The Global Guy

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!