the fuel was contained within the secondary catchment and little harm was done.

~G

This week's trip to Siple Dome was an amazing, but rather truncated trip. We flew 510 nautical miles East form McMurdo (to be actually 7 miles closer to the South Pole than Mactown) in a Hercules C-130 (background of first pic) and landed on top of this so-called dome, strangely with nothing really "domish" about it... flat snow for as far as the eye could see was all there was.

Formerly a drilling site for geologists, Siple is now primarily used as a fueling station for planes flying deeper into the field. With a staggering population of three and only one heated building, the town is not much to look at, especially since the only building is buried under the snow.

However, don't let that fool you into to thinking this place is desolate, cold and lonesome. As a matter of fact, while we were there, the weather was mild for Siple standards with no wind (very unusual) and upon leaving, there are now two buildings! (The purpose of the second was to move the galley from its old location under 15 feet of snow to an aboveground and much less "lair-like" situation.) The plan is to let the old one get buried, then send ten GAs out there one summer for a week to dig the whole thing out and take it back in pieces.

The flight was nice and the landing was something else. Once again, not many windows, cargo seats and lots of bumps and loud noises... reminiscent of my flight from Christchurch. However, the offload was pretty neat as the standard procedure for deep field includes dumping out huge pallets with all of our gear out the cargo ramp while the plane continues to taxi to avoid freezing up the engines. They let us run out the back quick and then took off for Mactown.

As shown in the second picture, strange fog inhabits the dome frequently and ice crystals form on everything. Even though it is further from the coast than McMurdo, the winds blow such that high humidity and oceanic weather is much more common, making for an airport with poor reliability rivaling that of Juneau International. Luckily, my tent stayed pretty dry and surprisingly warm, I slept like a rock.

The original plan was to be picked up on Sunday, so we worked 12+ hour days with hopes of maybe getting everything done in time to enjoy some skiing and relaxing; however, we ended up working a little too fast and Mother Raytheon had us hop a flight back on a Twin Otter (sardine can, in our case) and fly home early to save a few bucks. We couldn't all fit, so a couple stayed behind to finish up a few things and most likely get weathered in and enjoy peace and quiet, skiing and relaxing for the next week... grrrr... BUT, it turned out great and our foreman gave us Saturday off! Woo Hoo! Off to Castle Rock!