Weekly snapshot #28

All's pretty quiet on the southern front right now. It wasn't so at the beginning of the week, and I'll tell you all about that in my next post. But for now, we're just trying to stay warm in some chilly, overcast weather and I've got the space heater running in my office as I type this...

First sunrise! (belated post)

These photos are a bit late coming to you, but I saw the sun (!) for the first time in four months from Arrival Heights back on August 20. (As you saw in the weekly snapshots, there was lots of light in the sky before then, but the 19th was the date the sun first actually crested the horizon at this latitude, and only a few people who made a trip out to the airfield could see it; it wasn't visible from town.) Crazy to think it's been that long since there's been sun on our faces, as the time has gone by SO FAST. But there it was...

And here is me, welcoming the sun back to this part of the world. (Thanks to R. B-R. for this photo!)

Finally, here is a picture from around that same time, taken from the third floor of one of the dorm buildings, of Observation Hill (with the moon standing guard) overlooking McMurdo town. It's not one of the quaintest destinations on the planet, but McMurdo definitely has its moments.



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.