Conglomerate

I don't have a nicely packaged post for you as I haven't been taking many pictures, but I somehow have nearly a week to account for, here!

C and I finally left the cozy B&B where we'd been staying/working and made our way back to the east coast, this time via Lewis Pass, and spending a night at a hospital-turned-rustic-lodge in an area that used to be a gold mining boon community. Cool to see the old school at Blackwell...

...and the mining ruins near where we stayed at Waiuta Lodge.

Back in Christchurch...

... C and I parted ways and I took a bus north up the coast a couple hours to the seaside town of Kaikoura, with its towering mountains on one side and turquoise waters on the other.

I've really enjoyed the mellowness of this great spot for the past week. After a few nights at a really nice hostel, I saw a sign in a salon window from someone looking for short-term housekeeping help in exchange for a free place to stay. Which is how I got to spend the second half of the week in this lovely waterfront house, making bathrooms and windows and ovens clean for a few hours per day, and otherwise be unbelievably relaxed and lazy, watching the water change colors from day to day, and even hour by hour as the clouds and wind moved through and past. So beautiful. Plus I got to make some Kiwi friends in the bargain. What a deal. And what a nice town. Here's the view from the house where I've been staying. Can't beat that.

Punakaiki

Further north along the west coast from Hokitika, the landscape got even more wild and lovely.

We went as far north as the town of Punakaiki and visited the striking "pancake rocks" of Paparoa National Park...

...appreciated the abundance of New Zealand flax...

...and walked an hour upstream along side Pororari River, the landscape looking positively jungly in its lushness--but without the stifling heat and poisonous creatures of an actual jungle. In other words, New Zealand is PERFECT.

Hokitika

From Akaroa, South Pole friend Christine and I headed over the spine of the South Island, through the gorgeous Arthur's Pass area...

...to the west coast town of Hokitika. Our destination: Kapitea Ridge Lodge, a boutique B&B run by friends of C's. In exchange for spending our mornings doing the housekeeping, we got to stay here for four nights for free...

...enjoying the fantastic view...

...and driving into Hokitika town to check out its driftwood art on the town beach...

...and the jade stores on EVERY BLOCK.

A bit inland from town, the Hokitika Gorge was a fabulous side trip, with its strikingly blue glacial water...

...and peaceful Lake Kaniere with its surrounding rimy forest was the perfect spot to lay on a rock beach, reading and napping for a bit in the afternoon.

Akaroa

First order of business upon being released from the chilly clutches of the USAP back into the non-Antarctic world: walking around outside without the familiar hug of Big Red; smelling smells; feeling humidity--and even some misty rain!--on my skin (which miraculously did not hurt when exposed to the air in Christchurch as it always did when walking outside into the -40 degree temps at Pole); and marveling at things such as stores filled with nothing but cheese:

Then, it was time for some serious decompression. Headed southeast from Christchurch to the unbelievably lovely Banks Peninsula...

...got my first glimpse of some of the 40 million sheep of New Zealand (compare that with the country's 4 million human residents!)...

...and settled into a lovely little rental cottage with a large handful of other Polies for a couple of nights...

...in the adorable French town of Akaroa. So fun to explore town and stroll around...

...and, literally, smell the flowers!

Leaving the Ice

Wowee, does the South Pole ever have a short summer. I can't believe that, so soon, the season has drawn to a close and the Air Force is eager to get us all out of there so they can cease their flight operations to Pole until next November and the beginning of another summer.

As the last few flights to South Pole arrived, we got an ENORMOUS shipment of freshies to start the winter-overs off on the right foot (though soon enough they will be subsisting on preserved foods and what little greens the greenhouse can provide)...

...we started making daily trips out to the flight deck (this is the "international terminal" at South Pole!) to say goodbye as more and more of the summer crew departed and the station got emptier and emptier (eerie!)...

...until finally it was my turn to say adios (for now) to my home of the past three months. A Herc took us north north north...

...and I got to ride up in the cockpit and see the amazing machinery and scenery (Mount Discovery, Erebus, Pegasus and Willie fields) as we came in for a landing at McMurdo.

The Herc's flight deck:

View of Mount Discovery:

At one point during our descent, we passed through one layer of clouds only to find a second below us and for a brief time we were sandwiched between the two layers...so amazing!

And after a brief layover in McMurdo, a bunch of other people redeploying were bussed to meet us on the airfield and we all boarded a C-17 back to New Zealand.

So there you have it, the completion of my first Antarctic adventure. I say "first" because before I left Pole, I signed a contract to return next summer as Retail Supervisor, running the station store, post office, rec program, and a bunch of other random things. I'm super-excited about this, and will certainly be filling the blog with more pictures of dominated by icy scenery in the future.

But for now, I am back in New Zealand and thrilled for the chance to explore this amazing country for a few months. So stay tuned for posts from here, starting soon...

Q&A & Tractor Girl

Today's Q&A:

Q: From J.C. (St. Louis, MO): “What is the capitol of Antarctica? Wait, does Antarctica have a capitol?”
A: Antarctica does not have a capitol! It is not a country and, according to international treaty, cannot be claimed by any country or countries. There are several dozen countries that have scientific research bases on the continent (as they must, according to that same international treaty, in order to have a future say in what happens to Antarctica's mineral and other riches in the coming century). And there are islands that lie between the continent and South America that are technically Antarctica but are claimed by Chile or Argentina (though these claims are not internationally recognized). So there you go.

And a random tidbit for you: One of this summer's tourists to the South Pole was a Dutch woman (and her support team) riding a Massey-Fergusen tractor to the Pole to (and I'm still struggling to grasp the logic of this, but perhaps it's not mine to grasp) raise awareness for sustainable farming. Don't ask. Eventually at the station we just started calling her "Tractor Girl" (though she's a grown adult and mother of an infant.) They were taking so many publicity shots and footage that the ground around the ceremonial pole looked like it had been the site of a drag race for many weeks after, until some wind started to blow in snow to cover the tracks. But several of the people working here went out there to meet her and said she was really nice. A news article about the expedition, and a photo I took from the galley window when they first arrived.

IceCube

As the summer season at South Pole begins drawing to a close, I got to take one more field trip to one of the science projects down here. IceCube is the largest telescope in the world, though it's not something that I previously would have understood as a telescope. About a kilometer's walk from the station is the IceCube lab building...

Which is situated on top of a square kilometer of hot-drilled cores containing a total of about 5000 of these DOMs (digital optical monitors)...

...which have been engineered by scientists working on this UW-Madison project to detect neutrinos: particles that pass through the earth without interacting with anything. I won't try to explain beyond that because I'm sure I'll get something wrong. It's mesmerizing to watch the computer images of IceCube's data readings.

And it was pretty amazing to see the room where all the electronics for the project live, on a guided tour from the two scientists who are down here for a full year to keep the project up and running and make sure data is transferred back to those working on analyzing it at Wisconsin.

All of this is so beyond me, but the more I learn about the science going on here, the more lucky I feel to be a part of it in my own little way.

South Pole tourism

A couple of kilometers out past the ceremonial pole is an "NGO site"--where various companies who run (extremely expensive) tourism to South Pole can set up tents and have people stay overnight at Pole. Some people just come for a few hours on their Twin Otters or Baslers that make multiple stops between South Africa or South America and South Pole. Either way, the tourists generally want to see South Pole station while they are here. So all of us who are living here had the opportunity to volunteer to give tours if/when one is needed when we are available. Of course, I volunteered! Not too long after that, there was a Sunday morning tour that worked for my schedule. So another station resident and I headed out to the visitor's center that some of the South Pole crew dragged out near the ceremonial pole...

...and waited in there playing cards while we listened for the Basler bringing the tourists.

I can't imagine what it must be like to land here in a tiny plane for only a few hours! (By the way, that's the South Pole Telescope in the background of this shot.)

We walked them into the station and did our best to show them around for about an hour and a half, though I didn't get any pictures of that. Though it doesn't matter because you are familiar with the station at this point! It was three tourists (two women pilots from the U.K. and an Indian man) plus three pilots and three employees of the tour company, including their doctor, who always comes along in case of altitude sickness or other issues. So interesting!

Ozone balloon launch

A few decades ago when CFCs first caused the hole in the ozone layer, scientists were throwing out the data that indicated the problem as an anomaly, too strange to be accurate. Once they actually figured out that the data was correct and there was an issue going on, South Pole became an obvious spot for ozone monitoring and research. Now, the atmosphere scientists down here launch about two helium-filled balloons/month that get up to about 20 miles above the earth's surface before popping. The balloons carry electronics that collect info on the way up as well as the way down for transmitting back to the station. Recently, I got to help them prep one of the balloons...

...and launch it!

We could still see it in the sky several minutes later, looking like the moon on its way into the upper atmosphere...

Dark Sector field trip

On a day off, some galley crew friends and I took a field trip out to "the Dark Sector." Sounds very Startrek. Basically, it's an area about a kilometer from the elevated station where radio use is extremely limited because it is where the space telescopes of the South Pole live. We hitched a snow mobile ride out there with some of the scientists (or "beakers" as they are fondly called here) who work there.

The station looked so tiny from out there.

The grantees working on the telescopes were really generous in showing us around and trying to explain to us non-astronomer idiots exactly what they are doing there and how the telescopes work. Most of them are looking for (among other things) information about the Cosmic Microwave Background and what that can tell us about the origins of the Big Bang. If I have that right. which I might not. Which would not be the fault of the kind beakers who tried to explain it.

We even got to go inside the inner workings of the SPT, the South Pole Telescope, which is the biggest of the telescopes here (though not the only one, as the name seems to suggest).

And then up to the dish of a second telescope, BICEP-3, that was in the process of being built while we were there. The dish protects from the telescope picking up stuff (they explained what stuff, but I can't remember what it is now) emanating from Earth rather than space.

The silver cylinder is BICEP-3 in its state when we were there, and the blue tube is where it goes when they finish building it. These scientists have already done about six test runs in building it and expected to be able to do it for real in about two weeks' worth of work.

The dish of the SPUD/Keck array telescope, a third one out in the Dark Sector, was even more impressive and fun to walk around in.

And then this is the actual SPT. Down in the inside area behind where the orange railing is is where we were standing when we were inside it, I think.

After our field trip, a nice afternoon walk back to the station.