An Antarctic Summer Wonderland

Hello again from the dome of the Station Two Crash Shack out in Ice Town.

As I type, I'm looking out into a fairly miserable expanse of wind driven snow that stings the face, freezes to your clothes, and finds its way into any crevice or opening in your clothing. The LC-130s out in front of me keep playing hide and seek in the blowing white mass.

The weather here has taken a turn for the worse. Yesterday morning, it was a little cloudy and had the usual McMurdo breeze blowing. By nightfall (figuratively speaking), the winds were gusting hard in town, and harder out in Ice Town. While we finally went to Condition Two (weather bad enough to make you check out if you go somewhere) in town last night, the guys on B shift over at Station Two had already been in Condition One (you can't leave your building without having a rope to follow) weather for most of the day.

I'm sure their shift was actually easy and enjoyable, as there were no flights due to the conditions. Most likely, they did exactly what I'm doing right now and sat around in the dome playing around on their laptops.

The only downside to their shift was the fact that when we came on in the morning, conditions were still bad enough that we weren't allowed to go out and relieve them until almost noon. The amount of drifting snow had made the roads inaccessible to our normal mode of transportation, Scat 1*. As a result, after con two was finally declared for Ice Town, we were met by a Haaglund operated by a member of the Search and Rescue team.

For those of you not familiar with Antarctic vehicles, the Haaglund looks like this. (Photo credit to whoever took this.) The only differences between this one and the one we used was that ours was dark green and named "Hansel" instead of "Uncle Buck". After loading all of our gear into the back half of it, we climbed in on top of it. These vehicles are not particularly large and tend to force everyone to get cozy with one another in the back, especially with bags of stuff everywhere.

After meeting up with Delta Scharen, a monster truck fueling vehicle, we made our way out to Ice Town.

Riding in the back of a Haaglund is not completely unpleasant, though it is certainly not how the average family would prefer to travel (unless you like the idea of placing your children in a totally separate compartment where they can be neither seen nor heard). The ride is a little on the rough side, though not terrible, the visibility is awful as the windows are small and fog easily, and and takes slightly less than forever to get anywhere.

After we finally made it to Ice Town in near white out con two conditions, (often afraid that the mammoth Delta behind us wouldn't see us and squish us like some kind of tracked ant) we were greeted by the somewhat jubilant B shift crew. They were entertained by our mode of transportation and the fact that they were finally getting relieved. After stepping out of the Haaglund, I didn't at first notice how much drifting had occurred overnight. It wasn't until I grabbed a pile of gear and started to make my way to the station that I noticed that my head was almost level with the top of Red 2 (one of our behemoth tracked crash trucks), a height of about ten feet. Drifts of four to five feet surrounded the station and the trucks. Everything was half buried. It didn't take us long to figure out what our job for the day was.

After the B shift crew and Delta Scharen (which I was pretty sure was going to get stuck as they attempted to push through a drift to fill up the White Elephant) departed, leaving us the only inhabitants of Ice Town, we went to work.

Today, we did what we do best; shovel. The six of us worked for about three hours clearing snow from in and around our vehicles and the station. By the time we were done, the blowing snow had turned our turnout gear into snow covered suits, knit caps into crackled sheets of ice, and our mustaches and eyelashes were encrusted in rime. For as miserable as that all sounds, none of us ever really got that cold.

With the task of unburying ourselves for the day completed, we returned to our homely double wide and kicked back for a while. After our safety nap time, we finally went over to the galley for dinner.

Though the wind was still blowing and snow still hit us like a thousand needles, it didn't feel cold enough to warrant anything more than a sweatshirt. While my clothing was adequate for warmth, I neglected to ensure that my footwear was in the proper state to walk the short distance over to the galley.

As we walked over for dinner, we were still in near white out conditions. The sky above was white, the ground below was white. Aside from the buildings in front of us, there was no differentiating of the two. We walked along nonchalantly, until our feet first encountered obstacles.

One of the fun characteristics of bad weather in Ice Town is the channels that are made in and around buildings and objects by the drifting snow. In some places, there lies little to no snow on top of the blue ice of town. That can suddenly change, however, as a steep peak of snow often taller than four feet will just appear out of nowhere.

When you combine the fact that everything is white and there is a tall obstacle, this leads invariably to stumbling into said obstacle with less than favorable results. On several occasions, I stumbled unwittingly into these heaping mounds, often sinking into them up to my thighs. This is where my failure to properly secure my footwear by zipping them up led to unpleasant and squishingly chilly results for my feet.

After a fine meal of waffles (self serve, as the dining attendants were too scared to venture out here today) and other breakfast food, a familiar sounding and stumbling trek back to the station, and a climb back into the dome, I produce for you the fruits of my leisure time.

The snow has finally stopped falling (a odd occurrence to see here as it is typically much too dry and cold for snow to actually fall here), the winds are cutting back, and McMurdo, sitting pleasantly up on the Rock, is finally starting to reappear.

It looks like the storm is finally letting up, ending two days of weather that made more than one of us comment, "This is the Antarctica I signed up for."**



As an additional tidbit for this post, I would like to offer to you a bit of Antarctic flavor. While we are still technically part of the United State, a slightly different dialect has developed down here along with its own unique vocabulary. I present to you a fictional, though entirely possible, conversation that might be heard down here:

"After the Deuce crew loaded up into Scat, we were talking about the most recent boondoggle adventure of some of our friends, the Kiwis. They had boomeranged from a flight out to dig out some barrels and had to take the Delta back to town from Pegasus. Unfortunately, their Delta had broken down, leaving the Kiwis, a few DAs and a pair of crunchy winterovers stranded. After a while, a pair of Pisten Bullys, Ivan, and a big Cat came out to save the day. The crunchies, knowing better, jumped right into the Pisten Bullys. The rest hopped into Ivan to be taken back. The big stretch eight Cat came out and dragged the Delta home. By the time the Terrabus finally got everyone back to Mactown, we ran into them by the galley and invited them to dinner. There, after battling off a fresh batch of beakers, everyone enjoyed a plate full of freshies that had just come off a seventeen and a delicious frosty boy/crack from the crack/frosty boy machine. After dinner, the Kiwis left us, returning to their green home and the Tatty Flag."

Let me know if you actually know what that means. I'll be entertained.


*This is our four wheel drive Ford van on off road tires and a lift kit that we use for transportation. Its name is not an abbreviation for something. Rather, its name means just what the word is defined as. It's a fairly decent description of the vehicle, actually. It's a harsh continent, and as such, often has harsh names.

**Editor's Note: At the time of writing this, the weather did look as though it was beginning to improve. In fact, it got worse again, and over twelve hours later, the wind is still blowing hard. We're currently trying to figure out a way to actually conduct our shift change, possibly by use of tracked vehicle again.