A New Year's Not to be Forgotten

The "A" Shift group picture. All present and accounted for out at Discovery Hut with the exception of Polie D/O Walsh. Also, "C" shifter Cassidy snuck in, but he's really just an "A" shifter at heart.



First of all, a happy New Year to all of you. While most of you have just flipped your calendars over, we've been in the new year for almost a full day.

Those fortunate few down at Pole are coming near the end of their 24th New Year's celebration. Having all time zones in the world intersect under your feet certainly has a marked advantage to the party animal there, provided that you can keep conscious for all of them.

I still need to find out from our newly arrived Polies to see if it was actually as fun as it sounds.

As for my version of New Year's, it was a little different than I had initially planned.

Originally, I had expected to ring in the unofficial (bureaucratically, at least) real new year (on New Zealand time) over at Scott Base with those lovable and funny sounding Kiwis over the hill. Thirty-six hours prior to the big calendar swap, a call came into the Crash Shack telling myself and Caesar that we were to report at 0830 the next morning for "Happy Camper", our cold weather survival school.

Though we had finally gotten into the long awaited class, we were a little disheartened knowing we'd be missing the celebrations with our friends.

After getting transferred back to Station 1 so we could make our report time, we moped around a little for the rest of the shift.

The next morning, after getting off of work and getting all of our extreme cold weather gear together, we reported over to FSTP (pronounced eff-stop and standing for "Field Training Safety Program") to begin our class.

Our instructor for the class was an accomplished mountain guide who sometimes lives out of his van when he's not working somewhere. The man loves his nature.

Anyways, we went through the morning doing some basic classroom stuff, going over the contents of survival kits and how to avoid and deal with the cold. After completing our classroom work, we loaded up on a Delta and went out to the real classroom, the Ross Ice Shelf.

After getting out there, we went over some more basics of survival, including how to use camp stoves. After a boxed lunch, we went to work for real.

We went to work setting up everything a group of ten needs to survive a night out in the frigid Antarctica wild. This included the antiquated but virtually invincible Scott Tent, a few mountain tents, windwalls built from blocks of snow sawed from the ground, a kitchen with its own windwall, a dinner table (we're not completely uncivilized here), and of course, our survival trenches/mansions.

We couldn't have had a more beautiful day to be working out in the snow. The sun was shining (as is now evidenced by my very red face), it was "warm" by McMurdo standards at a little below freezing, and not too much wind until after we had built our initial windwalls.

Also, Mt. Erebus was busy smoking away, giving the local landscape a little more beauty as our crystal clear skies exposed everything for miles around.

As our day of official fieldwork came to a close as we lit the stoves to get ready for dinner, we had made a significant little community of tents, trenches, and walls that made our little village resemble something between a quaint snowy lea with field stone walls and a rabbit warren.

After more digging, we completed the survival trenches that we were to sleep in for the night. Some of these were far more impressive than others. One of our group, an ambition Jano, dug out a cave about the size of a small room, complete with arches made of snow blocks.

My own humble abode was far simpler. It consisted of a hole about four feet down and a horizontal tunnel which I could slide into with a sleeping bag. My roof was nothing more than my Big Red (our issued parka) weighed down with chunks of snow. It actually proved to be fairly comfortable and warm in the end, though in the future I would certainly make a few improvements.

After eating some dinner, (freeze dried meals made in the last decade which taste okay at first, but with each progressive bite become less and less appetizing) we all gathered around the dinner table cut into the snow. We then took a few pictures of the whole group together in a scene strongly resembling "The Last Supper" by da Vinci.

Following that, kite flying ensued, courtesy of Shuttle OJ and general and amusing banter was had by all as we awaited the approach of midnight.

At midnight, we had a countdown and proceeded to make as much noise as possible to ring in the new year. Apparently, we did a good job at it as we woke up our instructor who was sound asleep in his hut about a hundred yards away.

Not to be left out of the celebrations, he jumped on his ancient snowmobile and raced around our camp a few times. He then joined us to ring in the New Year before we all finally had enough and decided to sack out for the night.

Crawling into my hole, it struck me that I had never expected to be celebrating New Year's out a sheet of ice in the middle of the Ross Sea in Antarctica with ten other people ranging from my fellow "A" shifter Caesar, to Drew the Lead DA, to a bunch of beakers I'd never seen before, and a couple of Janos including "Diesel" (A fun and petite Asian girl. Another example of things being just a little different here.).

Seeing the sun still standing tall in the sky with the mountains in plain view with the residents of our snowy village popping in and out of their holes made me just lay in my under-snow cave in amazement once again before the delicious quiet and weariness took their expected course.

After a fairly warm and good night's sleep, we woke up to break camp. All of our group had slept in our survival trenches, apparently a Happy Camper first for the season (though nice weather didn't hurt us). After undoing much of our hard work the day before, we sat down to a less than delicious breakfast of plain oatmeal (harvested during the Clinton era) mixed with packets of hot cider to add some flavor.

Following this, we were again met by our instructor and left our humble town to be taken back to the instruction hut. We went through a few more exercises. For the first one, we went over the shortwave radio set. After setting it up outside, we were able to get in touch with both MacOps (the all listening entity of Mactown) and the South Pole. We were able to extend our New Year's wishes to them, and they to us. We also exchanged weather reports, ours being a little warmer than their balmy -37F.

I think they were jealous.

Following this, we went into the somewhat well known "bucket head" exercise.

Those of you that have seen the Werner Herzog documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" are probably familiar with this. For those of you who are not, a brief description follows:

The object of this scenario is to simulate searching for a lost group member who went out in the middle of a Con 1 white out to use the bathroom. We are given basic tools to try and go out and rescue them. Basically, a rope is extended out to its furthest point and people are spaced out evenly along the rope. Then, with the other end firmly attached to the building, we sweep out in a wide arc, yelling such things as the name of the missing person or "Marco" in a throwback to the swimming pool game. All the while, we are stumbling around with white buckets with amusing faces on our heads to simulate white out conditions.

After a few minutes of stumbling in our arc, I became the lucky one to locate our missing instructor by stepping on him. The day was saved, all because I couldn't see what I was walking on.

Following this, we took a brief glance over at the "SARcasm", an artificially created crevasse used by the Search and Rescue team for training. It made for an impressive hole in the ground scraped out by a Cat D-8 or another close relative.

Following this brief break, we went on to our final scenario of the day. We were given the scenario that our truck had caught fire in the middle of nowhere and all we were able to save was the survival bag and shortwave radio. Our goal was to set up an emergency camp with a mountain tent, a small windwall, contact MacOps on the shortwave set, boil one liter of water, deal with a simulated case of hypothermia, and otherwise not die.

We managed to get everything done in just under ten minutes. Though not sure if this was a record or not, it easily puts to shame the average time of about 25 minutes for a group of 20 to complete these tasks.

Our field training done for the day, we cleaned up and enjoyed chatting, napping, and eating lunch in the instructor's hut until the shuttles came to take us away.

Our day wound down with putting our equipment away and a brief lecture on helicopter safety procedures. Also, Caesar almost set the building on fire, but that's a fairly minor detail.

Wait, you want to hear about how Caesar almost set the building on fire? Is it really that interesting to you? Well, if you insist.

Before putting the stoves away, we had to go set them up and light them to ensure that they were working properly. Caesar, being a masterful fireman, proceeded to check one of these stoves.

Before further looking at the events, I will give a quick primer on the function of these stoves. Below the standard looking burner that you see on most stoves, including the ones in your home, there is a small cup that sits underneath with a fuel line that passes by before going back up to the burner. When starting, the fuel cylinder is cracked open briefly and liquid fuel accumulates in this small cup. The fuel is then shut off and the fuel in the cup lit. This action allows the flame from the cup to impinge on the fuel line itself to preheat any fuel passing through, vaporizing it. After this preheating, the fuel is then sent back through the line and sent as a gas straight to the burner for consumption.

Caesar, had the first step mostly correct, except for the fact that he didn't shut off the flow of fuel. After lighting the cup, he turned away for a moment, and didn't notice that the fuel was overflowing the cup and spilling all over the table with silent blue tongues lapping up.

As the table had a metal top and the wall behind covered in diamond plate (I'm sure this isn't the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last.), I watched, not particularly concerned, as the flame spread about the table.

After watching it for a moment unconcerned, I turned to Caesar and said something like this:

"Caesar. (In a normal and calm tone.) Caesar. (No response yet.) Caesar, the table is on fire, you might want to turn off the fuel."

The third time did it. He promptly spun around, did a little jump, and frantically went to work trying to shut off the fuel. After closing the valve, he picked it up and tried to blow out the large flame coming off the top of the burner, but only managed to spill more fuel and create a large but brief flare up.

After a moment, the flames went out with no damage to the table or the building. Though no real damage was done, I have now begun to carry the torch (pun intended) of instructing everyone at the firehouse to ask him how he set the building on fire.

Amusing anecdotes are already occurring as a result of this, and more are sure to come, though I won't bore you with the mundane details here.

After all of that, we finally went home. It was nice to get a shower and a shave after wearing mostly the same clothes for about three days.

Following that, even though I officially had the rest of the day off, I came into work anyway. It's hard to shake an addiction with firetrucks, sometimes. Also, when you have a good crew, why would you want to skip a day working with them?

While I had initially been disappointed about having to do it over New Year's, in retrospect, I think it was worth it. Who else can say they celebrated New Year's while camping out underground in the middle of a frozen Antarctic sea?

Ten of us can this year. I'm proud to be one of them.

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.