Trav's Travels: It's like taking a shower and getting an icecream headache

10/17
I mentioned in the last post that Marie made mac n cheese. I forgot to tell a sort of funny story with it. I asked her what kind of cheese she put it in (cheddar, monterey jack, and blue). She asked me if I had a special recipe. I said, yes of course. Kraft scooby do with extra milk! For some reason the surface area of the noodles of the scooby do ones is just perfect. The other cartoon ones (like spongebob) aren't bad either. The regular noodles can't compare! Nate groaned in appreciation. He is a fellow lover of kraft mac n cheese. Storm said "you probably don't want to know what they put in that stuff" And Nate said, I do know what they put in it...they put in DELICIOUS!" I told them that I'd have to tell Elisha that

10/18

Nate made split pea soup and he baked bread bowls for each of us to put the soup in, which was cool. He also made a peanut-butter, graham, and chocolate pie

Some pretty decent auroras the last couple of nights, but b/c there is a full moon, they aren't as brilliant as they would be in complete darkness.

10/19
30 knot winds were back. We went into Condition 1 again. B/c there is a potential for a plane tomorrow (not with this wind!), I needed to clean and defrost all the weather instruments on the tower so that the plane can have accurate readings for a safe landing. It was interesting climbing the tower in near zero visibility and 25 knot winds. The tower sways back and forth!

Things got really crazy in the late afternoon. We had sustained winds up to 60 knots (70mph). We had to go in pairs everywhere (for example, we had to go get nate from the SOB so storm and I had to go together to get him and then Elissa and Storm had to take me to the bighouse so I could start cooking), and we made a rescue line to hold onto between the greenhouse and bighouse.

The wind and the amount of snow it was carrying was incredible. In just a short walk from the greenhouse to the bighouse, my face was completely plastered by snow. It didn't matter than normally my face would melt it, so much snow was coming that it completely covered my face. So when you'd get inside, you'd be soaking wet. I described it as a shower with an icecream headache. At times it was hard to see more than a couple of feet in front of you, and it was a fight when you were going against the wind. We all had to use a lot of teamwork and communication to make sure we all stayed safe.

I was the cook for the night, and I made salmon cooked in butter with basil and garlic and also mahi mahi with a lemon, basil, garlic, butter sauce to put on top. I also made mom's yummy pepperoni pizza pasta and for Marie I made broccoli pizza pasta.

The night balloon launch was wild b/c of the wind. But also getting from the greenhouse to the SOB was pretty wild. The SOB has a light on it, so you can see it, but I couldn't really see what I was walking on in between there. Sometimes I'd be walking and I'd run face first into an 8 foot drift or I'd find myself climbing a large drift. It was very much like an obstacle course in the dark. We did lose one balloon to the wind, but managed to get a successful one off.

10/20

When we woke up, we were still in condition 1, which means they cancelled the flight and we weren't supposed to travel out of buildings except for when completely necessary. Of course with the strong wind, the weather system went down, which is a key thing to have when hoping for flights. So I had to brave the wind and conditions to make it out to the 50m tower to get the weather instruments back up and running. While I was doing that the others watched a movie and ate popcorn in the greenhouse. After I fixed the weather suite, the NOAA folks in Boulder emailed a thanks and wrote "It's good to hire someone from Estes that knows how to deal with the wind"

The drifts are piling up around the greenhouse, and it won't be long before the thing is covered! There are a couple of 10+ drifts out there and some people have drifts completely covering their windows. Some of us had small cracks in our rooms and we were getting drifts INSIDE our rooms.

Been a pretty wild couple of days for sure!!

Elissa made a chicken thai curry, which was tasty and then some sort of almond ginger cookie.

I posted a couple videos at the bottom that show the condition 1. Hopefully they work. Our internet may have been too slow here to load them correctly. Not sure