Weekly snapshot #27

It's an overcast but calm, lovely day on Ross Island. The hours of sunlight each day are quickly growing as we cruise toward the Southern Hemisphere Vernal Equinox (on September 22), at which point there will be more daylight than darkness each day until eventually the skies will never get totally dark during the coming Antarctic summer.


For now, we're still enjoying lovely night skies and long, colorful sunrises and sunsets.


The initial shock of the bigger station population and increased activity of the shoulder season has worn off a bit and we're refinding our daily equilibrium. The store is definitely busier than before but way more manageable than the first few days of Winfly, when all the new folks were coming in to stock up on alcohol and toiletries and see what's new in apparel this year. It was a little insane for a few days there and I'm glad to be back to a more steady business.

Antarctic Winter Film Festival

If you've been following along for at least the past couple years, you might remember that during my winter at South Pole, there was a continent-wide Film Festival where any station that wanted to participate would make a film reflecting life on their base and the winter-in-Antarctica experience.


Since McMurdo is the largest station on continent, we ended up having four people make four separate movie entries into this year's Festival, and I was lucky enough to get to make brief appearances in all of them.


That year we all got YouTube links to all the films posted on-line. That doesn't seem to be happening this year, but two of the four I was in are up online if you're interested in watching them.


The first is an Antarctic version of "Where the Wild Things Are." Click here to view.


The other is a fake trailer for a nonexistent, apocalypse movie that you can see here.


Enjoy!

Weekly snapshot #26

It's a chilly but lovely day for the end of operational winter at McMurdo.


A plane is about to land, with a second about to take off from Christchurch on its way down here around dinnertime, and we had two flights yesterday as well. The end-sum of all this aviation activity is that about 40 of our winter crew have bid us goodbye, and 200 (!!) new folks are settling in for the "Winfly" (Winter Flights) shoulder season--six weeks of increased operations as everyone ramps up for the coming Mainbody (summer) season starting October 1.


The 100 of us winter folk remaining are a wee bit shell-shocked by the nearly-overnight doubling of the station population, with 2/3 of those folks being faces we haven't seen for the past 4+ months, if ever. It's a little overwhelming. But hopefully a week from now we'll all be settled back into our new (albeit busier) normal. And to balance all this slightly stressful craziness/transition time, I'm promised that Winfly is the most beautiful time at McMurdo in terms of the skies, the sunrises/sunsets, etc. So here's to six weeks of that.

Square Frame

The Kiwis at Scott Base (four miles down the road from us here on Ross Island, with a winter population of 12) maintain a sweet little square-frame trailer out on the Ross Sea Ice Sheet (a permanently frozen area, at least for now) to which they are kind enough to invite some of us hooligan Americans from time to time. An overnight at the Square Frame has been on my bucket list all winter, and as the winter is dwindling, it was now or never to organize a trip out there.


I was in a group of three who hadn't gotten to make a trip out there yet this year, and when we stopped at Scott Base for a briefing on the way there, we found all the lights down and half their crew--plus two visiting McMurdoans--wearing masks and sitting in a dark room with an ultraviolet light on, intending to and succeeding in scaring the bejezus out of us.

Then they tried to soothe our nerves Kiwi style...that is, with a shot (which I of course gifted to someone else) before sending us on our way.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but the square frame is ADORABLE. So cozy and tidy and basically I just wanted to move in there and stay forever.

There is an outhouse about 20 yards away, but we brought one of the pee cans into the Square Frame foyer so we wouldn't have to get suited up to go outside so often, and the whole squatting-over-the-funnel method worked great.

 There was a little kitchenette, and a bunk area...

All in all, so perfect.


But the whole point, and the best part of it all, was spending a night out on the ice sheet. We had incredible weather when we went out. My phone camera isn't good enough to take night sky pics, so I don't have those, but the stars were INCREDIBLE. And it was so still out that when I went outside on my own and laid down on the snow, the silence and lack of sensory input--there are few smells in Antarctica, and it was so dark, and with no wind there were basically no sounds--it was almost an out-of-body experience, the quietest being-outside experience of my life, and so lovely I almost cried.


And then in the morning, because we're getting so close to sunrise, all this light started slowly coming back into the sky and we spent a good hour outside enjoying the scenery and taking pictures.

This is the Square Frame seen from the outside, with Castle Rock in the background:

And this is the mighty Mount Erebus, the southern-most active volcano in the world (and, I believe, creator of this island we are living on, Ross Island), and you can see it's actively venting in this photo. With no wind, the puffs of fumes from the crater would just sit on top of the peak like that for up to a minute...totally incredible. It looks really close in this pic and when we were standing there, but it was actually something like 20 miles away from where I was standing when I took this shot.

All in all, this was one of the most magical, special recreational things I've gotten to experience during this winter in McMurdo, and the overnight, though too brief, left me feeling so grateful, and like I'd just woken from an amazing dream.

Weekly snapshot #25

What a day! It's absolutely GORGEOUS out. And it looks like broad daylight...though the sun hasn't risen at all yet. It will peek out for the first time since April on Sunday, and then we're just barreling toward more and more lightness from there. Already, I saw people walking around outside today with their eyes squinted up as if the sun were shining in them. It's going to be painful for us when the sun actually does come up!

And the nacreous clouds are out in force. You can read more about this special type of cloud here. They weren't showing up as well in the picture I took at noon, but here's a different one of the sky in another direction just an hour earlier. Beautiful!

Women of Wisconsin!

Very strange fact: Of the 26 (27 after last month's flight) women on station this winter, 6 of us (nearly a quarter!) are from Wisconsin. Definitely a statistical anomaly, but kind of fun, so we all got together for a picture the other weekend.


Here are the McMurdo Winter 2018 Lady Cheeseheads!

Weekly Snapshot #24

I know this photo looks a little gloomy and the temp doesn't exactly look balmy, but it's actually SO nice out. It feels warm and the cloud cover is diffusing the mid-day light so it looks uncannily bright out and it's just a weirdly lovely day. I think that's about it from me. I fly outta here two months from today and I think it's going to come way too soon. We're just enjoying our last couple weeks of real winter before the shoulder season starts and things start to get a little crazy....

Weekly snapshot #23

I'm suddenly having a memory of the springtime at Pole, as light started to come back into the sky, and every week I thought, "Geez, it's so BRIGHT out," I was feeling like I might be blinded, and the sun hadn't even risen yet. That feeling is back now. The other day someone asked me if we sell sunglasses in the store, and a bystander said, "Sunglasses? What do you need SUNglasses for?" And we all stood around perplexed for a moment with our winter brains till the inquirer said, "Well...I mean...the sun is going to come up soon, right?" And then I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to imagine where in my room I stashed the sunglasses that I had with me all the time for the first month+ that I was here. The times, they are a-changin'.

Though the sky is getting brighter by the day--and the actual first sunrise of the spring is just a couple weeks away--the temps are some of the lower we've had this winter and there's lots of complaining going on about the cold. Which always seems funny to me in Antarctica. Even here, where it's cold and you know it's going to be cold, people don't get tired of commenting on and complaining about it....