Penguins

Apparently the only reason people check this blog is for penguin pictures. Fuckers.

Shuttle Nate, Mr Antarctica

I was going through my photos for a new post when I noticed something peculiar. There's lot of photos I've taken of people that I work with and hang out with, but they're typically group shots of people screwing around and posing. One man keeps popping up however in solo pictures, and I've amassed quite the collection of photos of him. That man, of course, is Shuttle Nate.

Look! Here he is climbing out of the Ob Tube!

Shit, look at him sporting that purple jacket while rocking the shuffleboard table at Southern Exposure!

Wow! Look at that puck placement!!


Here he peaking up the skirt of Our Lady of the Snows!

And here he is, holy shit, showing off his mad astronomy skills and giving the weekly science lecture in the galley!

These are just a few of the Shuttle Nate photos I've found on my phone. I've decided not to posts the ones of him sleeping, because that would just be creepy. It also seems that I have more shots of him than of myself, so he comes off as a typical McMurdo resident while I am, per usual, socially invisible.

Come back next week and I'll post my pictures of Nate scaling Mt. Erebus, scuba diving under the Ross Island ice shelf, and baking chocolate chip cookies. In case there is any confusion, yes, in my pictures he is doing all three things at the same time.

The Ob Tube

So, somebody asked me to post pictures of the Ob Tube.

The Ob Tube is basically this big metal tube that they stick into the ice every year so scientist can climb down and look at things under the surface of the sea ice. Because the ice around Ross Island is so finicky this year, there are not many morale trips for Mac Town residents due to safety concerns. To remedy this, the Ob Tube was opened up for residents to visit whenever they had free time to kill.

It's a really cramped space, and in order to climb down, you need to strip down to your underwear and apply plenty of seal blubber so you can slide down. No kidding though, on my first trip to the tube, there was a 45 minute wait to climb down because someone got stuck and couldn't get out. I can't phathom what that's like, but I imagine it is more scary than having the self realization that you are exactly the awful kind of person that you always assumed yourself to be.


Approaching this thing, you have the realization that this tube is being held up by by packed ice and a couple of metal bars that prevent this thing from falling to the sea floor. Really fucking scary, but then you walk up and you look down and see nothing but darkness. While you're contemplating whether this was a good idea or not, the person you walked out to the tube with is all, "Hey man, are you gonna climb down or what?"  So you throw your legs over (and you know that you're not going to fall in, because there's no room to fall,) grab the rungs, and begin your descent. Halfway down somebody closes the lid, so whatever light you had no longer aids your climb. Ten feet from the bottom, the metal rungs turn into a rope ladder and totally destroy any confidence you built up and you begin to sway wildly until you pull your shit together and establish some sort of balance. And then you find yourself in the world's most crazy aquarium.

Unfortunately, my phone camera is a piece of junk, and the focus mechanism focuses on the glass and not the water on the other side.

Those white floatie things are everywhere. I don't know they're called, because instead of going to Sunday night science lectures, I spend my time playing shuffleboard at Southern Exposure. This picture does not begin to capture how many of those things exist down there. And that bright spot at the top is frozen sea ice. It looks really cool from the tube, but again, bad photo.

If I had a better camera, I could have taken pictures of jellyfish the size size of basketballs, and even seals that swam by. Okay, I didn't see any seals down there, but there is a seal that lives right outside of the Ob Tube, and he swims around all the time. One time I did see a Kraken, but I'm not allowed to post pictures because of NSF guidelines. Sorry, but that's somebody grant money right there...

Due to the weather warming up, the tube is now closed, but it was fun while it lasted. Although the first time down is scary as hell, it's not as bad after you know that you're probably not going to die. I also have photos of the tube that some diver took from the exterior. They're not mine however, so I don't feel cool posting them without violating somebody's work and adding watermarks. But yeah, the Ob Tube... fucking awesome.

Happy Thanksgiving from Ob Hill!

So, it has been a while since I've posted. Most of my days off now are spent doing random hikes and community projects, so I've been "kinda" busy. On top of that, I spent a week fighting the dreaded McMurdo crud, which involved a lot of sleeping and a lot of hot totties. Today we celebrate Thanksgiving, and I've received an additional day off this weekend. What a perfect time to post while I wait to line up outside the galley for an hour and gorge myself on... I dunno, not freshies though, no flights have been able to make in it all week.

I wanted to show everybody some of the cool stuff there is to do down here besides watching Kiwis drink and scream about rugby.

A few weeks ago, I signed up to volunteer for the McMurdo trail crew. There's a number of different trails around the station that range from 1-7 miles, and a lot of them cover some of the mountainous hills surrounding Mac Town. A couple of us residents signed up to shovel snow on Ob Hill and make sure the trails are actually still there. It was basically 4 hours of shoveling rock-solid snow on the tallest hill overlooking town.

This

Became this

HOLY SHIT!!! IS THAT DUDE SWINGING A PICK AXE??? That's right, trail work in Antarctica is fucking serious!!!!

The result of 4 hours work?

Boo-yah! Now take that view and spread it our over a quarter of a mile, and you got some serious cleared trail happening. The original picture was taken about 30 feet above where the actual trail was, so imagine trying to hike around Ob Hill in the snow at a 45 degree angle. That's some scary stuff, and better men and women than I have done it just to reinforce the fact that I am a sissy. No joke, it's posted right in the middle of Highway 1: MIKE IS A SISSY. The most popular name at McMurdo is Mike, so it may no be referring to me, but all of us Mikes share the burden...

I did get some cool shwag out of the deal. I received a trail marker and a bunch of stickers.

Oh yeah, we also some props from folks elsewhere, too. Fuckin-A we're tough wingnuts, we play with pick axes.

This was just my afternoon on that particular Sunday. I have a bunch of pictures from the rest of the day, and other days as well. So, hopefully, more postings soon.

Condition 1? More like Condition Fun!

So, I spent my last available weekend drinking non-stop and working out some issues. That was fun, and probably the last time I'll get totally inebriated on the continent for a long time. Well, at least until I have a chance to experience the day bar that runs from 7 AM - 11 AM.

Anywho, after wallowing in a pool of misery and going through a six pack of Coors Light on Sunday afternoon, I managed to rally myself in time for the final game of the Rugby World Cup between the All Blacks and the French. I'm sure the French have a team name, but nobody at the bar I drank in could seriously cheer on the French and expect to enjoy themselves on Sunday night. So I did not bother to learn it. Look at what I'm getting at here...

This is the reaction to the final seconds of the game, when New Zealand sealed their 8-7 lead over the French. The view of the French fans is not being blocked by overzealous All Blacks fans, there simply are no French fans present.

It was a good time, and I sat around afterwards to watch postgame celebration before walking back to my room and going to bed.

Life on McMurdo is not all about crazy Kiwi sports and drinking, and I do work sometimes. For the past two days though, Ross Island has been pounded with high winds and impossible driving conditions. While we Shuttle folk are a mean breed of driving fools, the airfield crews don't like working in horrible death inducing weather. As is the case, we've spent most of the last two days sitting inside our bunker with nobody to transport. 

McMurdo is protected on 3 sides by large hills and mountains, so the station is pretty safe from the elements... most of the time. Ross Island is surrounded by frozen ice, though, and on that ice is the runway where planes land. While all is sunny at wonderful MacTown, the airfields can be in complete chaos a mere mile away. So you can imagine when conditions go from this:

to this

at McMurdo, conditions are a lot worse on the ice. Those two pictures were taken in the exact same spot in not similar conditions... Now take conditions like that, and put them on a road that looks like this...

That's what I drove in when I had to evacuate crew from the Ice Runway. Those flags in the picture above? They weren't there. Well, they were, but you wouldn't have known. Unless we're picking up large groups, most of our driving is done in regular vans equipped with snow tires, so don't assume that I'm doing crazy driving in my would-be-McMansion Ivan the Terrabus. In these conditions I was driving a vehicle that's greatest safety feature is a cup holder. Not to say it was a near death experience,  but don't assume I was in monster truck safety.

Mad props to the firefighters who camped out on the Ice Runway for a few hours in the middle of this storm. You will note, please, that Grant was not among them.



"Every day is a boondoggle"

Life is slowly approaching something close to normal here at McMurdo. Shuttles has begun making the switch to a 24 hour schedule, so I guess in a way the summer season for 2011-2012 has officially begun.  My last Saturday off for the forseable future was spent at the ATO party, playing poker with firefighters, and stumbling around drunk looking for someplace that wasn't occupied by approximately 500 other people.

I've spent the past two weeks screwing around, but for now I wanted to post some pictures of what I am doing down here in regards to my job. I've been training on lots of different vehicles, but the only ones that really matter are Ivan and the Deltas. When I told people that I was coming down to Antarctica to drive busses, I wasn't that far off. Let me present to you Ivan the Terra Bus:

You might be able to get some of the scale of this thing from the van sitting behind it, but this picture does no justice to Ivan. This thing is a damned monstrosity. The tires alone are 5 1/2 feet tall. It weighs 55,000 lbs without passengers, and in order to turn this thing I need to draft riders to stand by me and help pull the wheel. That's right, this thing has galley slaves.  I've been told that honking the horn plays Kalinka whenever you press it, but who the hell uses the horn in this thing? You just get this thing into sixth gear, crank this baby up to 7 mph, and make whatever is front of you move. For real though, this thing is hard thing to drive, and I'm fortunate that I crashed into anything yet. 

The other large vehicle that we use down here is the Delta.

This is Dawn. She's not as pretty or comfortable as Tina Marie, but everyone loves Tina Marie, so Dawn got some lovin' from me.







There's not much to say about driving these things. The fact that it is articulated means that it has an awesome turning radius. Still, it can get up to a max speed of maybe 20 mph, and the struggle with driving it is in staying awake and not driving off a cliff. Passengers have a different experience though. I think you can simulate the Delta experience by hopping inside a barrel and rolling down the hill near the Comcast Center then promptly getting hit by a NITE Ride van. 

Oh, sweet, it's 1715. I'm gonna go eat dinner, and then watch New Zealand and France play the final match of the Rugby World Cup. I'll write about something else later, after drinking.

Fire prevention week

I go through my mandatory flamethrower safety class next week. Just in time for the monthly Zombie drill...