The bustling metropolis of McMurdo
I’m all out of Wednesdays. I will be in Christchurch by this time next week.
As my time here draws to a close and work finally starts to slow down, I’m catching up on a few of things I have somehow managed to not do over the last four months.
I’m planning a long hike for Sunday on the one trail I have left to do. It’s the longest one and takes about six hours to complete (which is a lot of time to give up on the one day each week that I’m not working for 11 hours). It should be a nice walk and a good chance to take in the beauty that is so prevalent here.
I got to take another hike around McMurdo earlier this week, and I really enjoyed it. There were some areas with a massive amount of accumulated snow from a several-day storm we had over the weekend. It’s been a very long time since I’ve got to wade through waist deep snow.
When we got up to the ridge on the outskirts of town, we could see four ships (which is shocking since we have been so incredibly alone here until about a week ago). Only one was close enough to really see and was a U.S. Antarctic Program research vessel. The others were just dots on the horizon but were the icebreaker, the fuel tanker and the re-supply cargo freighter.
This time of the year is really the storm before the calm.
In the last few weeks of the season, the station population swells. We have several hundred more people here than we have had all season, which makes a huge difference when you normally only have several hundred people to begin with. Most of them are from a special cargo handling battalion the Navy sends us each year. But a lot of them are people either coming in for the winter or leaving Pole for the season (all U.S. off-continent flights go through us).
It seems like our tiny piece of civilization is now busting at the seams.
But very soon and very suddenly, the vessels will come in, the ships will be offloaded, and everyone will immediately start to leave.
Once McMurdo reaches the near-breaking point it quickly deflates down to the winter crew of less than 200. Those people will spend the next seven months keeping things running and awaiting the return of the sun and the rest of the program participants in October.
As my time here draws to a close and work finally starts to slow down, I’m catching up on a few of things I have somehow managed to not do over the last four months.
I’m planning a long hike for Sunday on the one trail I have left to do. It’s the longest one and takes about six hours to complete (which is a lot of time to give up on the one day each week that I’m not working for 11 hours). It should be a nice walk and a good chance to take in the beauty that is so prevalent here.
I got to take another hike around McMurdo earlier this week, and I really enjoyed it. There were some areas with a massive amount of accumulated snow from a several-day storm we had over the weekend. It’s been a very long time since I’ve got to wade through waist deep snow.
When we got up to the ridge on the outskirts of town, we could see four ships (which is shocking since we have been so incredibly alone here until about a week ago). Only one was close enough to really see and was a U.S. Antarctic Program research vessel. The others were just dots on the horizon but were the icebreaker, the fuel tanker and the re-supply cargo freighter.
This time of the year is really the storm before the calm.
In the last few weeks of the season, the station population swells. We have several hundred more people here than we have had all season, which makes a huge difference when you normally only have several hundred people to begin with. Most of them are from a special cargo handling battalion the Navy sends us each year. But a lot of them are people either coming in for the winter or leaving Pole for the season (all U.S. off-continent flights go through us).
It seems like our tiny piece of civilization is now busting at the seams.
But very soon and very suddenly, the vessels will come in, the ships will be offloaded, and everyone will immediately start to leave.
Once McMurdo reaches the near-breaking point it quickly deflates down to the winter crew of less than 200. Those people will spend the next seven months keeping things running and awaiting the return of the sun and the rest of the program participants in October.
posted by Steven Profaizer @ 10:31 PM
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