Final days at Summit

I truly cannot believe it, but my time at Summit is already up. Tomorrow (barring weather or mechanical complications), a Herc will arrive to fly our construction crew back down to Kanger, and all the luxuries of the civilization of the coast of Greenland (modest as they may be). The time up here has flown, a little too fast, actually, and I am really going to miss the friends I've made here. I've been trying to just enjoy/soak up the final days of the contract.

My friend B and I, who ended up with nearly identical cold weather gear, have been having fun twinning it up a bit:

We had a "block party" at the fish huts with some yard games and a very dramatic sky for a backdrop:

I also got to help launch one of the twice-daily weather balloons (Summit is one of 450 sites world-wide--including South Pole, if you remember--where these balloons are launched)...

...and I got to help set up scaffolding for the first time.

But the bulk of the last two days of work here were spent on a massive digging project, trying to uncover things that got covered in up to 5 feet of drifting snow over the winter. That was exhausting enough that by the end of the last day of work, I was feeling pretty glad to be done.

Finally, we took one more group picture of our construction team, this time inside the workshop. It requires a bit of explanation, maybe. :) First of all, Saturdays are work days for us, but to lighten the mood on the last work day of the week, there is a "Sleeveless Saturday" tradition. Which is why so many people in this photo are sleeveless despite freezing temps. The other thing you might notice here is the disturbing proliferation of mustaches. This past Saturday morning, our current crew leader came out of the bathroom at breakfast time having just shaved his beard into a handlebar mustache. By the time we all congregated at work less than an hour later, at least six other guys had shed significant parts of their facial hair, and all in all, it was a sight. So here we are, a crew to remember, one last time (with unfortunately poor photo resolution, oh well).

All right, I think that's it from Summit. It's been a joy and I still feel so lucky to have gotten to come here. It's not my last post from Greenland, though. I'm staying along the coast for the next week so will be back with more pictures from the not-completely-frozen part of the island.

Bhartia group -- Aiming for Europa

There is a science group here right now (referred to as the Bhartia group, after the Principal Investigator of their project) consisting of four engineers from a robotics company called Honeybee Laboratories (based near L.A.) that is contracting with NASA to design and develop a drill that, in the next several decades, will be sent to Jupiter's moon, Europa. The drill will need to get through 20 kilometers off ice in order to reach an ocean that may contain organic life, which is what NASA will be searching for with the mission. In order to start to test the drill that might some day accomplish this, the Bhartia group has set up a camp 6 km from Summit Base to do some testing this summer. And this weekend, they invited us out to their camp to see their operations.

It was a very fun boondoggle, a bunch of us riding on a sled attached to a snow mobile, away from station along the vast, flat, white...

...to where the group has three tents set up: a kitchen tent, a poop tent, and their drilling tent, with the snowmobiles pointed back toward station and ready to go in case a polar bear is spotted heading in their direction (unlikely but possible).

Outside of their drilling tent, they made a snow inuksuk, an Inuit tradition, to bring their mission luck.

We all crowded into the drilling tent to hear about the progress they're making and some details of their intentions and work here. Definitely one of those moments where I get to feel part of something much greater, and like all of the shoveling and other dirty work I've been doing the past 7 weeks is for a real purpose.

It's not Europa now, but some day it really may be!

More work

Here are a few more glimpses into my job as a Trades Helper here at Summit.

It was always a total mystery to me how these elevated buildings were kept level...

...so it was a total thrill to me that I actually got to learn how to level the Big House at Summit.

There is also a huge amount of digging holes and filling them back in. This sounds ridiculous but it's so often true. Sometimes we have to dig a trench for a new cable, or dig up any number of things that have gotten buried in the snow as it accumulates. I have lost count of the number of holes I've already dug that I could stand in up to my waist at least.

And Summit is largely a walking station; there are some snow mobiles but people are encouraged to man-haul things whenever possible, so the sleds are our friends.

All this manual labor is made possible by our morning stretch sessions, which mostly consist of belly laughing.

We have a particularly awesome construction crew this spring, I'm told, and I know for sure that it's been an hilariously fun time. I'm so grateful to have gotten to know all these people. (I'm sounding nostalgic because we're not done yet, but we only have a week left...)

Sun sun and more sun

There have been some really amazing sun moments during the spectacularly amazing weather we've been having in the month I've been here. Here are a couple since my last posting of pretty landscape pictures.

I have NO IDEA what was going on with the sun in this shot, but I LOVE it.

And then, even after all of the sun dogs I've seen here and at South Pole, I never even KNEW that a FULL sun dog looked like this. Un-freaking-believable.

Randomness

Here's a random collection of pictures for you that--with explanations--hopefully gives you more glimpses into life at Summit camp.

At Memorial Day, we flew the American flag in camp, which also involved (either out of respect for our hosts or by official agreement, not sure which) flying the Greenlandic flag. Which is when I learned that any time the Greenlandic flag is flown, the flags of Denmark and the Faroe Islands must also be flown. So this was our Memorial Day scene.

We had a nice dinner on Memorial Day to mark the occasion, and someone from the construction crew had brought up to Summit some musk ox meat, which was grilled up for that dinner. I'm not much of a meat eater, but I did try the musk ox, as something new and typically Greenlandish. It was fine...not sure I'd eat it again, but now I've tried musk ox!

Also notable recently: at the very end of May we saw a sight we hadn't seen for the 3.5 weeks since we arrived here: a plane! The first weekend of June was very busy at camp, with seven flights, visiting scientists, safety inspectors, and some personnel turn-over. When the dust settled on Tuesday, we had a new group of scientists staying here, but with departing personnel the balance landed with only about three more people on base than there had been before the flight period. It was a relief to have camp feeling quiet and insular again.

One of the planes brought in three more fish huts (yes, the kind that people use for ice fishing in northern North America) as berthing mods, so that now there's a little village of fish huts that looks so cute and colorful against the stark white and blue of the landscape. (There's also a red fish hut, but it's set apart from the others at the back of the station because it's where our overnight bear watch sleeps, and we want her to have the greatest chance possible of getting decent sleep during the day.)

I also FINALLY took a walk on the runway last weekend, which I've been wanting to do since I got here, but which I'm always too tired at the end of a work day (and on Sundays) to actually do. But I think I'm finally well-acclimated to the physical labor of my job and the altitude and all else, because taking a walk on Sunday with one of my friends here and appreciating the quiet and the gorgeous day was exactly what I wanted to do.

Recreation

We spend most of our time here working (basically 10 hrs/day, 6 days/week) but not all of it.

So the rest of the time (when we're not sleeping) there are various recreation possibilities. We have had an arts & crafts night and a Texas Hold 'Em tournament, and Thursday nights there is always a Bollywood movie playing.

I've found bunch of friends to play a LOT of card games with...

...and there are just enough other women on station for us to have some girl time/talk.

There's a sauna for warming up after a chilly day of working outside...

...and then there are the games and traditions that are specific to polar life--often invented in Antarctica and transported to the northern polar region. For example, this game, charmingly called "Ass Ratchet." Basically, two people each hold opposite ends of a cargo strap wrapped around their rumps and then use one hand to try to yank the other person off balance. The first person to move a foot loses. It sounds stupid but we have spent HOURS playing this game and watching each other play this game. We even had a tournament one weekend and crowned an Ass Ratchet Champion for Spring 2019.

This is the kind of thing that makes polar contract workers unfit for the rest of society after a while. Not sure how close I am to passing the point of no return? Or have I already?

Wildlife

This is a bit of a sad one. Like what would happen if another polar bear made it into camp, we get all excited to see birds here (there have been a couple so far), but it means pretty certain death for them. If they stop here, it's because they're exhausted, and it's too cold for them to stay long but there's no food that would allow them to move on. Everyone is taking pictures of the stoic fliers when we first see them....

But inevitably a few days or weeks later we find them frozen among our cargo crates and have to have a little moment of mourning.

RIP, little buddy!

Science!

Of course, just like in Antarctica, the reason we come to this inhospitable place is for science!

Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile may remember that the two summers I was at South Pole coincided with an ice core drilling project. A lot of the people working on that project had previously been here to Summit to do the ice core drilling that happened here (which is actually how I first heard of Summit Camp and started to want to come to Greenland). That project is long-done but the site of the core sample is still marked with this imposing totem pole.

You might also remember that releasing weather balloon was a fun adventure at South Pole. And they  also release twice-daily atmospheric tracking balloons here at Summit. This one was a ridiculously great photo op, with sun-dogs going strong as the science tech brought the balloon out for release one evening.



There are two science buildings on station. One, set a half-mile to the south of the station so that it can avoid as much of the equipment and other air pollution created by camp operations, is called the TAWO: the Temporary Atmospheric Watch Observatory.

It's not a big space, but it's the primary work area of the two research scientists we currently have at camp. As the name suggests, the experiments/projects based there are primarily involving the atmosphere.

The other is the MSF, the Mobile Science Facility. (These names are kind of misleading, maybe. As far as I know, the TAWO is a permanent, not a temporary structure. And no one has been moving the MSF around since I've been here.) Which houses the rest of the research done here.

I haven't gotten to do formal tours of any of these buildings or learn about the science going on here in great detail (I just finally visited these two buildings while helping to do annual inspections on the doors and windows all over camp.) But if there are any other science related adventures while I'm here, I will post again!

Appreciation

I haven't posted many landscape pictures since it looks so similar to Pole here. But I do want to stop and appreciate the special beauty of the polar world....

A great sun-dog with my finger saving your eyes.

The is the shadow of The Big House (with two outhouses in the foreground) late in the evening when the sun was low. I love how it looks like a polar spider.

Working

I might end up doing more posts on working situations since that's where I spend most of my time up here, but here's at least an overview of my job at Summit as a Trades Helper.

We do have a building (called Smobile--I don't know why) that is kind of the construction office, though it doubles as a weight/exercise room, and I don't have a picture of it to share. But that's where we have our morning meetings, and the rest of the day most of us are generally working outside or elsewhere on station. It is a job that gets me more exercise than I've ever had in my life for this amount of sustained time, probably.

When we first got here, we spent a lot of time just trying to find and dig out (of the snow that blew in over the winter) and reorganize supplies in our very own Home Depot and Tool Crib.

This included locating and starting to dig in to the carpentry supplies; the carpenters usually end up building things just outside the door to Shmobile.

One of my first projects was digging out the side of the building and then assisting the electrician in fixing the wiring going into the micro-turbine power generator.

This picture was taken in the inside carp workshop, which is a good heated workspace, though not big enough for most of our projects. Here we were doing a safety training on how to operate a winch, as there will be work done in confined spaces (vaults) throughout the season and I've already gotten to be a vault attendant while an electrician did some underground (or, under-snow) work.

I've also gotten to assist on a bunch of carpentry projects. That's me on the left using a nail gun for the first time.

I also (along with my roommate and coworker, B) got fit-tested for a respirator by the station medic so that we can eventually do a painting project with some really toxic, specialized paint.

One day the electrician needed to drag a big set of wiring from The Big House out to the electric distribution shack, so five of us formed a chain gang (I'm second-to-last) and got the job done.

Probably the thing I've done the most of is shoveling. I'm on the right here after three of us (plus an ice-melter) spent a morning digging out the man-lift, Genie, from where it had been stored for the winter and consumed in snow.

That was totally worth it, as the following week I got to train as an operator of the lift. I'm on the left up in the cage at its full extension.

The view of camp from up there was spectacular....

That'll do for now, but I'll be sure to come back with fun pictures of any other particularly interesting jobs I get to work on....