The latest batch of "Palmer is Beautiful" photos

This penguin was napping on a rock when I came upon him and decided he'd chosen a nice view and sat down myself to enjoy it. About 20 minutes into our mutual relaxation, he stood up, stretched, took an enormous poo, posed for this picture, and then laid back down next to his own excrement and went back to sleep. 

This is a photo I took the last time the LMG left station, in mid-December. (She's coming our way again right now, arriving in just a few days.) You can see all the passengers on the back deck still waving goodbye.



Palmer Christmas

Though being away from my family at the holidays is my LEAST favorite part of contract work, Christmas at Palmer was as nice as a family-less Christmas can be. The chefs made us an amazing Christmas brunch spread (and later a Christmas dinner, of which I failed to take any pictures).

And C, my Logistics/Cargo partner-in-crime, and I held a cookie-decorating event, which involved some baking the day before...

And then a LOT of frosting and cozy fun on the day of.

We kind of half-heartedly made the pieces for a gingerbread house, and used the cookie cutter of our resupply vessel that one of the chefs had previously made, so that we also had a ginger-bread boat. The house lacked structural integrity despite the extreme amount of care put into it. All the same, the house and the boat were the most impressive part of it all when the frosting was gone and we were all sugar-crashing.

We also did a gift exchange, which was of course entirely optional, but which nearly everyone on station participated in. It was nice to have almost everyone together for a totally non-work-related reason, and for the laughter that comes with the playful theft of a White Elephant. These were high-quality gifts, too--I was impressed.

Merry Christmas from Palmer Station!



Same view, different day

Merry Christmas!
I'll do a post about our Christmas celebrations at Palmer next, but for now...

Here's to appreciating all the little things, including how the same place can become totally new and remind you of its beauty if you're paying attention.

I just love how different this view from a particular walk-way on station can look from day to day. A small sampling...

Rec boating!!

My first afternoon of rec boating was soooo amazing. In addition to the Bahia wreckage, we saw chinstrap, adelie, and gentoo penguins (the three types that most frequently hang around this area), a leopard seal swimming past our boat, tons of elephant seals (the massive bulls looking impossibly large as they rested on land), skuas hanging out near the penguin colonies, hoping to poach eggs, giant petrels nesting, cormorants skimming the water, beautiful icebergs...and it was about 40 degrees out on a windless, sunny, perfect day. Just...wow.

We even went out to visit the iceberg that you have probably seen in a lot of my landscape shots from station. The winter crew named this berg "Old Faithful" and it was really fun to see it from close-up.

The Bahia

In 1989, the Argentinian supply vessel The Bahia Paraiso ran aground within sight of Palmer Station and ultimately sunk. Thanks to the proximity of Palmer and the relative ease of rescue operations, there were no fatalities in the shipwreck. But the oil spilled as a result is considered the greatest single-event ecological disaster in Antarctic history. Despite three decades and remediation efforts, the wreckage (which is completely underwater except at low tides) still continues to leak the occasional drop of oil onto the ocean's surface here.

On our first day of full rec boating, where I got to go out as part of a group of 10 for like three hours. It was a totally gorgeous day, and we started out at low tide, when the metal hull of the overturned shipwreck was visible even from station. The ship was over 400ft long, so we were still this far away from the part of the wreckage breaking  the surface of the water...

...and yet when we looked straight down into the water we could see the ship's props shimmering below.

Crazy to see the wreckage upclose! And to imagine see the actual event of the ship striking rock and beginning to sink. Would have been amazing to see, but of course nothing we hope will ever happen again. The oil spill decimated the cormorant population on nearby Cormorant Island, and it still has not recovered.

Bonaparte

Finally, the weekend before Thanksgiving, the sea ice got blown out from around station and the boats were able to hit the water. Palmer's research is marine-focused, and there are a half-dozen scientists here who have been waiting out the sea ice so they can get out in boats to collect samples, count birds, and so on. But since there are boats, we can also use them for recreation purposes when the scientists don't need them...or if they don't need all the seats. 

Which is what happened the weekend before Thanksgiving. The BoatHouse guys were racing all over the place in the solas, dropping a group of "birders" (scientists here to count and study the bird populations on various islands around Palmer) off at one island and then moving them to another, in between trips to drop off emergency caches at various islands. And so with three other scientists, I was able to hitch a ride just across the little inlet at our dock to Bonaparte Peninsula. It was crazy how refreshing and amazing it felt to be just three minutes away from station and hanging out on the rocks for a couple of hours, appreciating the moss and lichen and seals and penguins swimming by, and the very lovely, mild day.

Recreation

We have a pretty small community here, so we don't have as many big social events going on as at the other stations I've been to. But I love Palmer's brand of recreation. Everyone is very playful and creative. One morning when the boat was arriving, we'd had a big snowstorm the night before and a bunch of people waiting to do their line-handling duties spontaneously built some of the most impressive snowmen I've seen!

There's also this AWESOME hut about a 10-minute walk from station where you can bring a sleeping bag and mat and sleep for the night with a stunning view over Arthur Harbor at the glacier. I haven't gone yet because I was soaking up the great luck of not having a roommate, but I'll start taking my turn now that that has changed.

One of the Marine Lab Technicians who comes here on a lot of the port calls introduced a game she used to play as a kid--Skittles--and then one of our community members actually built the game for us to play here!

We have also had some trivia nights, which involved a lot of confusing silliness when costumes were encouraged. I also took my first turn ever at hosting trivia, which was a lot of fun.

And, one of the best things ever  about Palmer--the hot tub!!! I love it and go in there several times per week. It has to be one of the best views of any hot tub on the planet!

And then there are the very Antarctic kinds of recreation, like this hang-out area behind the trades shop, which its frequenters like to call "Hobo Camp," and which sometimes involves them bringing out the smoker and preparing delicacies such as...Spam.

And then there's turning community chores into fun. Everyone takes a turn once/week doing the dinner dishes and kitchen clean-up. People tend to form teams and sign up together with the same group every week. I'm lucky to have gotten drawn into a group where we celebrate the end of our frantic cleaning with a shot of (alcoholic or non-alcoholic, per individual preference) shots and laughter. It makes even the chores around here feel fun.

But the BEST part of recreation at Palmer is rec boating, which we've had to wait a long time for since the sea ice stayed packed in around station for so long. But the next couple posts will be about that!

Visit from the NBP

In mid-November, a rare thing happened at Palmer. The Lawrence M. Gould (LMG) is our usual supply ship and the one that brought us down here in October. But the program also leases an even larger vessel, the Nathaniel B. Palmer (NBP) that typically traverses the peninsula with scientists whose projects require that they be on boats rather than using Palmer as a land base.

I posted a picture of both the vessels docked in a row on the pier at Punta Arenas when I was first coming down here. But it's been almost 20 years since they were both at Palmer at the same time. But due to the need to drop a couple of scientists off at Palmer at a time when the LMG happened to be here, we got a dual LMG/NBP visit. It was pretty cool to see.

The ships tied up to each other and put down a gangway between the two that we could cross to take tours of the NBP.

It's only a few dozen feet longer than the LMG, but it feels SO much bigger, and is definitely taller, so that it gave a really nice novel view of Hero Inlet.

 I guess I'm just really not great at staying in one place for a very long time, because it even felt jarring and amazing to me to look out at the same view that we can see from Palmer, but just be a little bit higher and out in the water than we are usually. At the time I had only been at Palmer for about six weeks, but it had been such a crazy six weeks it had felt MUCH longer, and even the smallest change in perspective at that point was very, very welcome!

Room with a view

Not too shabby! 

AND I had my room to myself for the first two months here, for which I'm crazy grateful.

It's a joy for me in the morning (or at night) to pull up the blinds and see what is happening in this little corner of the world today.

There's all these other windows around station, too, where you just walk by and it's breath-taking. You see this stuff, and no matter what work craziness is going on, realize: not a bad day!

Local friends

One of the fun things about still having so much sea ice around for the first few weeks here is that there were seals hanging out and about. With their babies!

Our most ubiquitous animal friends are sheathbills, very curious, white birds that hang out with us almost all the time, will eat anything we let them (from the cover of the hot tub to our poop as it comes out of the station outfall pipe), and leave their adorable footprints everywhere.

They tend to pair up and (at least when they have not been hanging out by the outfall and are wearing that evidence on their feathers) can be quite adorable as they bob around station, checking out all the action and bobbing their heads around everywhere.

Once the sea ice broke up a bit, the animal visits to station multiplied exponentially. Penguins started hopping up on the rocks down by the pier to hang out for a bit...

...a baby elephant seal decided the side of the boat house was fantastic place to rest for a weekend...

...and some sea stars were visible alongside the dock ramp.

I have to admit, predictable as it is, the penguins are my favorite. They are just so endlessly entertaining to watch. The way they move is so funny and endearing and awkward, and they just seem so cheerful and optimistic. I just love it.