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.