Antarctica Blog

The wind continues to blow. Yesterday it blew from the north and today its blowing from the south so that everything that didn’t fill in yesterday is getting filled in today. The snow fences I set up work alright but as was the case today, the wind picked up at night and the fences were in the wrong place.

We have had some Twin Otter activity the past couple of days. They have been out this way moving Science groups from one camp to another. A lot of science groups try to get back to the states for the holidays. I-205 left on Saturday to go back to McMurdo so we are back to just the three of us here at Siple Dome.

My big excitement of the week was fixing a Herman Nelson and doing the 250 hour preventative maintenance on the Tucker. Sounds fun, huh? The Hermie has been giving us problems since put-in and finally just quite working. The problem was in the burner which also houses the magneto and the fuel pump which both turned out to be malfunctioning. Luckily we had both parts on hand. The 250 on the Tucker was just a more extensive lubing than the regular 25 hr plus a series of system checks like the battery, brakes and headlights (kind of ironic, that one). The only problems I ran into were minor. The oil drain plug is over one of the drive shafts and my attempt to bypass it failed miserably spewing oil everywhere. I recovered most of it in the end. The tracks were also in need of tightening which was kind of fun.

Wish I had more to write about but it has been a pretty uneventful week.

Another busy week here at Siple Dome. We got a couple of tanker flights to fill up our fuel bladder. What a difference! I had to cut one of them off because we exceeded the safe fill limit of the bladder. Neither the plane or the camp have an accurate method for measuring the fuel level so we have to compare estimates to figure out how much we have. We have found the best way is actually to stick a yardstick down the vent cap and estimate that way. Why fuel doesn’t go spilling out all over the place when you open the vent cap is beyond me. Something to do with the density of the fuel probably.

Another science group came through mid-week, I-345. They already had most of their equipment staged out here so they arrived, had dinner and were out the next day. They are a group of 6 and they are doing a light traverse on snow mobiles studying the movement of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We also have two Twin Otter crews working out of Siple. It was fun having them around. They have been shuttling personnel and equipment out to the I-205 study sites. I-205 have been using explosives to image the ice stratification and the terrestrial surface under the ice. Because their flights have had extra room Luci and I both got to take a flight on a Twin Otter. Really not much different out there than it is here in the camp at Siple Dome.

The weather has not been too great here this week. Frequent windstorms keep filling everything in with snow and we keep digging it back out again. One storm laid down some pretty hard snowdrifts. We had to spend a day grooming the runway to get rid of them. I have devised a set of snow fences to prevent drifting around the Jamesway. Seems to work alright but just as I set it up the worst of the storm passed. Go figure.

This week we have surpassed our halfway point of the season. We have started thinking more seriously about what to do with ourselves this spring. It is starting to shape up a bit like last spring. This is the very rough program. We hope to spend at least two weeks in NZ. Mostly sailing. Then fly to Denver to see friends, look for a job for next season, snowboard and hopefully take a Wilderness First Responder refresher course. On the flight back to Maine we might stop in Chicago to see our friend Ash (we haven’t told him yet: Surprise!). In Maine, I’m going to take a Motorcycle Safety course and apply for my Motorcycle license, finally. Up to now I have been able to circumvent the law in Italy by virtue of playing the ignorant foreigner. I have a feeling my days are numbered in this game though. Next: Italy sometime around our birthdays in May. Then motorcycle trips. We have a couple of different ideas. One involves the large Mediterranean islands and the other involves visiting my cousin in Eastern Europe. To early to commit to either at this point. I am currently working on getting my brother Jesse to come to Italy to be our “intern” at Boccalatte for at least part of the summer. He insists he has a love-life to get back to in the States. I keep insisting that the love-life can wait.

Supporting science. That has been the name of the game this week. On Wednesday our first group of scientist arrived: I-205. They are studying the movement of the continental ice sheet and, more specifically, the effect of the tides on the movement of glaciers that spill out onto the Ross Ice Shelf. We had been lead to believe that they would arrive here and immediately go out deeper into the field and set up a smaller camp. But as it has turned out they will be based here for three weeks; flying out to their study sites with a Twin Otter. So, our numbers have jumped from three to ten. Tomorrow another group is scheduled to arrive on a Herc: I-345. This could push our numbers up to nineteen.

Needless to say, the three of us camp crew have been quite busy. Day before yesterday, was a LONG day. We got up early to start observations for a proposed 1000 departure from McMurdo. One Twin Otter and a Herc with fuel to fill our fuel bladder. They were both delayed which meant we got up early for nothing. We spent the day shoveling out from a couple of days of bad weather. Don and I were four feet down in a pit digging out our fuel bladder when Luci called us to say that she overheard on the radio that two Hercs might be diverting here for fuel from South Pole and WAIS Divide. Apparently the weather at McMurdo had gotten bad and they were planning to try and wait it out here and see if there was any improvement. So we quickly got the fueling system started and in an hour we had two Hercs roaring away in the fuel pits. To make matters noisier, one of them was having engine issues and had to leave all engines on a high idle. And then the pilot came out and tried to strike up a conversation. The engineer on the second Herc kept complaining about how slowly our pump pumped. I kindly explained that THEY were supposed to be giving US fuel rather than vice-versa.

After they left we were 6000 gallons of fuel lighter and the top of our bladder was four feet deeper in the hole. We spent the next four hours before the next flight trying to get to the point we were before we gave away all our fuel. We tried to use our grooming equipment to dig it out but it simply wasn’t designed for digging. So we dug by hand and groomed the pile of snow out of the way. Around dinner time the Twin Otter arrived with three crew and the science group leader. The Herc tanker didn’t arrive until 1am. They dropped of three palettes of stuff and gave us 3000 gallons of fuel.

It has been getting warm here. Standing snow is melting and the ground is getting kind of slushy. Today, on our theoretical day off, Luci and I finished filling the snow cave with the frozen food that was still sitting out on the surface so that it won’t thaw on us. Since the Twin Otter crew is using the Polar Haven as their dorm, there’ll be no shower today. Tonight I’m going to fire up the grill.

Since Antarctica contains all lines of longitude, it also has segments of the continent in every time zone. Geographically speaking, here at Siple Dome we are on Hawaiian time because we are roughly on the same longitudinal line. But using the many varied time zones spread across the continent would have its obvious drawbacks, especially when trying to make flight schedules. To make thing infinitely easier we only use two different time zones here at Siple Dome. McMurdo, South Pole and all the field camps supported by them use New Zealand time (aka McMurdo Stupid Time) for everyday functions such as meal times and waking and sleeping, etc. Weather, Fixed Wing operations, the USAF, and the National Guard do all their planning and forecasting in GMT (Zulu). To make things even simpler, people occasionally quote times in Mountain Time (Denver time) since that is where the USAP headquarters is. It is all arbitrary considering that in the summer it is always daytime here anyway. We could just as easily be on Nuku’alofa time and it wouldn’t make much difference, especially at the South Pole.

Because of the capricious nature of the clock time and the confusion that it can sometimes create, we have found that holidays that fall mid-week (Thanksgiving being one of them) can be moved around with little or no confusion. Here at Siple Dome, we could very well have made pumpkin pie on no less that three Thanksgivings. The last Thursday of November on Local NZ time actually starts at 6am on Wednesday morning in Plymouth, MA where the first Thanksgiving was held. But because the Kiwis don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, it doesn’t make much sense to celebrate it on the Kiwi clock. By dinnertime on the last Thursday of November in Plymouth, MA it is already mid-morning coffee break at McMurdo on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. So we figure that we might as well postpone Thanksgiving until Saturday and make a long week-end out of it (we have 6 day work weeks here).

Tired and confused yet?…You should try getting a good night sleep in a tent in full sunlight. The lead picture was taken just after midnight McMurdo Stupid Time.

Here is an overlay of the US over the Antarctic Continent. I find that a lot of people grossly underestimate the size of Antarctica. I also drew in a couple of places that I often refer to.

I have been beating my head on our laptops all weekend and I have cobbled together a functional, though slow, system for sending recieving and surfing. Hopefully I haven’t brought down the entire 77 satellite Iridium system. So a warning to all of you under a non-polar satellite orbit…keep your eyes to the skies.

The big camp at WAIS Divide went in this week. At the moment they are using a portable 10-99 HF radio for communications so, most of the time, we can barely hear them but they sound like their doing alright; at least happy to have finally gotten out in the field.

We finally got another Hercules here at Siple Dome. The flight that arrived here this week was a tanker bringing us fuel for the Twin Otter planes. The Flight Engineer happened to be a good friend of ours from seasons pervious, Keith. He is full time with the 109th NY Air National Guard. They are the ones who operate the LC-130s for the National Science Foundation for their research programs both here in Antarctica and in Greenland.

They brought in a bunch of goodies from McMurdo for us. Among the goodies was a successful trial laundry run. Obviously, we don’t have a washer and dryer here (though there used to be when this place was a big drilling camp). I hate doing laundry by hand and we get our share over the summer at Boccalatte. Plus, here we have to melt our own snow for water which is a time consuming process in itself. So we decided to try sending our laundry in to McMurdo where we have my brother Jesse do it for us. Since we don’t have a lot of clothes out here, timing is critical. We have to time our weekly shower with a flight in the next couple of days. That didn’t happen last week and we ended up doing laundry by hand. When a plane did finally arrive we forgot to give them out Cruise Box (box of stuff to go back to McMurdo). But when we finally got it on a Twin Otter it was back out here the next day on a Herc.

Speaking of showers, today, being Sunday, was our shower day. We take showers in the Polar Haven a semi-permanent structure similar to a Jamesway but of newer design and smaller size. On shower day we superheat the Polar Haven to sauna temperature and hang a solar shower with water in it from the support poles. Then we stand in a mini-berm which is a large rubber basiny-type-thingy that is normally put under fuel line connections to catch any leaks. Nothing special but it sure beats the system we use in the summer (you’ll have to search old blog entries for pictures of our set up at Boccalatte).

Don and I were also going to have Luci cut our hair. Don found a pair of hair clippers in Skua (once again, you’ll have to look at older entries to find out what that is). But it only had a #1 guide on it (the shortest). So it looks like we are going to shaving our heads or doing something creatively short. But last night, a chain of events unraveled our bathing and shaving plans.

In the early afternoon a Twin Otter stopped by with a couple of Scientist on their way to WAIS Divide. They were just stopping for fuel to get them the next two hours to WAIS. After a couple of hours we got a call from them on the radio saying that they couldn’t land at WAIS due to poor weather and were on their way back here for the night. About 20 minutes before they were scheduled to arrive the weather here started getting cold, kind of windy and the freezing fog started rolling in here at Siple Dome. We went out to the fuel pumps at the runway to wait for them. We could hear them flying over but, by now, it had gotten really foggy and they couldn’t land. We got another cal from them on the radio saying that they were going to look for a hole in the fog and try to land in it and then taxi over to the fueling station. An hour later we heard the buzzing of the twin engines and they emerged from the fog. They had landed 7 miles away and just sort of drove here over the snow.

It was midnight by now and we knew that our relaxing Sunday morning was shot. In fact, this morning it was still foggy, windy and cold and the flight crew and scientist were still hanging around waiting. And, it was my morning to get up early to do the weather. By the time the plane got off the ground it was still foggy and cold ( but not too foggy to take-off) and we just didn’t feel like getting snow to melt, filling the solar shower, getting out the berm, and taking a shower. Hopefully tomorrow is nicer weather…or Jesse is really going to be hating us.

As for mechanical activities this week: I successfully re-zerked the bogies of the Tucker. Sounds made up doesn’t it? But it is not, it is an actual procedure. This week the 25 hour preventative maintenance came up on our Snow-Cat (Tucker is the manufacturer). It primarily involves greasing the many moving parts of the drive-train. In order to get grease into bearings with out taking the whole machine apart they are fitted with little grease fittings (or zerks), little threaded things that look kind of like small bolts that screw down into the bearing housing that allow you to attach a grease gun and squirt grease directly into the bearing housing. The fittings are essentially little one way valves which allow grease to go in but not flow back out; at least that is what they are supposed to do. The Tucker is a tracked vehicle. Each of the four tracks are wrapped around six solid rubber wheels (bogie wheels) and the tracks are moved by a cog connected to the axle. Each one of the 24 bogie wheels has its own set of bearings and, therefore, it’s own zerk fitting.

While trying to grease the bogies I found that some of them just wouldn’t hold grease. Either they spit it back out at me or the grease would ooze out around the edges. Upon inspection I discovered that someone had replaced the zerks with the wrong type; a type that tap-in rather than thread-in. In the process of banging the zerks into the threaded holes in the bearing housing, the person who replaced them damaged the threads making it impossible to thread in the right type of zerk. Luckily for me, I found a tap and die to re-thread the holes and some new zerks which allowed me to “re-zerk the bogies on the Tucker”.

We are having a Bad-Iridium day today, which is something between having a bad-hair day and having low blood-sugar. We have finally abandoned the Apollo mission software and are using the phone hand-set as a modem to dial directly to Don’s ISP in Alaska. Yesterday I had some incredible luck with it. I stayed connected for an hour and was able to send mail using Outlook. But, today we are having spatial issues. We can’t seem to get a good signal to/from the satellite even with voice…oh, the woes of a non-polar orbit! So who knows when I’ll actually get this posted.

Another week has gone by here at Siple Dome. This week has been a weather reporting farce. We finished grooming the runway this week but have only gotten one little Twin Otter in and they can land on just about anything anyway. The big Hercs keep canceling their fuel stops here. There is a very big camp
that is going in about 200 miles from here. When it is finished it will be larger than Palmer station (currently the 3rd largest US station in Antarctica). At the moment there is only a flag marking the spot where it is to be built. The construction crew and camp staff are all waiting for good weather there to begin building the camp. They have been waiting for over a month. Their plan has
been to go light on fuel so they can go heavy on cargo. After they drop the cargo the idea is to stop here for fuel so they can make it back to McMurdo.

Since we are on the flight path and the closest manned operation to the site we are also called on to do weather reports for the planes going in. The planes require weather from us hourly beginning 6 hours before departure and every hour during flight; they usually depart (or plan to depart) at 0930 from McMurdo. This mean we get up at 0300 to begin reporting our conditions even though we are far enough from WAIS (the big campsite on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet) that our weather is completely different here. For the past three weeks they have kept us getting up only to turn around without landing either here or there for one reason or another; usually weather related. Yesterday they had a full plane with the put-in crew and tons of cargo in the air over WAIS. It was a beautiful sunny day here but on the ground at WAIS they found 35kt winds with blowing snow; no fun for putting up a tent in. So, they turned around…again.

For those of you who want to see pictures of our camp here at Siple Dome, I apologize. Outside of our Jamesway there really isn’t much to see that you can’t see here:

Except for piles of junk that we use to fuel planes and keep our grooming equipment going.

But, they say a picture says a thousand words which means, syllogistically, that a thousand words are just as good as a picture. So here are roughly a thousand words to descried our internet connection from top to bottom.

Now, an internet connection is a luxury that most in the western world take for granted these days. To have an internet connection requires certain infrastructural hardware that are omnipresent most everywhere; two in particular are power and a phone line. I am sure many of you have gathered by now that there is absolutely nothing here. What fossil resources we have here are precious. They are shipped to McMurdo once a year by the millions of gallons in the form of Mogas (gasoline) and the aviation fuels JP8 and AN8 which are, essentially, diesel fuel with anti-gelling additives. Here at Siple Dome we have Mogas and AN8. How does all the fuel we need to run the camp and fuel airplanes get here over 300 nautical miles from McMurdo? Like everything else here, it arrives by plane; the fuel arrives by the thousands of gallons stored in the wings of LC-130 Hercules. They have these dangly missile-looking things under their wings which are, in fact, auxiliary fuel tanks. At McMurdo, the plane takes on enough fuel to get it to Siple Dome or South Pole or wherever and the surplus gets pumped into massive bladders to be used however (we have a tiny 10,000 gallon bladder). This makes the fuel that finally arrives at its destination on the continent very precious indeed. To take fuel to South Pole, for example, it takes roughly three times more fuel to get to pole and back than they can carry as payload. Sorry, I can’t remember the exact numbers and, without a good internet connection, I can’t even look it up.

Oh, right I was trying to give a photographic impression of our internet connection. So, what does all this mumbo jumbo have to do with our internet connection? Nothing at all! It was just a ruse to increase my word count. In fact, our internet connection is 100% photovoltaic…powered by the sun. Considering that from September to February we have twenty four hours of the stuff, it would be ridiculous to have it any other way. True, we have two generators (a Honda 1K and 3K) that we can use to charge our battery bank if we have prolonged periods of overcast weather. But with two gel-celled 100 amp hour batteries, it takes a really long period to make us resort to them. We just do without.

Our two 12v batteries are wired parallel which gives us a DC current to use auto cigarette lighter plugs when possible. What current we don’t use directly we use alternated via a beautiful Statpower true sin-wave 1800watt inverter which changes the 12v DC to 110vAC to run all our other various household appliances From it we run a 30in TV, DVD/VCR, boom box, an Air-Ground band base station, hair clippers, electric razors, and about ten different battery chargers of varying types to name a few on our primary system. We also have secondary PV systems for the HF Radio base station, the (semi)-portable 10-99 HF radio, the vhf radio chargers, and the weather station.

So that takes care of the power for our internet connection; now to describe our phone line. At McMurdo, the large metropolis on the Ross Sea, they have telephone poles and lines strung all over town linking all the 200 or so buildings and Scott Base to one central Telco switching room which then beams an RF phone signal 40 miles across McMurdo Sound to Black Island, the liver of the USAP telecommunications system. From Black Island, phone calls (and therefore internet bandwidth) are beamed into the sky to then be bounced back to earth at the USAP’s telephone and internet information landing site in Brewster, Washington where they are disseminated to their various destinations nationwide. This is why, if any of you have ever had family or friends call you collect from McMurdo, chances are it showed up on your bill as a call from Brewster, Washington. There are exceptions to this routing, of course. For example, calls to New Zealand are handled differently though I am not sure how. The IT department at McMurdo are currently in the throes of changing the Stateside downlink to Denver, Colorado where the USAP has its main offices. But, that would be too much to have to explain in this, yet another ruse for more words to describe the dismal internet connection here at Siple Dome.

Now, as I said before, we are hundreds of miles from McMurdo. Well below the horizon and therefore far out of range of the McMurdo-Black Island internet and telecommunications (semi)super-highway. So what do we do here at Siple Dome without our own Black Island uplink-downlink station? Well, in the past, USAP Field Parties used strictly High Frequency (HF) radio transmitters to transmit voice data alone. HF signals have the ability to bend and bounce off the upper atmosphere extending their usable range by hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles at the expense of clarity of sound that a propagating VHF wave can carry. After the advent of the internet, field parties still had only HF radios which they used to send oral messages to MacOps (the radio communications liver of the McMurdo Station) who subsequently typed the messages in the body of an e-mail and sent it via IP. Picking up a piece of paper and writing a letter, barring extended periods of bad weather, makes for a nicer message that the whole USAP has not heard first.

So the HF Radio is still the primary form of communication for field parties in Antarctica. But, in the mid-1990 there was a (semi)revolution that has not-yet-replaced-but-only-supplemented field party communications in Antarctica: the Iridum satellite phone. An Iridium atom has an atomic number of 154 (or is it 77, how can I know with only half an internet connection) which is (semi) precisely how many satellites the upstart company launched into space throughout the mid-nineties; in a non-polar orbit I might add, so that remote locations like the Sahara and the polar ice caps could have telephony. The price tag for such a system obviously puts it out of range of the average joe (10s of 1000s of dollars for a subscription plus upwards of 7 dollars a minute call time) so the company went under and was bailed out by government agencies; the only people who could really benefit from such a service anyway. So now we get unlimited calls but can’t send e-mail via a POP server because the DOD does not have enough liver to filter out all the spam such a service would generate (if any of you IT geeks know a work-around for this, I’m paying cash). So we have to use web-mail which, with a 7k connection gives me plenty of time to cut my fingernails, toenails, hair, lawn, whatever, but, because the line goes down every 7 minutes or so (damn non-polar orbit!), I can’t because I have to keep re-connecting and reloading. To top it all off, the dial-up software that comes with the Iridum Data Kit is worthless. It is called the Apollo Emulator and I am beginning to believe more and more what it emulates is the software used to send data from the Apollo missions of the 60s. I guess I can’t complain, I don’t foot the bill and I don’t have to dictate messages to MacOps.

Oh crap, I over-shot my thousand words. Got a good picture? No? Fine, here’s a picture of me sipping tea in the Sahara..er…South Polar plateau.

That took me a grand total of eight re-connects to upload. Enjoy.

Put-in at Siple Dome has officially ended after two weeks of digging snow, making a runway, and general opening tasks. Yesterday, our GA from McMurdo, Louis, left on a Twin Otter flight back to Base. David, the fuelie, and AC, the Carpenter left a week ago after finishing their opening tasks. Now it is just Luci, Don and me until the science groups start arriving in a couple of weeks.

We departed McMurdo according to schedule on a LC-130 Hercules. Putting in with a Herc meant that we were able to bring out all our supplies in one shot. Actually, two shots. The first plane left an hour before the second with us and all our cargo. The second arrived at Siple Dome with our Tucker Snow-Cat that we use to groom the runway. At the end of last season, the Tucker that was out here cracked a head or blew a head gasket; nothing field-rectifiable, anyway. So, now I use the back of the old Tucker as my workshop, as I have been designated the camp mechanic; although I am getting paid nothing close to a Mechanic’s pay.

We have the main pieces of equipment that are essential to camp operation: the Tucker, the Alp I snowmobile, and three Herman Nelsons. Herman Nelsons are by far the most important. They are old military avionics heaters. Because of the cold, most motors need to be heated before attempting to start them. The Hermies are also handy for heating just about anything from hands to work spaces. They consist of two mechanical parts: the burner and the primer mover or head. The burner houses a gasoline fired heat exchanger, the gas tank, fuel pump and ignition magneto. The prime mover is a single cylinder gas motor which, when attached to the burner, runs the blower, the fuel pump, and the magneto. The head is removable so it can be brought out of the elements for servicing and to keep it warm. Hence the workshop in the back of the old Tucker. I have to admit, they are really fun to work on. They are so simple that they would make a perfect teaching tool for anyone wanting to learn about internal combustion engines. They can be a real pain to start sometimes, though (that’s why we have three). Since they are designed to be used in the cold, they have a built-in carburetor heater box. It is a little metal box stuck on the intake manifold with an asbestos wick. You push a valve and gas squirts in to soak the wick. Then you drop a match in it and let it burn for a few minutes before you try to start it. Crazy, huh!? Works every time.

Our snow machine is an old single-ski Bombardier Alp 1. It is a tank that is OK for towing stuff but has a turning radius of roughly a football field. It has a cranky starter (due to a worn starter gear) so we have to pull-start it most of the time. To start it on cold days, the following procedure is essential. It must be primed with no more than and no less than 8 pumps of the primer. Then, you have to pull the recoil starter handle no more than and no less than eight times with the key in the OFF position ( to prime the cylinders). Finally, you put the key in the ON position and it should start with one more pull of the cord. Though, I have to say, we were all amazed when, after a winter sitting unused with an engine compartment packed with snow, it started with the electric started on the first try!

The Tucker is powered by a Detroit series 53 engine. Every time I hear it start up it reminds me of the sound of a lobster boat on Swans Island, Maine where I grew up (many of them use the same engine). Since we have limited facilities for working on large machinery, the work I do on the Tucker is mostly preventative maintenance. It tows a huge, hydraulic grooming apparatus. It uses a small Wisconsin engine to raise and lower the blade which also required periodic maintenance. I am also responsible for the upkeep of two gas powered generators and a fuel pump for fueling the aircraft. The fuel pump also takes me back to my youth on Swans Island as it is run by a 10HP Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine; the first motor I ever worked on ( I had to replace the shear pin after hitting the omnipresent ledge in the middle of our yard).

Luci has been keeping busy keeping track of our cargo. She has a list of what is in all our various boxes on all the various cargo palette around the camp. That way, we don’t have to go on a hopeless hunt anytime we run out of dried milk in the Jamesway. She has also been putting together palettes of retro, or stuff to be flown back to McMurdo, and doing a great deal of the cooking. The two of us spend most of the first week putting up over a hundred runway makers on our 10,000ft runway. Then we spent the next week grooming it in shifts. We have also been taking turns fueling planes when they arrive. That’s pretty much life here at Siple Dome.

Back at McMurdo. Just like we never left. It has been a crazy couple of weeks. To top it off, my computer died. Luckily, I had the new hard drive from Hong Kong and a Ghost Image to recover my operating system. It did require the help from one of the computer Techs, Holly, in his spare time; of which I am grateful.

During our stay in CHC one of the C-17 flights down to the ice was turned around. They flew all the way down to McMurdo before the pilots decide the weather was too bad to land and that they were going to Boomerang. This backed up the flights and required some rearrangement of cargo and personnel. This meant that Luci and I flew down on separate flights. Then, Luci’s flight never left the ground and was delayed another day. When she finally got to McMurdo we discovered that we were not in the same room together. Not a total surprise since we had been tipped off by a contact in Housing. Still, there was nothing we could do about it since we have been labeled Transients on account of the fact we are staying in McMurdo less than three weeks.

We have been out-straight getting ready for our camp. There will be three camp staff this season at Siple Dome: Don Wray, the camp manager; Luci, and me. Siple is about 300 miles from McMurdo on other side of the Ross Ice Shelf. Despite its name, it is on the “Flat White”. Our primary function is a Fuel stop and staging area for a much larger camp that is being built on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and as an emergency landing site for the LC-130 Hercules Aircraft flying to the South Pole Station. But, we will have a couple of science groups using Twin Otter aircraft who will be based out of our camp. Our primary function at the camp will be to monitor weather for arriving aircraft, grooming the skiway, and fueling the planes when they arrive.

We are scheduled to put-in tomorrow. We have been spending much of our time in training sessions with any free time requisitioning food, parts and supplies for the roughly 100 days we’ll be out in the field. Not and easy task considering that Luci and I have never been out in the field before. Once we have all our stuff in a big pile we than have to process it all into the Cargo Handling system to make sure that it stays frozen or not frozen and that it makes it out to the camp when we need it the most.

The camp itself consists of a small structure called a Jamesway which looks like a small airplane hangar and a huddle of tents which are the sleeping quarters. We’ll be putting in with a carpenter, a fuelie, and a general assistant who will be spending the week helping us dig out the Jamesway and our heavy equipment and getting the fueling system set up. We will have a satellite phone with a data link so I should be able to keep the blog up. Wish us luck!

PS: check out some of my retro-posts from Thailand and China.

Crazy! Hong Kong is an insane madhouse of people packed into high-rise buildings and narrow streets. To make matters worse we were there during one of the biggest Chinese holidays; National Day. From what we gathered from TV, more Chinese than ever are traveling this year and most of them to Hong Kong and Macau. We were there for one purpose only: shopping for cheap electronics. We bought an 80G hard-drive for my little laptop, an I-Pod, and a set of knock-off noise reducing headphones (which don’t reduce noise as much as I would like). We were in Hong Kong for a night before taking the ferry over to Macau.

Macau was an old Portuguese colony and is now one of China’s Special Administrative Regions. The architecture is much more European than Hong Kong and the City itself has a more provincial feel. Despite the fact that we were hundreds of miles north of Bangkok, it was just as hot (if not hotter). We walked around sightseeing, had a nice Portuguese dinner, and watched the National Day fireworks. Before taking the Boat Back to HK to catch our flight we hiked up to the old fort (death by sweat) and went to the sub-par, but air conditioned, museum (ahhhh!). To go back and forth from HK to Macau you have to show your passports and get stamped. I used my old passport for the last time going from HK to Macau and got my first stamp on the new one going back to HK to get the plane to Christchurch.

In Christchurch, we immediately started running into people from Antarctica we knew. We were there a little early because we made our own travel arrangements. Usually people are only there for a day of orientation before flying out. We had plans to go up for some spring skiing at Mt Hutt but we soon discovered that, after a warm spell, most of the snow had melted already. On top of that the weather was typically rainy and windy on the south island so we just chose to stick around town, catch up with friends and eat well.