Erebus Air Guitar

<> It’s hard to believe that I’ve been on the ice for an entire week already. McMurdo is a surprisingly active little town, with probably around 1,000 summer inhabitants. McMurdo station is one of two permanent stations on Ross Island, the other being the kiwi station on the other side of the island (about 2km away) called Scott Base. There’s a very nice little hike to the top of the nearest hill, called Observation Hill (or Ob Hill for short), from where you can see both McMurdo and Scott. In the photos above you can easily recognize Scott because for some reason the kiwis insist upon painting everything chartreuse. Go figure. Taking a step back, I think it will just take some time to get settled and used to this place, which so far has a funny resemblance to summer camp… a bowling alley and 3 bars with 1$ MGD's - and no supervision. Oh yea, did I mention the 24hrs of sun…that is definitely weird.
Tuesday November 16^th and the 17^th I participated in the USAP (U.S. Antarctic Program) cold-weather survival training. We left McMurdo first thing in the morning, fully dressed in our ECW (extreme cold weather) gear, and since it wasn’t –40 in the vehicles, it goes without saying I was sweating my ass off. That’s a great way to start off a couple of days outside in Antarctica – overheated and wet. The training was fairly basic with respect to the classroom skills – mostly about hypothermia and frost bite – but was also extremely useful from the perspective of learning how to use the old WWII-era HAM radio (with antennae which unfolded to lengths of several meters), comm. protocols, and, most importantly, where to watch out for crevasses. After classroom training, it was time to be dropped off in the field, although we were still in the near vicinity of Ross Island and could actually see over to Scott Base (the nearby Kiwi base). This is where the real fun began.
Ice time began with hauling our equipment (snow shovels, ice saws, ice axes, a Scott tent, stoves and a box of Korean War ear food rations – no shitting here, most food was expired by at least several years) out to the McMurdo Ice Sheet where we would spend the night and most of the next day. Here we learned to construct two different types of ice&show shelters, a Qunizee Hut and a more typical igloo. The quinzee is essentially a large snow mound constructed by piling up most of your gear (sleeping bags, clothes, etc…) and shoveling 3ft of snow on the sides of top of the equipment. Pack it down, pull out the gear from a small hole on one side, and there you have a small hollowed out snow mound. To keep warm, fill in the small hole where you removed your gear, and dig a separate entrance from outside the hut and enters the cavity of the mound from the bottom. Remember, heat rises, so the entrance from the bottom doesn’t allow much of the heat to escape, keeps the wind out, and also keeps it relatively dark inside so we could get a little shuteye. The only problem, after building this frickken snow cave, which isn’t easy, the last thing I felt like doing was finishing it off by tunneling into it by digging a 4-ft hole to come in from the bottom of the hut. As tho anyone in their right mind would take the time to build a Quinzee hut in the middle of a blizzard…well, at least it’s one way to stay warm. Nonetheless, others choose to build the more traditional igloo by carving out blocks of ice, which was honestly a lot easier. As you can see from the photos above, they even had the time to build a front porch and television. Fortunately going to the bathroom wasn’t too difficult out here due to the nice little outhouse on the ice shelf. Speaking of… we all felt we needed to come up with a more interesting name for the shitter on the ice, so I began telling the group about this guy I knew back in NC, and after a couple anecdotes…well, to make it short, these structures - lonely, isolated, and totally lacking in character - are now known as HutsonHuts, after this UNC grad student (who used to be a cool Duke student and now wears brightly colored tights during his pilates and yoga classes and is an avid women's college basketball fan) shares these very same qualities. I'm so glad that guy is about 17 time-zones away.
The rest of the evening went very smoothly, with great temps (in the 20’s!) full sun and no wind. We had the time and energy left to take a walk around the area and take a couple pics in front of Mt. Erebus, the big-ass volcano (12,000ft) that is wholly responsible for the existence of Ross Island. That’s pretty much all for now, next week I’m off for some exploring up the coast to Cape Evans, home to the famous Scott Expedition Shelter of 1910. So tune in next weekend for some pictures of tongue lunch, canned cabbage and anchovy paste from last century.