Antarctica Blog

Wow! Free airport internet.  This is a first for me.  These Aussies sure are an advanced society.

Well, I now have a full blown cold.  Medicine here is extremely expensive.  I guess what I am saving on internet I already spent on Sudafed for the flight.  We went and sat on the beach for a while yesterday but it made me feel miserable.

I feel a bit better today.  I am in the departure lounge about to board our flight to Narita Airport in Tokyo. We got here early to repack the bags we left in the checked luggage. We now have AA Gold frequent flyer cards which allows us check-in in the business class line which was smooth. Things went so smoothly that we now have a couple of hours to kill before our plane boards.

I managed to book us a place to stay up on the northern Japanese Island of Hokaido at Niseko ski area.  Niseko is renound to have some of the best skiing in the world.  I checked on their ski conditions and they are getting snowstorms as I write.

Well, time for me to go to Japan. More when we get there.

Just a quick update to let everyone who follows my blog know that we made it safely to Sydney.  We had to catch a super-early shuttle to the airport for our 0645 departure.  Their computers were down so they were checking us in manually.  It took forever and we will probably never get the frequent flyer miles for it either.  We took the train to the Circular Quay in central Sydney and then a ferry to the north shore beach town of Manly where we booked a little apartment for three days.

I like Manly better than the southern beach of Bondi.  It somehow seems more normal. Coincidently, Bondi is where brother Jesse is at this moment.  We weren’t able to coordinate our lodging (a friend was taking care of it for him) and since we are on opposite sides of the city from each other we decided it would be too much of a hassle to meet up. Today Luci and I took a walk along the north shore to Sydney Harbor National Park.  It was long and now were are exhausted.  We have been throwing around different ideas about what to do with our time here.  Luci wants to do yoga and I want to surf or get a sailing dinghy.  But, I feel the beginings of a cold coming on and I’m not sure being in the water will be the best thing for it.

Tomorrow we are free and the day after we begin the Japan segment of our travels.

Here are a few pictures from Our Kayaking trip with my two brothers. It was a good time overall.  We had a variety of conditions to conntend with (but no rain) which kept it interesting and there were bouts of familial strife but it is such a nice area that it is extremely hard not to enjoy ourselves. We had two tandem Kayaks and were out for five days and four nights of camping. Two of our campsites were only accessible by boat. 

 The first one we had all to ourselves. The other two were also accessible by foot on the Abel Tasman Costal Track but it always turned out to be other kayakers we were sharing the sites with. the water is surprisingly warm and we enjoyed a lot of beach time. 

We tried not to exert ourselves too much but on some stages we were facing some pretty heavy swell and wind.  There were some beautiful tide lagoons that we were able to explore because the high tide fell right in the middle of the day. We also saw many NZ fur seals and birdlife including Little Blue Penguins and Cormorants.

Our last day was by far the best weather. We had flat seas and a light breeze on our backs. We did some island exploring with an amazing view of Mt. Authur the newest peak in my bag. 

After our trip was over and the boats returned we were planning on staying in Motueka. At the last moment we decided to stay on the bus all the way to Nelson where we met up with a friend from the Ice. The four of us managed to score a nice little appartment for the weekend from a friend of the bus driver. As it turns out, the place is actually the cafe and hostel owners private suite that he sometimes rents out to friends. It was an entirely impromtu manouvre that turned out to be very succesful.

Our NZ trip is drawing to a close and we have our minds set on Sydney.  We are staying for a few days on our stopover on the way to Japan.  It was to be an eight-hour stop that we turned into a three-day stop to make a weekend out of it.  Jesse will be there two and is in the process of finding a place near us at Manly beach with some friends. He is going to be in Australia for a bit longer than us and plans to get out of the city.

Someone found Joels passport and gave it to the police. The police then sent it to the US consulate in Auckland. Joel called and asked them to send it to Christchurch where he can pick it up.

We are all headed back there tomorrow…by thumb. Yep, cheap to the bone. I ‘ll try to drop another post from CHC before we leave on Tuesday morning.  

We made it out of the bush yesterday.  We had a charmed trip through the Kiwi Bush.  We got lucky from the very beginning. We took the bus from Christchurch to Westport and arrived with enough time to shop for food.  In the morning we met an Italian banker at our hostel. It turns out he was headed up to Karamea near where we pick up the trail and he agreed to give us a lift.  Really lucky because otherwise we would have been walking for a long time on a dirt road before ever getting to the trailhead.  We unloaded our overloaded packs, put on our shorts for walking and said our goodbyes.

No sooner had he left when I realized that I had left my windbreaker in the closet of the hotel.  I wasn’t about to go on without it becasue 1: it is nice and 2: I might need it.  Luckily, there was a telephone (just a normal household telephone in a box) at the trailhead. So, I called the hotel to see if they had found it (they had) then called the bus service between Karamea and Westport to see if they could bring it up.  The closest place they stopped was about 12 KM away back down the dirt road.  I told them someone from the hotel would bring the jacket over to meet the bus that left in a half-hour and to leave it at the hotel where they stopped so I could pick it up there if I couldn’t get out to the main road to meet the bus. 

There were two little farmsteads nearby that looked like they might have a car.  I had to put on my poor-lost-tourist face to try and elicit some pity and get a lift to the main road and back. The idea was to just walk up to one of the houses and ask.  Kiwis are straightforward people and usually very helpful in these sorts of situations so I figured this would be the best approach. As we walked up the driveway it was obvious that no one was home but as we neared the gate a woman and a kid drove up in a little Honda Civic.  To make a long story short…the woman agreeed to just let me take the car out to the road to meet the bus.  In the meantime we hung around eating backberries and shooting arrows with Dillon her son.

When the time came I drove out and back, got my jacket and we were on our way…finally…or at least we though so.  Not ten minutes down the trail we came upon the last house before entering the Kahurangi NP. Dillon told us there was a grumpy man who didn’t like people who lived there.  He was out front working on a Toyota LandCruiser. We figured it would be best if we kept hushed as we walked by since the trail goes through his land.  We didn’t make it twenty feet past his yard when he called out, “Hey! You!”. “Oh crap”, I thought, “Here we go”. After an already long morning I was eager to get walking but since it was his land we were on we were obliged to stop.

As it turns out, his name is Paddy; an Irishman who moved to NZ 27 years ago.  He is an artist who plays violin and works stained glass.  His shack was full-to-bursting with his astounding work; mostly in wood, wrought iron and glass. He called us over to help him bleed the hydro-clutch on his LandCruiser in exchange for a cup of tea. Over tea we discussed the state of the world and got a very interesting perspective from an Irish expat who has lived in the NZ bush for 27 years. 

After tea we were finally on our way. We started our trek on the western end of the Wangapeka track which meets up with the Leslie-Karamea Track at about its half-way point and turns north along the Karamea river. We had food for seven days and planned to be out at least five nights. We spent our first night about three hours in at Belltown hut. We thought we would be alone but a very tired woman arrived from the other side of the Little Wanganui pass just before dark. Once over the pass the next day we would be deep in native forest of the Kahurangi.

Luci was a bit concerned about climbing the pass but it turned out out be pretty mild. From the top we had great views of the ocean off the West Coast on one side and the wide expanse of the mountainous kahurangi forest on the other. That night we stayed at the very nice Taipo Hut and had a bath in the river. 

For the next two days we walked along the remotest part of the track north of the junction between the Wangapeka and Leslie-Karamea tracks along the upper reaches of the Karamea river.  Nice, level walking along the river.  We were alone for the most part on this section of the track.

After the confluence of the Leslie and Karmea rivers at Karamea Bend we began our ascent up to the Tablelands Plateau. This is an area where Jesse and I hiked last year at about this time. There are a lot of nice huts in this area to choose from so we stayed at Salisbury Lodge; a place where Jesse and I passed but didn’t stay at last year. It started raining about an hour after we arrived; the only precipitation we saw on the whole six days were out. 

In the morning we had a choice of routes out. Along the Flora river valley (the way Jesse and I went) or over Gordon Pyramid and Mt. Aurthur. The weather looked changeable but the forecast was good so we decided to give the summits a try.  It turned out to be much longer than we expected because the trail actually took a different path than was marked on the maps we had. But, at a certain point we were able to drop packs at a junction and continue up Mt. Aurthur lightweight. Luci had had enough and went down to Aurthur hut to secure us beds because it is close to the road and it was saturday night. I jogged up and down the mountain that Jesse and I failed to summit last year.  It was errily foggy but it was broken so I got some good views from the top.

When I met up with Luci at the hut she had managed to get us a couple of beds. But, after some though, we decided we might be better off getting a ride from the trailhead into the town of Motueka (where we were supposed to meet my brothers Jesse and Joel) in the afternoon AFTER people’s day-hikes than the next moring when people were setting out on their hikes. We stumbled down the final forty minutes of our six-day trek, tired and sore.  We were taking a chance that we would find anyone and our option was sleeping on the floor of a kiosk if we didn’t.  But, as luck would have it, a family of four who I had met on the mountain were packing up to go and offered to give us a ride all the way to our hotel in Mot.

Within an hour of being in town we met up with both Jesse and Joel. Today we have been running errands to get ready for our five-day kayaking trip that starts tomorrow. To complicate things, Joel has lost his passport. Being sunday, there is not much we can do at the moment.  Other than Joel’s misfortune we have most loose ends tied up for the kayaking and the couple of days we have left in NZ before heading over to Sydney for a few days.             

We finally made it off the Ice.  It felt better than usual this year. We had far too much time at McMurdo.  It was too long to stay busy but too short to go to work.  We made a couple of pitiful attempts to volunteer in various departments but the busiest part of Vessel Offload season was over by the time we arrived in town.  The Cargo Vessel got loaded with rubbish and off without a hitch which is more than we can say about the US Icebreaker Polar Sea.  It shipped off from town but for some reason returned to refuel a day later.  Fuels and Fleet Ops had already put away fuel lines and the pier infrastructure and had to set them back up again to fuel the ship.  Then, as soon as I got off the ice I read in the news that there is a foundering Japanese Whaling vessel about 150miles from McMurdo causing an international incident.  From what I have read the Sea is still around, negotiating.  I sure would like to be a fly on the wall at the meeting between the Coast Guard, illegal Japanese whalers, and Greenpeace (oh yea. They are there, too).   

Our flight got off the Ice about 5 hours late but we were lucky to get off at all. Our transport lost a wheel on our way to Pegasus Field.  We arrived in CHC at three o’clock in the morning after flying cargo class. But, here we are now in Chrishtchurch, NZ once again. Sure is a nice place to come back to.  The past five days have been packed with errands.  We have been putting the final touches on our kayak trip with my brothers, packing bags and boxes to mail and store, and getting our Japanese rail passes.  We have also been fitting in a good amount of recreation with friends from the ice. Ironically enough we have been spending time with a couple of friends from WAIS.  I guess it is a good sign that we can still look each other in the face.  Yesterday was the nicest day weather-wise since we have been back.  We threw Frisbee in the park and watched the CHC Model Yacht Club regatta.

In about an hour Luci and I begin our fourth consecutive NZ adventure. We are headed over to Westport on the West Coast where we plan to spend about seven days traversing the Kahurangi NP hiking on the Leslie-Karemea track.  It should spit us out, filthy and tired, a few miles from where we will meet my brothers to go sea-kayaking.  We are really looking forward to getting out into the bush.  We’ll try to get some photos up when we get to Motueka.               

We made it back to McMurdo safe and sound.  I wound up staying out at WAIS until the last flight out.  There were additional changes to fueling needs which required my presence.  The Twin Otters decided to leave the continent via WAIS after we pulled out so I needed to fill drums to cache for when they passed on their way to Rothera, the British base on the peninsula. Since there was this to be done and the whole fueling system to be put away I was deemed essential to the final stages of pull-out and stuck around.  Four of us left on a Twin Otter two days after the others. We stopped at my old camp at Siple Dome to refuel.  It brought back some memories.

Town is crazy. We arrived in the throes of vessel offload so it is very hectic and very dusty around McMurdo. The Vessel left the pier last night.  Luci and I went down to Hut Point to watch it pull away and watch the icebreaker Polar Sea dock.  We saw penguins, whales and watched Weddel seals swimming around in the open water just below the cliff at the point. It has been nice to see old friends and talk about our seasons and vacation plans but we are ready to leave. McMurdo is getting old very fast.

We have started to make plans for the Japan section of our travels.  We just booked our hotel in Tokyo for our first weekend there. While we had been planning to go north to Hokkaido for some skiing I think we have finally decided to stay on Honshu and go skiing near Nagano. 

My brother Joel is in town. He arrived yesterday and is leaving tomorrow. Jesse is going to be the last one of us off the ice on the 20^th. We need to start thinking about campsites for our kayak trip on the Abel Tasman because they need to be booked in advance. The next time I post will probably be from NZ.  I get pretty bad about posting while traveling but as always I will do my best.

This could quite possibly be the last post from WAIS Divide.  This week has been crazy. I got the bladder emptied and, with the help of the Arch Construction Crew, got it all dug out, folded up and packaged to go back to McMurdo.  The weather has been really strange out here. One moment it will be sunny and calm and another it will be snowing hard with 15kt winds. It hasn’t been very conducive to working outside but there is so much to do in a short amount of time.
The plan for the bladder keeps changing like the weather.  First we were going to deploy the new one then we decided to leave it in the box until next season. Then the National Guard decided they need to divert all there Herc flights here next week because there is no cargo to go to South Pole until the vessel arrives at McMurdo.  Since we don’t have any cargo to come out either they are bringing fuel and since our single bladder is at max-fill we need to put out the other. 
But first we need to plow up a pad for it so it is elevated off the snow surface.  This requires the use of equipment which, at the moment has been occupied with building a T2 (big) cargo pallet. Of course we could use the Pisten Bully to do it but the mechanic wouldn’t think of actually using the thing…and I’ll stop there this time.
So yesterday we had two Herc missions scheduled but neither the weather here or at McMurdo was any good for flying in so they have been postponed to today. The first one should be bringing in the Carpenters and taking out our last science group.  The second flight will be taking out most of the arch crew.  Then Saturday, we should be expecting two more flights bringing fuel and taking away retro-cargo. 
The flight bringing the carps will also be bringing com-techs to take down our satellite dish.  They plan to be in on one flight and out on the next.  So, as soon as they get here we will be without internet. I will still have the Iridium connection but it is painfully slow.
It looks like Luci & I will be out of the first wave of camp staff out.   It is planned for sometime around the 5^th of Feb. It will probably be later if things continue as they are going.  This will put us in McMurdo during the thick of Vessel Offload time; perhaps the worst time of all to be there. Lots of trucks, noise, dust and confusion.  Nonetheless I am considering staying an extra week in town to work. We’ll see.  
 

I apologize to all of you who follow my blog for not keeping it updated. It has been hard work getting over the hump out here and now we are more than half-way through. On the subject of leaving…now, with a light at the end of the tunnel it seems like everyone’s spirits have lifted with the prospect of getting the &*%$ out of here. We are coming up on a very bust time with science trying to finish up their projects, the arch finishing up theirs Distinguished Visitors trying to catch a ride out here for “inspections” all while we are trying to inventory and prepare for close-out. The carpenters are supposed to come out Thursday to start taking down tents and transition us back to winter mode. I have my own little project to deal with in the meantime. I discovered a small leak in one of our fuel bladders. Nothing serious but the Fuel department thinks that it should be changed out before winter snows bury it and over-stress the seam making a minor leak a major one. So this is going to involve a major excavation of the bladder. While we are digging it out we figured we might as well raise it above surface level before filling the new one. The first step of course is to drain the old bladder which I have been working on the past few weeks.

We have had the DC-3 Bassler around for the past week. It has been shuttling people and materials back and forth between WAIS and the nearby Byrd Camp. They are closing the camp down and a lot of the retro material will go back to McMurdo via our camp. This has meant a lot of extra work for all of us during an already busy time. But it has also mean that I have been able to dole out a great portion of the fuel in the bad bladder to the plane that consumes over a thousand gallons to fly to McMurdo one-way. I estimate that we only have a thousand or so gallons left. Enough that I could start pumping it out into drums.

Our last science groups should be in and out this week and the project coordinator is down from Denver to assess how successes and shortcomings of the field season. Luci and I have made our travel plans and are looking forward to getting out of here. We are planning a kayak trip with my brothers Joel and Jesse in NZ before moving on to Japan (hopefully to ski) and SE Asia before making our way back to Italy. There are various pull-out scenarios being thrown around. One has all but four of us leaving on a Herc in the first days of Feb with the rest leaving by Twin-Otter a few days later. Another has us all leaving by Bassler the way we came in. Who stays and who goes in the first scenario is still up for debate but I have (ironically) volunteered to stay as long as possible so I can put my babies to sleep for the winter.

This picture was supposed to be our christmas cards but we never had enought time to print them up.  So I decided to just post it instead.  It was taken at Boccalatte in Italy in August. Yep, Northern Hemisphere summer. Yep, that is snow on the ground.   

I have been making more modifications to my fueling system during the past week. Over the past winter, most of the camp equipment was stored in the Arch. This winter we won’t be able to store as much material in there so we are making our plans to store the stuff outside. One of our equipment operators has been plowing up a big cargo berm. If we were to just put the stuff on the ground it would be drifted over before we could get out of camp. Up on the berm it will at least escape getting buried until sometime mid-winter. Burying wouldn’t be particularly good for the fueling station. If we were just to leave it out in the open the way it is now, every little nook and cranny would fill with snow. Digging it out would be tricky because of the risk of breakage to fuel lines and pump motor parts. So in lieu of putting the pump inside, the idea is to put the inside on the pump.

At the moment the USAF has a “worldwide shortage of cargo palettes”. These are the standardized wood and aluminum boards that all Air Force cargo is first built onto before being loaded into military aircraft. It is a pretty ingenious system really how all this cargo can be slid on or off any military cargo aircraft as long as it has been build onto one of these palettes first. Especially if you consider how much longer it takes to load and unload a Russian cargo aircraft of the same class. They don’t have a standardized rolling palette system on their aircraft so everything has to be stowed in the hold manually.

Needless to say, these palette are extremely useful on the ground as well. Not only do we store all our cargo on them (making them easy to move after a storm to clean up around them) but we also use them for myriad other purposes. The Air Force rightly prefers that we only use the palette for its original function and with the recent shortage of them throughout the world we have been instructed to return as many of them as possible to Mcmurdo.
To replace them we have been shipped out a non-standardized replacement. They are roughly the same dimensions and weight. But, the new ones stand about six inches tall and are made of molded and reinforced plastic and have holes in them where the standard ones were a solid piece of two-inch-tall wood and aluminum. The new ones also don’t have the nice D-rings to clip cargo straps to. But, since the plastic takes well to screws they make great forkable platforms from which to build onto. The idea, of course, was to replace the air force palette that the pumping station is strapped to with a new plastic one so they can have the standard one back at McMurdo (to most likely find its way back here full of more cargo).

I spent the end of last week building the base of my new pumping station with the idea of eventually building a box that can be forked onto the whole apparatus making it easy to store for the winter and put back together at the beginning of next season. The biggest design hurdle is the eight-foot-tall rocket ship that is the new Velcon V3 filter. I started by building the floor with sheets of plywood with a frame of two-by-twos so the cover box fits snuggly onto the base. Then I built a sand box out of two-by-twelves that the pump and filter containment berm could fit nicely into. At this point I had to break down the old palette to put the equipment into the new base. This had to be done with the Tucker forks piece by piece: First the pump and motor, then the filter. Then the containment could be slid nicely into the box and both could be secured (screwed) to the floor. Then the static reel and nozzle cradle could be put into place.

It all went of without a hitch and I was able to pump fuel with it for the first time on Saturday. Of course the problem of the tall filter still stood. The solution I came up with was to build a cradle so that it can be drained and laid on its side for storage. Otherwise the top-box would have to be ridiculously large. But, because I didn’t want to have to drain and disconnect the plumbing from the two-hundred pound filter and then lay it down for measurement, I had to on-sight the thing. Kind of a pain, really, considering I’m no carpenter and I have spent a good part of my life using the metric system. I really hate having to do figures in fractions instead of decimals. I don’t understand how American carpenters can stand to use such an arcane system of measurement. But, it seems to have worked out. The cradle looks nice anyway and the measurements are all good. I won’t get to see how it holds the filter until the end of the season.

Now that the base has been fabricated I need to start thinking about the top-box. Hopefully we’ll get another spell of nice weather so I can start working on it.