Trav's Travels: Summit Station, Greenland

6/4/16

Had a morning flight from Kangerlussuaq to Summit Station. It was cloudy in Kanger, so didn’t see anything on the 2 hour flight to Summit. We landed via the skis of the LC-130 and then had to walk about a ¼ of a mile in semi-deep snow to the main building on the station known as the Big House. Most people were huffing and puffing and even had to have other people carry their bags due to the altitude. Summit sits at 10,528ft above sea level (or about 2 miles high/twice as high as Denver), but at times the way the pressure works it has a realized altitude of above 12,000 ft. I had the chance to acclimate well having been visiting my parents at 8000ft and biking trail ridge road (12,500ft) with Elisha, skiing Longs Peak with my brother, and skiing at Hidden Valley, so I am really feeling no effects.

We had a briefing and lunch when we arrived, and were assigned our places to stay. There is a place called “tent city” which is where the short-term folks are staying, in tents of course. Elissa and I are in a building called the Greenhouse (b/c it’s painted green), which has 8 bunked rooms, a couple science labs, a small kitchen, and 2 toilets. There are only 5 toilets at the station (3 flush, 2 outhouses in the cold), so with the 48 people that are there now, you definitely have to wait in line to go to the bathroom, especially since the showers are in the bathrooms.

My roommate’s name is Thona, and he seems like a very nice guy. He’s the field research coordinator here. We met the other 3 techs—Hannah, Jason, and Marci—who will be training us for the turnover. Jason and Marci leave in a couple of days and Hannah will leave in August. They all seem very nice. I know Marci as she worked on the WISSARD project in Antarctica when I worked in Crary. There are a couple other people (Robin and Danny) that I know from the Ice and a couple of other people I recognize. The core group seems very nice and are all interesting characters. There are names of people here such as Dog, Storm, and Mouse if that tells you anything. I guess the nature of this place would bring interesting people.

There’s only 5 or 6 buildings on the station: Greenhouse (labs, lounge, small kitchen, medic room and sleeping quarters), Big House (kitchen, cafeteria, lounge, station manager’s office), TAWO (science building with air sampling, meteorological stuff, and NOAA things), SOB (Science and Operations Building...mechanic shop generator, snow melting, and balloon launch facility), MSF (mobile science facility...more science stuff), carpenter shop (shop and very lousy fitness room), Smurf building (blue and houses a backup generator), and the Caboose (rudimentary dorms). The 2 main buildings people hang out in are the Greenhouse and Big House. There’s a few tracked vehicles and snowmobiles around, and a very large snow runway.

The medic is a very nice guy who’s an RN at the University of Colorado’s med center and does some ski patrol work. He’s fun to talk to. He provides for free medicines and other medical things of all types from Tylenol to tums to condoms to Diamox to you name it.

Temperature upon arrival was 4F and -12F with windchill but otherwise sunny and nice.

6/5/16

On Sundays, generally food is help yourself from leftovers from the past week. However, since there are a lot of people here for this flight period, and it was our first day, the chef made a very yummy brunch with several quiches, salmon, several types of gourmet cheeses, special sausages, chicken tikka masala, and other tasty things. There were several people quite ill (nauseated and headache) still from altitude so the medic was going to give them oxygen.

Elissa and I went through some light turnover training today and people went through crosswords, which is a big deal here apparently

The Food:

This is a lot for Elisha since I know she’d be interested.

So far the food has been amazing. So far we’ve had chicken alfredo, chicken tikka masala, jambalaya, pad thai, shrimp, and steak. People say the food here is unbelievable and that they all get fat. As one guy said who’s been coming for years and years (known here as commander). “I tell people I come here for the food, but they don’t believe me”. Unlike McMurdo, food is available around the clock. We have access to leftovers as well as sandwich stuff, juices, milk, cereal, fruits, coffee, tea, hot cocoa at all times. They also have easy make things if we’d prefer like ramen noodles, canned food, and mac. They have sauces and condiments of all nature to use. There’s probably more I don’t know about, but that’s what I know about at the moment. They also have a big snack area with granola bars and then dried fruits of all sorts (blueberries, dates, raisins, apricots, cherries, ginger, etc). Also lots of seeds and nuts, which I was pleasantly surprised about (raw almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, peanuts, cashews, etc). Then there’s the drawer I call the Reg Guy drawer. It’s a massive drawer filled with chocolates of all types: snickers, kit kats, m&m’s, peanut m&ms, reeces pieces, hersheys.

The big house has a few plants, which is nice. If you remember, in Antarctica there could be no plants. There’s also a pretty big selection of books and games and a very extensive video library (in DVD’s and hard drive). There’s a few board games to pick from and even a guitar. I noticed they had some whiffle ball stuff and a soccer ball.

Interestingly on one of the fridge’s there is a Florida Gator magnet. Guess the gator nation is everywhere. Internet is highly limited here with bandwidth, so we can’t stream anything, video chat, or download big files. Even too much surfing can be bad. But luckily we are far enough south of the pole that we do have 24 hour internet b/c the satellites are always in view.

Of course it’s 24 hour sun here right now. It’s a huge flat snowland. The best way to describe it might be to imagine the ocean and then just to pretend the water is snow. Just endless white forever and ever to the horizon. And completely flat, except for little drifts (like waves).

Tonight we played trivia and my team won! And then we practiced launching a radio sonde (weather balloon)

6/6/16

More training today at TAWO. It's a 1/2 mile walk out to TAWO b/c it's in the clean air sector, so a couple options are to walk out, ski out, or ride a fat tire bike out. Today we had to pull a couple of sleds out there, and I got to ride one of the fat tire bikes and pull a sled, which was cool.

Today the wind was dead calm (and -8F) and the weather beautiful so I went for a ski on the snow runway. It was challenging b/c I'm out of ski shape, I'm at 10,500ft, the air is cold in the lungs, and they don't have skate ski boots in my size so I was trying to skate ski in regular nordic boots and regular nordic skis, which made it very difficult.

I think the job will be pretty good. Unfortunately I have this extra stress of writing the paper hanging on me that seems to be with me all the time. This job doesn't have standard hours We launch balloons at 8am and then again at 9:30pm. In between we're pretty busy but usually have some downtime after the 6pm dinner. But it's hard for me to think about fitting in some exercise, recovery from work, and working on the thesis. It would be fine if I was like the normal employee who spends the evening knitting, with a good book, or watching a show. So I guess we'll just see how it goes. My job also has tasking on Sunday, though it won't be crazy busy then I don't think