Ice tunnels

Thanks to one of the carpenters who works down there, I got to take an amazing field trip to the ice tunnels, which (for those of you who have watched the YouTube video of the station and have an idea of its layout) start from the bottom of the beer can on the way to the arches, in an ominous-looking side-path...

...and extend about 1900 feet out under the backyard, with several side tunnels included. The reason the tunnels are a popular destination for people who don't have to work there is that over the years, Polies have built dozens of weird and interesting shrines into the walls.

(Apparently there's a whole population of grown men obsessed with My Little Pony? Am I the only one who didn't know this?"

But the reason the tunnels exist to start with is that they are the place for and access to the station's water and sewer lines. Kind of unnerving to have those two existing in conjunction, but as I explained in an earlier post, our water is melted by and pumped up from a melt-hole by a machine called a Rodwell, and when the cavern in the snow created by the Rodwell and station water use gets big enough that no one wants it to get any bigger, they move farther out, create a new Rodwell tunnel for getting water, and start filling in the cavern left at the old Rodwell site with the sewage from the station.

This season, there are at least two carpenters assigned nearly full-time to widening the wall of the main tunnel. This involves spending six+ hours per day in the -60F temps of the tunnels, using chainsaws to carving huge 70-lb blocks of ice out of the side of the wall....

and then towing those blocks by sled to defunct tunnels (such as the tunnel that was for Rodwell 1, which has already been exhausted as a water supply and completely filled in with human waste--euphemistically deemed "outfall"--and in theory will never need to be accessed again) to fill those in.

This is Rodwell 2, which used to be the water supply until it too was exhausted, and now it is the current outfall. This was the biggest, most spacious part of the ice tunnels.

And then, at the very end of the current tunnel system, we reached that wood-encased pipe, which is connecting to Rodwell 3, the station's current water supply.

This is one of the warmer parts of the tunnels, since there is machinery operating and a fair amount of human presence. As a result, the ceiling and walls have developed these amazing ice crystals all over them.

J the Baker and me after about 45 minutes in temps up to -60F! Don't we have lovely smiles?