In the five years that I’ve been privileged to come to the Antarctic, I’ve never been lucky enough to see an emperor penguin up close in the wild. I may have spotted one standing alone on an ice floe while I was on the NBP several years ago, but it was so far in the distance that even with binoculars, I couldn’t make a positive ID. Today, my luck changed, and I finally got up close and personal with a group of six penguins hanging out near the base.

I’ve been sitting in McMurdo for the past week waiting for the weather to clear up enough that we can get to Pole and open the station. To kill some time, the cargo department organized a trip out to Cape Evans and Shackleton’s historic hut. I’d been out there before, but I figured that any trip off station is better than sitting around watching another movie.

We had been traveling out for about an hour or so, and had just passed the Erebus ice tongue and were about to pass the Razorback islands. It had been a pretty boring drive so far, with no wildlife spotted except for a few Weddell seals off in the distance. I was about to drift off to sleep again when the vehicle we were in lurched to a stop, and we heard the driver on the radio calling out “Penguins! Emperor penguins!” That got everyone awake pretty quickly! We quickly threw on our coats and grabbed our cameras and headed out the door to take a look around. About 150 feet away, and headed straight for us were six Emperors just out for a stroll.

I couldn’t belive our luck…the penguins were obviously curious about us, but as they approached they managed to maintain a dignified appearance. Unlike the clownish adelie penguins, these were stately and aloof. They gave the impression that they didn’t want us to know that they even cared if we were there or not. The whole group stayed together as they approached with no one individual showing any read leadership. Every once in a while, they’d let out a squawk, or wave their flippers, but no matter what, refused to get excited. Eventually they got to within about 20 feet of our group, and hung out for about 10 minutes just watching us watch them. Folks were going crazy with their cameras…I think this was a completely new experience for every one of us.

After about 10 or 15 minutes of hanging out, the penguins started to get bored, and continued on their path across the ice shelf. They were obviously in no hurry to get where ever their destination was, leaving us even more opportunities to get shots of their backsides.

All in all, the entire encounter couldn’t have lasted more than 25 minutes or so, but I think it was one of the highlights of my Antarctic career.

Antarctic history is full of tales of heroic responses to medical emergencies ranging from the spectacular 1977 incident at a Soviet base where the doctor was forced to remove his own appendix, to the over-publicized case in 1999 where the South Pole doctor was rescued an entire week before the station was scheduled to open anyway. I’ve even played a very small role in a mid-winter knee surgery during my 2002 season where we established a video link to an orthopedic surgeon in the US to guide our doctor thru the repair of a torn tendon. This entry is about the latest chapter in the history of international cooperation in the Antarctic leading to another successful medevac.

Despite the best efforts of the Antarctic program to screen it’s workers, it occasionally happens that there is a medical emergency that requires more resources that can be comfortably be provided on station. If this happens during a summer season at McMurdo or South Pole, the patient can normally be flown out within a couple of days at the most. During the winter, things get more complicated, forcing either highly dangerous medevac flights, or even more dangerous emergency surgery.

At Palmer station, things are a little different. We live in a relatively populated area of the continent, with neighboring bases as close as 50 miles away. During the summer season it’s not unusual to find all sorts of ships in the surrounding waters, from other nation’s resupply vessels, to tourist ships bringing down those fortunate enough to afford passage down here for a few days. In the spirit of international cooperation it is standard practice to provide emergency transportation if needed, and normally a person can be back in Chile or Argentina within four or five days. In addition, while Palmer doesn’t have a runway, the glacier above the station is flat enough in sections that as long as the winter snow cover hasn’t melted, a small plane on skis can safely land. The US doesn’t maintain any aircraft on this side of the continent, but the British Antarctic Survey has a fairly sizable air fleet at Rothera Base, some 200 miles south of us.

To start at the beginning of the story, one of the crew presented at the medical clinic with severe abdominal pain. The station physicians (we had two at the time because the summer and winter crews are in a transition period) determined that there was a probable case of appendicitis, and that the patient should be evacuated as soon as possible. It’s too early in the season for tour ships, and our own resupply vessel was still a good week away with one bad engine, which meant that the earliest the patient could be in Punta Arenas was two weeks from the onset of symptoms.

Station management consulted with the NSF back in the states who called the British to find out the status of their aircraft. During the winter season, the Brits base their planes in Chile, and we were fortunate to find out that they had recently brought a couple of planes down to the continent. They agreed to help out, and suddenly our base was crazy with preparations for their arrival. Everyone on station was involved in one way or another. The SAR team spent the morning deploying flags on the glacier to mark out a skiway, others packed up the patient’s belongings, monitored radios, made lunches for the pilots, and someone even made a spectacular get well poster for the patient to take with them that was signed by all members of the community.

The weather had been lousy all day, but satellite images showed that there would be about an hour of clear skies between two storm systems. The Brits decided to trust the imagery, and launched their plane while there was still bad weather at both of our bases. Amazingly, the weather behaved exactly as predicted, and with about 20 minutes before the plane was scheduled to arrive we had bright blue skies and hardly any wind. The patient was bundled up and loaded on the back of a sled to be pulled up the glacier by a snowmobile. Only essential personnel were allowed up on the glacier during flight operations, so the rest of us all scrambled to find the best vantage point to watch the plane arrive and depart.

When the Twin Otter approached station, it was unreal how slowly it was flying. Watching from the roof of the IMS building I was absolutely amazed at how short of a distance it needed to come to a stop. The pilots probably used more distance to taxi to their takeoff spot than they did for a landing roll. They shut down their engines, and the patient and the outgoing winter doctor were loaded aboard. We gave them box lunches, and a bunch of Palmer souvenirs as thanks, and about 10 minutes later they were airborne again.

The plane stopped once at an Argentine base on King George island to refuel, and then they continued on for another six hours until they reached Punta Arenas around midnight. Our support staff in PA had arranged for an ambulance to meet the plane and transport the patient to a local hospital. Twenty-four hours later the patient had received surgery and was well on the way to recovery. The last we heard, the patient and Kelvin the doc were enjoying the scenery in Patagonia, and are waiting for the rest of the winter crew to arrive sometime around the 6th when we are planning a road trip to several national parks in both Chile and Argentina.

I’ve just celebrated the absolute best birthday I’ve ever had in my life today! For the past three birthdays that I’ve spent on the ice, most of them have been kind of so-so just because it’s at the end of the normal season, and everyone is pretty burned out and concentrating on nothing more than how much they want to leave. Palmer however has a different schedule, and when the 13th rolled around, there was already a new summer crew that was fresh and full of energy. In addition, due to a mechanical problem on the resupply ship, about half the winter crew was still around to join in the festivities.

The tradition at Palmer is for people to get hit in the face with a meringue pie on their birthday…well, I was pretty much expecting that and I made it a big deal that who ever tried that was going to get it right back at them. Of course a statement like that wasn’t going to go unchallenged! After they brought out a cake and sang happy birthday, I found myself ducktaped to the chair I was sitting in…they started playing stripper music, and wheeled out a huge cardboard box decorated like a huge birthday present. Suddenly the top flew off, and our boating coordinator, Toby, jumped out in full drag dancing his way over to me to give me a lap dance. I’ll admit that I’ve been here for a while, but even a full year at pole couldn’t make that look attractive! Of course after he got down to just a set of pasties, the pies came out in full force. I think I got hit with about six of them from all different directions, and like I promised as soon as I got free of the duck tape I was chasing everyone around. When we finally finished, the galley was pretty much wrecked and it took almost an hour to clean it all up before we could move the party to the bar.

Once in the bar, there was the usual festivities…dancing, boozing, and eventually another Palmer tradition. Shot-a-minute isn’t as bad as I thought it would be at first….it’s just shots of beer, but doing 32 shots of beer in a little over a half hour really catches up with you pretty quickly! When you first start, it seems like forever between each shot, but after about 15, the minutes really start to fly by. It seems you’re just finishing swallowing the previous shot when it’s time to do the next one! Fortunately for my head, the next day was a work day so we all quit at a reasonable time. Whew!

While all the above makes for a great birthday, what made it even better was that I finally found out what I’m going to be doing with my life for the next few years. I’ve accepted a full time job with the Antarctic program as a Network Engineer in the Denver office. It’s mostly an office job, but there will be opportunities to go back to the ice every now and then. Besides the full time job, I’m also doing a quick cruise on one of the research vessels from December of 2005 to February of 2006. I’d thought I might have to sacrifice that cruise if I was needed quickly in the Denver office, but they’ve made arrangements to have someone cover the job untill I get back. As if that wasn’t good enough news, Raytheon is going to fly me to New Zealand direct from Santiago so that I won’t have to waste anytime going back to the states! This means that my schedule for the next few months is going to look something like this:

• Oct 29th (today) leave Palmer Station on the Lawrence M. Gould
• Nov 3rd: Arrive in Punta Arenas, Chile
• Nov 4-14: Road trip around southern Patagonia…basically south Chile and Argentina.
• Nov 15-21: Easter Island (the one with the big heads)
• Nov 22-Dec 10: Northern Chile, Bolivia and Peru including Macchu Picchu
• Dec 10-11: Fly to New Zealand
• Dec 12: Embark the Nathanial B. Palmer ship, and do work in port.
• Dec 18: Depart New Zealand and sail to McMurdo station doing lots of science on the way…this is going to be amazing!
• Feb 2-4: Disembark the Nathanial B. Palmer and fly from McMurdo to New Zealand
• Feb 5-6: Fly from New Zealand to Houston Feb 7-12: Move to Denver Feb 13: Start work in the real world.

Stay tuned..I don’t think I’ll be able to update a lot from the ship, but you never know! Look for lots of travel pictures coming up soon!

Henry Malmgren photographs an elephant seal in Antarctica.

Socially, it’s interesting to watch the integration between the summer and the remainder of the winter crews. This has really got to be the easiest transition I’ve ever seen on the ice. Most of the people who’ve arrived are old hands at this station, and those that are newbies are adjusting really quickly. Normally most of the winter crew would only stay for a couple of weeks at most, but due to mechanical problems with the ship, we’re going to have to stay until the end of October instead of the middle. This has screwed up a couple of people’s travel plans, but personally I’m thrilled. The wildlife is finally starting to come back in force, and the water has opened up enough to get out and go explore the islands again.

Last weekend was actually one of the best boating weekends I can remember down here. I probably spent about six hours out on the water driving all over the place, taking pictures of the animals, and just enjoying the feeling of being off station for a while. The water was the absolutely clearest that I’ve ever seen…when we wandered over to the shipwreck of the Bahia Paradiso we were actually able to see the entire ship sitting on the bottom, and get a real feel for how huge it was before it sank. We also saw a huge elephant seal sitting on some rocks near shore that we had to get a photo of. I’d never realized how big these guys were up close, and how mobile they really are. Apparently later in the season it’s not unusual to come across two big bulls fighting over rights to have their own harem.

Unfortunately there hasn’t been that much boating since that first day. Since last Monday, the weather has been the worst I’ve ever seen down here. It’s been nearly five straight days of winds averaging around 30 knots, gusting to about 45. We even had one hurricane force gust yesterday of 75 miles per hour! This morning the winds have died down a bit, and we’re optimistic that this Sunday will turn out to be pleasant for going outside.

Last Friday after dinner I decided to take a walk up the glacier to see if there was any open water to be spotted in the area. It was supposed to be close to a full moon, and I thought that there might be some interesting lighting conditions to use to take some photos of the station. I’d gotten distracted by some work stuff so by the time I got geared up it was already getting pretty dark. I was listening to the final couple of chapters of the new Harry Potter audio book on my mp3 player, and wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to the stuff around me. Up ahead on the trail was a big dark shape, and since it had been windy the past few days I figured a trash bag had somehow escaped and gotten away from station. I was going to put a rock on it to hold it in place till I got back down when it suddenly started growling and lunging at me. It turned out that it was a HUGE Weddell seal that looked like it was just in the beginning of labor.

Apparently it’s fairly common this time of the year for Hero inlet to become a nursery for Weddell seals, but to have one come this far inland was very unusual. I followed her tracks back to the sea ice and found two more Weddell seals on the other side of the harbor. They were all looking pretty miserable, and kept making these noises that sounded like something between a growl, a moan, and a howl. One would do it, and then the other two would reply. It was kind of like they were all in some seal Lamaze class, encouraging each other to breathe!

By this time, it was pretty dark, so I headed back to station to tell the others what I’d found. The next morning, I was out there as soon as possible. The seal on land was still there, looking even more miserable than before. She was getting very defensive about her territory, growling and lunging as soon as I entered her personal zone of safety. I quickly backed off, and left her alone to her labors. One of the other seals on the sea ice had apparently given birth during the night, but unfortunately for me she was on the other side of the inlet, and I didn’t have time to hike up the glacier just then.

Later on after work, I wandered back out to see what was going on. The new mother was looking pretty tired and unhappy. We’ve got these birds around called Antarctic Sheath-bills that are the worst opportunistic scavengers you’ll ever see. Normally they hang out around our sewer outfall taking advantage of our leftovers, but now they were harassing the new mom, trying to pick off all the afterbirth from both her and her newborn. I climbed the glacier to get over to their side of Hero inlet, and managed to get some decent photos of mom and baby. The infant was asleep, and facing the wrong way, so unfortunately these aren’t my best shots. On the way back to station I stopped by the original seal one more time to check on her, and noticed that she seemed even more miserable than before.

Sunday afternoon I finally got around to wandering out to see her again, and it turned out that sometime in the last 18 hours she’d given birth. Mom and the newborn were looking happy and healthy. I couldn’t believe the size of the infant…no wonder the mom looked so miserable! Both of them were extremely active, playing with each other, and fighting off the sheath-bills. This youngster still had the umbilical cord attached, and every so often Mom would nibble at it to see if she couldn’t get it off. I hung around and watched them playing for an hour so before heading back home to see how the pictures came out.

We’ve reached that time of the year where the weather becomes pretty much unpredictable, and as a result we’ve experienced some of the wildest swings I’ve ever seen. We started out August with a pretty heavy cover of pack ice out in the harbor, and clear skies that led to some amazingly pink sunrises. Pack ice is cool to watch because it’s so surreal…a lot of time it’s really just ice chunks floating in water that hasn’t developed it’s own solid surface yet. The ice moves en masse as the tides rise and fall, and wind will blow the bigger chunks around in a kind of aquatic ballet.

After a few days of watching the pack form tighter and tighter, the weather changed completely, and we had a few solid days of warm (around 30 degree) temperatures, and tremendous winds. Our top gust this month was around 65 knots, and we had about four solid days where the wind never dropped below 30 knots. Of course all this wind is bad for the ice pack, and we actually had a really nice warm evening with no ice right off of the pier. Now, what does one do when it’s the middle of August in Antarctica, and there is a bunch of open water? Well, you do a polar plunge and go swimming of course! Yeah, it sounds dumb, and it probably isn’t good for the cardiac system, but there’s just something invigorating about hurling yourself into below freezing water and swimming around for a few minutes (ok, seconds) and then heading for the hot tub.

Twenty-four hours later, and the temperatures were heading back down again. Three or four days of 20 degree weather with not much wind was just right to set up a nice smooth layer of ice on the ocean’s surface. If you hike up the glacier now and look out over the ocean, it’s just solid ice as far as you can see. It’s really cool, but hopefully it’ll go away in less than a month so that the ship can come back and bring us salad!

Besides the arrival of the summer crew, the upcoming month of September is usually known for the return of the local wildlife. While there have always been a few gulls and sheath-bills around, we haven’t seen any seals for at least six weeks, and no penguins have been spotted for at least four months. Well, all that started to change this month. We saw a lone seal sitting out on an ice floe just before the sea froze over completely a couple of weeks ago, and last Sunday on the coldest day of the season we got our first bunch of penguins walking toward the station. We’re not really sure where they came from, but at about 10:00 am Sunday someone radioed that there were penguins on the ice. Everyone ran out to check it out, and sure enough, there were 18 gentoo penguins marching around the point, and heading up to Hero inlet. I grabbed my camera and headed out to see what kind of photos I could get. The light was lousy…completely flat with no contrast, but out of the 100 or so shots I took, I’m very happy with about five or six of them. We haven’t seen any more since then, but we’re expecting the mass migration to Torgeson island anytime now.

After the 4th of July, there’s really not a good holiday to celebrate for a good long time, so we decided that it would be appropriate to celebrate Christmas this month. Several of the folks on station took it upon themselves to dig thru some of the storage units, and finally came up with a bunch of holiday decorations, and even a tree that they set up in the Galley. All week it was a little bit surreal with holiday music playing during meals, and Christmas lights flashing around. I suppose it’s pretty appropriate, as the temperatures have been dropping, and it’s gotten stormier outside. Its actually kind of cool to have the fireplace going in one corner, and the tree blinking in the other.

Saturday night was the date that we’d set for the party, and it went great. Everyone dressed up, and we set up all the tables in a banquet style with tablecloths and candles for atmosphere. The meal was fantastic, and you couldn’t ask for a better group of people to hang out with. After dinner we cleaned up, and then it was time for the gift exchange. I volunteered to act as Santa for the evening, so I got to get lots of pictures with just about everyone on station sitting on my lap…that’s great when the ladies are there, but not so much fun when a big burly construction guy plops down!

Anyway, after getting my lap flattened by everyone on station, I really needed a shot or two to recover. Did you know that it’s nearly impossible to do a shot while wearing a Santa beard? It’s not easy so I ended up having to drink the Bushmill’s straight out of the bottle thru a straw…effective, but not recommended for your quality of life the following day.

Most of the presents given were of the handmade or alcohol variety from the store. I ended up with a bottle of wine with a dragonfly made out of knots in rope…pretty spiffy. I used our plotter to print out a 6 foot by 3 foot panoramic poster of the Neumeyer channel which we passed thru on our way down here. I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, and it ended up going to our power plant guy…perfect for him since it’s his first time on the ice, and now he’ll have a huge souvenir to show his family.

During a brief period of nice weather last weekend, four of us on the station decided to go over to the bottom of the local glacier and do some ice climbing. Two of us including myself, were first time climbers and personally I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d done a bit of rock climbing before in my life, and wasn’t a big fan of it. I never got into the shoes that were supposed to be too tight, and the jamming your fingers into tiny cracks so that you can support your body weight with them. Luckily, ice climbing turned out to be an absolute blast, and had only a superficial relationship to climbing on rock.

The week or so before we went out it had been snowing pretty constantly, so we had to traipse out through hip deep snow to get out to the ice face. Ted and James set up the safety ropes at the top of the glacier and then rappelled down to where Joe and I were waiting to get started. Gearing up was pretty easy. We all had harnesses and boots with crampons, so all I had to do was just tie into the rope, grab the two ice axes, and walk over to the glacier.

Looking up at the huge vertical wall of ice in front of me I kicked my boot into the ice at the base. It took me a few tries to get the hang of the technique…if you don’t kick in hard enough or at the right angle, you’ll just blow right off of the ice face. Once I got the hang of it, I was surprised at how easy it became. Next I picked a target on the ice above me and aimed one of the axes at that spot. My first few swings were perfect…if I had been trying to chip ice for a drink. For actually sticking into the glacier, they didn’t really do much. After a few more experimental swings I finally got into a rhythm and started heading on up. I noticed pretty quickly that my calves were the muscles that were taking most of the strain, and started enjoying the workout. Listening to the “chink” of the axes as they impacted the ice, and feeling the burn in my legs as I ascended was a fantastic experience. Before I realized it I was up at the top looking down at the guys below, and checking out the scenery all around us. After a couple of minutes I rappelled back down, doing pretty good until near the bottom when my crampons got caught up in my pants, and I tumbled down head over heels much to the amusement of the guys with me.

We’d all done about three or four ascents when the wind started blowing harder from the ocean. We figured it was just a freak gust and ignore it for about another 20 minutes. It quickly became pretty apparent that this wasn’t just a little gust, but that a full storm was on the way. We broke down the climbing equipment, and started to head back. By the time James got everything unbolted from the top, the winds were howling at around 30 miles an hour, gusting up to 40. Heading back was absolutely miserable! It was like swimming through cotton candy, if cotton candy was cold and coarse enough to sting your eyes when you looked up. It took about half an hour to hike a quarter of a mile back to station, and another hour to get warm and dry again. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the fireplace in the galley as much as I did when we finally got inside!

So the last boat has left, and we’re on our own for the next 90 days. Not much of a period of isolation I admit, but I’m really looking forward to it. This is a great crew, right up there with the crew at the South Pole Station my first time there. Despite the lack of wildlife right now, I’m still constantly awed by the beauty of this spot. Every day the wind and waves bring something new to our harbor to look at, and the ice formations are like our own private sculpture garden that someone modifies on a daily basis.

The days are starting to get longer again with about 15 more minutes of daylight each day. We’re trying to take advantage of it, but the weather hasn’t been cooperating all that much lately. We’ve had a bunch of snow storms and windy days, and the harbor has been getting so iced up that we can’t put boats in the water. Nevertheless, we do what we can to get out which more often than not means heading up the glacier in the backyard. A couple of the guys have dug out a ski chalet that’s protected from the wind at the top of the hill, and it usually has a couple of people hanging out between runs up and down the slope. It’s a great spot for photography with a nearly 360 degree panorama of the ocean and surrounding islands.

One thing that we’re all watching for is the first appearance of the pack ice from the south. Pack ice is usually defined in a broad sense as any sea ice that’s not attached to land. Every year Antarctica nearly doubles in size due to the sea freezing and breaking up into chunks of ice ranging from open pack where the ice isn’t very thick to close pack where it’s just a constant sea of floating ice chunks bobbing about in a tight mass. We’ve been watching satellite images of the approaching pack, and it’s gotten to about 30 miles to the south of us moving towards us at about six miles per day. While it will be cool to see, what we’d rather have is fast ice which is frozen sea water that’s actually in a more or less unbroken sheet. When we get the fast ice, we’ll be able to set up ski trails going between the various points of land down here which will be yet another recreation opportunity. Woohoo!

If the pack gets here before the sea surface freezes, it’ll be tough to set up extensive ski trails…in fact that hasn’t happened since the mid 90s. What we need is a few days of constant cold and calm weather that’ll let the sea freeze over without the wind blowing it apart and out of the harbor. We’ll know one way or the other in the next couple of weeks!

Happy Midwinter all! This has to be the most unusual midwinter I’ve ever celebrated down on the ice, and as a result it just doesn’t seem like such a big deal. We’ve still got the summer crew here, its still light outside for about five hours a day, and there is a boat parked on the pier that we can use to get out if we needed. The boat and the summer crew will be out of here on Friday, and we’ll start our short “winter” season. It looks like our final number is going to be 20 people sticking around for about 90 days before we get the boat back and the summer season begins again.

I’m scheduled to be back in Chile on the 20th of October, and then I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do. I’ve started polishing up my resume in preparation for the first real job search I’ve done since I graduated from University. I’d prefer to end up back in Austin, but I wouldn’t mind either Denver or the DC area. Either way, I’m excited about actually having a permanent address for a while. I’ve been saving a good bit of money, so I should be able to actually buy a house and have a place of my own to live in where ever I end up settling. I never thought it would happen, but I’m looking forward to being stationary just as much as I was looking forward to traveling a few years ago!

The temperatures are dropping, and the days are getting significantly shorter. Compared to the South Pole, or even most of the northern states in the US, this is going to be an easy winter. Still, for the banana belt of the Antarctic, the 16 degree F temperatures (~-10c) are relatively frigid. We’ve been very lucky this season, with noticeably fewer bad weather days than the average. For me, that means that I’m trying to take advantage of the weather to play with my camera while there are still interesting things to photograph. There’s an ice cave near the location of the old Palmer station that opens and closes depending on the amount of glacier calving. Right now it’s open, and it offers some really challenging photo opportunities. I’m still working on perfecting how to capture it, but each time I go out there, I get a little better results.

One of the best things about the short day is that the sky and mountains have taken on an almost permanent pastel cast to them. I didn’t think it was possible, but I’m actually getting tired of taking sunrise and sunset photos! The local wildlife population has dropped pretty significantly, although there will probably be a few hardy seals and birds that stick around for the duration. Right now there are a couple of elephant seal colonies that don’t show any signs of leaving, some giant petrels and seagulls, and of course there are the ubiquitous “antarctic chickens” that have found the unlimited food source of our sewer outfall.

Other changes include the slow dropping of the seawater temperature. It’s not cold enough to freeze solid yet, but we are starting to get formations of pancake ice, and slushy water which is the first step in the process. The sea hasn’t actually iced over everywhere for a few years, but this has been such a weird season for weather patterns that anything could happen.

Before we get any really serious ice though, we’ve got to get the rest of the summer crew out of here. We’ve got one more supply vessel run before we shut down for the winter, and it’s scheduled to arrive here next Friday. It’ll bring our winter supply of veggies, beer, and packages from Amazon.com, and then it’ll take away the last of our trash, and everyone but 20 people. It’ll leave here on the 24th, which is three days after midwinter. Following that, it’s a quick three months of keeping everything stable, and then I’m outta here a month after the first boat of the new season.

This crew is a really good bunch of people, which is an extremely welcome change from the previous season at Pole. I don’t think I’ve talked about it before on here, but last year’s personality dynamics at the south pole left a lot to be desired. It’s really refreshing to be back at a station with a fun atmosphere where people seem to want to be here instead of just waiting for the winter to be over.

The last thing that I expect when I come to Antarctica is the chance to get away from station for a few days. Sure, in McMurdo if you’ve got the right job, or are sleeping with the right person, it’s possible to get one of the rare boondoggles to a remote field camp, but I didn’t think that would happen at Palmer. Luckily, there’s a project here for the next six weeks or so that requires a constant source of fresh ice fish for their experiments.

In order to meet this demand, we’ve got to go out on regular trips on the Gould (our resupply vessel) to drop off baited traps, and go trolling the bottom for the particular species they are interested in. It’s a fairly manpower intensive operation, so they’ve been borrowing station members to go out with them for a few days to help out. I got to go on the second cruise last week, and had an absolute blast out there. Due to my position as the only computer guy on station, I didn’t think I’d be able to make it out, but luckily the Gould had an IT person on board that was able to swap positions with me for the three days I was gone.

We weren’t going all that far geographically, only about 30 miles or so away from the station. However, it took about 8 hours time to sail to our destination, passing thru the beautiful Neumayer strait on our way there. The Neumayer is known as one of the most spectacular bits of scenery on the Antarctic peninsula, mainly due to its narrow width, and spectacular mountain scenery on both sides. Usually you can spot humpback whales playing in the water, and there are always plenty of spectacular icebergs to watch. We got extremely lucky on our outbound passage, with perfectly clear skies and amazing visibility. One the way back, it wasn’t quite so good, but there were more whales to spot, including one humpback calf that did an amazing fin breech that unfortunately I wasn’t fast enough with the camera to capture on film.

Fishing is a 24 hour activity, so the ship’s crew was divided up into two shifts. I ended up on the midnight to noon shift which made for some interesting sleep cycles. We found that we had better luck with the type of fish we were looking for during the night shift, which kept me pretty busy. The procedure was to let the net down, drag the bottom for 20 minutes, bring it back up, sort thru the catch for the species we wanted, throw the by-catch back, and repeat. It was repetitive, but it still wasn’t sitting at my desk working on servers so I was pretty happy about it. I was also pleased to be the only one of the group from the station to not get seasick! I wouldn’t mind working on the research vessels when I’m done with Palmer, so that’s a nice discovery to make. In the genetic lottery of life, I lost out on the dancing without looking like I’m having a seizure gene, but at least I got the anti-seasickness one!

I hate to say it, but for all you people working back in the real world, life just isn’t fair. I’m on my third year down on the ice, and I still can’t believe that they pay me to do this. Sure, I put in a lot of hours during the week, but the weekends more than make up for it. This past weekend was another couple of amazing weather days. Sunday especially was an extraordinary day with clear blue skies, temperatures of around 30 degrees F, and hardly any wind to speak of. With weather like this, most of the people on station head off to get some much needed time away from the main buildings, and I’m no exception!

One benefit to being on this station instead of the South Pole is that we are far enough north that we will never get the 24 hour darkness that the rest of the continent has to deal with. We’re about 120 miles north of the Antarctic circle, which is the spot on the globe that marks the southern most spot that has days of 24 hour darkness or daylight. We will get some pretty short days, however, and right now sunrise is about 8:30 am, and sunset is about 4:00 pm. Days are getting shorter by about 16 minutes every day, but even on June 21st, (midwinter day) we still will have a bit of daylight left around noon.

Anyway, I was determined to make the most of the daylight, so early Saturday morning I headed out on one of the Zodiacs to Humble Island. This is one of the islands that will have a pretty good amount of wildlife year round, and I was hoping to practice my photo skills. We didn’t see any penguins on land (just swimming in the water), but we did see three types of seals and several varieties of birds, including a bunch of giant petrel chicks that are just getting to the stage where they’re losing their down and getting their permanent feathers. I took a bunch of pictures, and then we headed back to station to get ready for the evenings festivities.

Every now and then it’s traditional at Palmer to have a “Neanderthal Cafe” evening, where the galley is decorated up like a proper restaurant, and everyone comes dressed in costume. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to go as, so I just threw a bunch of random props together and called it a costume. I think I was going as a “weird guy in a bathrobe with a chicken on his shoulder”. Since this is a PG rated website, I’ll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to fill in the jokes that can come from that situation!

The next morning I decided that the best cure for a hangover was outdoor activities. Several of us were feeling up to boating so we ran back over to Humble again to try to take some even better photos based off of what we learned from the previous day’s shooting. After we got our fill of that, we decided to head over to an area called Loudwater Cove to check out a giant iceberg that we’d heard about. This berg looked big from a distance, and when we were actually driving around it it was even more impressive! It was wedge shaped, kind of like a wooden doorstop. We could just imagine the noise that this thing must have made when it calved off of the glacier! We took a few shots of that, and then decided to head over to Christine Island in the hopes of finding some penguins to photograph. We got halfway to that island, and were about a mile and a half away from the station when we detected a smell on the wind that totally changed our plans…lunch! The cooks on our resupply vessel were cooking steaks on the grill, and surprisingly we could smell it from that far away. The idea of a big hunk of meat was more appealing to our hangovers than a possible penguin sighting so we headed back in for some chow.

After lunch I decided to join a few other people up on the glacier for an afternoon of snow skiing. We had about five people on a combination of boards and skis being pulled up the glacier by a rope hanging off the back of a snowmobile, and then heading back down. The glacier had about three or four inches of powder on it, not great conditions, but I’ve skied on worse back home! We stayed up there until the sun was behind the mountains and it was starting to get seriously dark. It was way too much fun, and I can’t wait till the next weekend to do it again!

Today my legs were pretty sore from using some muscles that I hadn’t exercised in a couple of years. It has been about three years since I’ve been downhill skiing, and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly everything came back. Of course a day skiing isn’t complete without a hot tub, so that’s pretty much what tonight’s activities were. I had kitchen cleanup duty tonight, and then after that was finished the cleaning crew all headed outside to the hot tub to split a bottle of wine and a few laughs. It’s actually snowing outside now, but the water is hot enough that you really don’t mind at all. There were a bunch of Antarctic Terns flying overhead, and the glacier was extremely active, calving with a roar every few minutes.

The rest of this week should be fun as well…on Wednesday I’m heading off station for a couple of days with our supply vessel to go help with a research fishing cruise. I’m pretty sure it’ll be lots of work, but I can’t wait to get started!

We’ve just come out of a two day weekend that featured absolutely beautiful weather. At the South Pole, two day weekends were nice, but I found myself getting bored around noon on Sunday when I got sick of watching movies, and it was too cold to go outside. Here, it doesn’t seem like that could ever be a problem. The outdoor recreation opportunities are just about endless! There are about a dozen or so islands that we can go hiking on, there’s a glacier to climb, and lots of wildlife to photograph! Apparently this is getting towards the worst part of the year for wildlife spotting, but after the barren wasteland of the interior of the continent, I’m still getting a thrill every time I see anything moving.

Our first free Sunday was marred by lousy weather, including 50 knot winds and rainy (yes, it rains here!) weather. Some of the folks who’d been here a while told us to get used to it, because it could be great weather all week long just to turn lousy for the one day we have off. Luckily we woke up to a perfectly clear sky, low winds, and a gorgeous sunrise. Immediately a group of us headed down for the boats and we were off to go explore some of the islands. Over the two day weekend, I walked around on about four islands, our local glacier, and even checked out the local shipwreck. I think that I’m starting to almost develop a tiny bit of skill for photography, because some of the shots that I got on this outing were amazing. I’m still using the camera that I bought for Africa, and once again the zoom lens on it is proving invaluable. I’m actually wishing that it had a few more mega pixels so that I could enlarge these photos even more when I get home. I might be looking at a new purchase sometime in the next few months….

Anyway, here’s a few shots of the local wildlife. I know I haven’t updated in a while, and I’m going to try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I’ve still got a lot of updating to do from my last trip, so stay tuned to the recent posting section on the left. I’m also working on a redesign of the basic layout, so if things look funny for a while, that’s the reason.

I never thought I’d be so happy to see a plane as I was today when Skier 96, P024 landed to take me away from here. It’s been a good winter, not as good as my last one, but then we were a very special crew back in 2002. My replacement just got in on Saturday, so it’s been a very intense past 48 hours trying to bring him up to speed on changes since he last left, and then to get all the last minute preparations done that I needed to do to leave. Packages had to be mailed, documentation had to be written, and my room had to get a good cleaning for the next person.

The flight to New Zealand was amazingly easy. The C-130 flight out of Pole got us to McMurdo in little less than it’s normal time of three hours, and then we had about three or four hours available to hang out in Mactown. I spent it looking up friends that I knew were there, and filling up on freshies before being given the typical squashed sandwich that they provide on the outbound flights.

The final flight to NZ from McMurdo was on a C-17 cargo plane. I’d never been on one of these before, and it was HUGE. There were only six passengers, the crew and no cargo on our flight, so we had plenty of room to all stretch out. The crew even dragged out sleeping bags and spent the flight watching movies on their laptops plugged into the power points on the plane. I’d take that over a first class 747 any day!

We finished all the arrival formalities around 2:00 am, and then it was straight off to bed for me. I love the feeling right now of knowing that tomorrow I could go anywhere in the world and it would be totally OK. I’m headed to Australia on Friday, but first it’s going to be a full week of chores, including getting PQ’ed for Palmer station.