Saturday November 21, 1992
Hello,
This is my last letter from Antarctica during the Austral Summer of 1992-1993. I shall try to pack every last bit of peculiar stuff that I have discovered here into it. Right now I am scheduled to go to the South Pole on Monday, but schedules have a way of getting messed up around here. It is about a three hour flight, and it will go over the Trans-Antarctic Mountain Range, which is supposed to be extremely beautiful. I was told to definitely have my camera ready when we fly over them, and I plan to be.
Well, the election was only mildly noticed down here. My absentee voter ballot never showed up so I was unable to participate in deciding my elected officials. It turned out that my vote was not needed in the end, though. We get television new here, but it is a week late. Sometimes we can get live radio news. A short while ago a bunch of DVs (Distinguished Visitors) showed up here to look around. They were congressmen to see how the taxpayers dollars were being spent, and the usual gaggle of reporters that follow them everywhere they go. ABC is supposed to do the first ever live news broadcast from Antarctica next week. This is presuming we get the brand new satellite link working before then. Actually, it works, but it has not had the proper approval from whoever is supposed to give that kind of stuff out. I'm sure that ABC will make sure that it gets approved and licensed before then.
The other day it was quite hot. It was 25 degrees. I even took my heavy jacket off and put on my light weight one. There were a few crazy people walking around in shorts after work. I am told that the average temperature at South Pole right now is -30 to -40 degrees. It should be fun.
It is fun to watch the people here. This town of about 1200 people definitely has it's different groups or societies. There is a big contingent of what my roommates call "granola crunchers" or just "crunchers" for short. They are the "only natural food" and "Earth first" types. They have their own cold weather gear that they brought from home where they live half of their time climbing mountains or backpacking. They absolutely refuse to wear the issued clothes, most likely because the issued clothes don't say Patagonia or North Face on them. They are a very cohesive group. At meals they will never intermingle with "non-crunchers." In their quest to sit together at meal they will routinely squeeze ten to twelve people around a table designed for six. There are many people here from parts of the U.S. that have no jobs available, which are mostly the states with low population. So, there are an inordinate number of people here from Montana, Wyoming, both of the Dakotas and other states like those.
I had my 29th birthday last week, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit. My roommates threw a surprise party for me, but I pretty much figured it out about fifteen seconds before I opened the door to our room, where everyone lay in waiting. There were people there I never met before. It's amazing what free beer will get you down here. We went out to the clubs after that. Some people I did know had had such poor birthdays earlier this year that they were re-celebrating them on this very same night. So, we combined our celebrating. My birthday was on a Sunday, so all this celebrating happened on the Saturday night before it. Therefore, I ended up lounging around for most of the day on my birthday.
Sunday, November 22, 1992
Well, I finally got off my duff and went hiking. There is a place called Castle Rock, which is quite spectacular, that I went to. It can be a potentially dangerous trip, depending on the weather, so you cannot go alone. One on my roommates went with me. It took us about two hours to get there and an hour and a half to get back. We sat on top of the rock for about half an hour, making the whole trip last four hours. I took lots of pictures, of course. I hope that they turn out well. I am supposed to leave for the South Pole tomorrow.
Sunday, December 6, 1992
I have just returned from spending eight days at the South Pole, and as you might have surmised I am still alive. Actually, I had a great time there. It took a few tries to get down there because they kept finding things wrong with the plane just before we were supposed to take off. The temperature at the Pole hovered around -30 F, but it didn't seem that cold. In the wind the wind-chill made it have an effective temperature anywhere from -40 to -80 F depending on the wind speed. Trying to use a camera, you have to take off a glove to use it, in those conditions was painful at times. The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is quite small compared to the McMurdo Station where I have been. Pole had 111 people while I was there. It is very much a small town compared to the big town of McMurdo, especially in the atmosphere of the community. Everyone knows each other and wants to. I was there over Thanksgiving, and there was a wonderful dinner. I really enjoyed it. The layout of the Pole station is rather unusual. In the center of it there is an upper half of a geodesic dome which serves as a wind and snow block. It is half way covered up with snow on the outside, after years of snow accumulation. The inside is not heated, but has several buildings in it that are. Therefore the temperature inside the dome is pretty close to ambient, which is -30F. Since the buildings are heated there is no reason to wear warm clothes inside them, so people wear normal clothes. But, when they have to go from one building to another inside the dome they just go, in the -30F air in their normal old clothes. Even I was doing this. There are several outlying buildings near the dome. The summertime berthing is part of these outlying buildings. And, they are of the tent variety that I described previously. I was spared that adventure and was put in the berthing building inside the dome. One of the buildings under the dome is a huge refrigerator for fresh foods. Since the temperature outside the refrigerator is -30F it is actually a heater to keep the foods at the normal refrigerator temperature. The altitude there-is 9301 feet, of which over 9000 feet is ice. Everyone in McMurdo told me that I would get altitude sickness there, but I had no such problem. There was a big party while I was there. They even put together a band for it. There is a half finished building, which does have the heating completed, that they held the party in. It was lots of fun even though I didn't really know anyone there. One nice thing about the cold here is that there aren't any bugs of any sort. Here in McMurdo it has been rather warm, up into the 30-40 F range. This temperature feels especially warm after my visit to the Pole. While I was at the Pole, on Thanksgiving Eve and Day, ABC television did live interviews here in Antarctica. They were shown on "Niteline and "Good Morning America." The occasion was the new satellite system that was just put in her in McMurdo made such a thing possible, and the publicity couldn't hurt in getting congress to fully fund the program. I have a copy of the shows on -video tape, which I will bring back with me. While I was away at Pole the powers that be rearranged my schedule again. I left the opening of this letter as I had already written it to help convey to you how this schedule shuffling affects my life. Now they say that my being in Port Hueneme will not be all that effective, so I don't need to rush back there. I am still needed in Christchurch fairly urgently, but there is one small problem with my going there right now. We are having a shortage of fuel here in McMurdo, so to help save fuel there is a strange rule that if you leave the Ice right now you can not come back this season. So, if I go to Christchurch now I would have no where to go afterwards, but back to Denver. Their solution to this is to keep me here for another month, then send me to Christchurch for a while, and then back to Denver. This would probably mean that I could not do my vacation on the way back, but I will have to check on that. Sorry about my using the form letter format to write to you, but I am sending this to almost thirty people. You would not be seeing such length and enthusiasm in these letters if I did not do it this way. It is probably not the best way to do things for everyone concerned, but it is for me. Thank you for understanding. I will close now, it seems that I will have plenty of time here on the Ice to chronicle another episode of this chapter of my life adventures. Who knows what will happen next!
