Trav's Travels: July 2016

7/13

The first flight of the July flight period arrived today bringing with it 17 high school students from a program called JSEP. It also brought with it 7 or so teachers/chaperones. 5 of the students are from the USA (Alaska, Alabama, New York, California, and ??), 5 are from Denmark, and 7 are from Greenland. It's a big jump in station population and I think we now sit at 54 people. The clinic has been busy as several are suffering from AMS (acute mountain sickness).

Most of the people here are hiding and laying low, but I really don't mind the kids. They bring good energy and excitement to the station, and they've been fun to talk to and hear their stories. I've had to give a couple tours to them and also show them the balloon launching. I don't necessarily know the history of the group, but they've been coming up for a few years. It's some joint venture between the US, Denmark, and Greenland to get underprivileged kids up here. They also spend a couple of weeks in Kanger. I don't necessarily know what underprivileged means in this context b/c I don't think it's necessarily poverty (they all have iphones! or am I the weird one without one?). I think it might be more not having as good of resources in school. Like the Alabama girl (with strong southern accent) told me that she lives in a tiny rural area and her high school has no AP courses. So maybe if you are attending Heron, MT high school you'd be eligible! Anyways, if you're interested, you could google JSEP Greenland and probably find out much more.

They have some classes here taught by 2 grad students from dartmouth and then they are also working on research projects. I heard them talking about residuals in data analysis. Pretty advanced! I'm working on dealing with heteroskedasticitic residuals in my own data right now! But I probably didn't hear about residuals until I was a sophomore or junior in college in stats or biostats class.
One of the greenlandic kids told me I looked like Hugh Jackman and asked to me to take a photo with him. I've heard I look like Dexter, Markey Mark, Jim Carey, and a better looking Jim Carey, but that's a new one. When I told him people often say I look like Dexter, he got very excited and said oh yea! He told me Dexter is one of Greenland's favorite shows, but that it is not for the soft of heart.

The flight also brought some packages for me. A very sweet package from Elisha which included a mug she had decorated with Idaho/Montana stuff. And also some nose warmers she had made for the cold weather skis and snowmobiles here. Amazon was also generous and sent me some new headphones that fit well over all my layers keeping my face warm, a hard drive to put all the hundreds of terabytes of movies on they have here, 180 pieces of trident gum, and Hip Hop Abs! Soon it will be too cold to enjoyably exercise outside and have piece of mind of not getting frostbite, so I'll be moving indoors for exercise. So figured hip hop abs might be fun. Word on the street is Elisha likes nice abs...
Kaija, our former station managers sent tons of candy (like we need anymore) and lots of magazines.

7/15
For lunch we had really tasty greek food with some sort of lamb meat. For dinner we had shrimp, chicken, and sausage paella.
Today we did our monthly iceSat traverse, which is always fun b/c it's out on the snowmobiles. We took my roommate Thano along as well b/c we had to pull and raise the flags for winter as well. On the way home we had a little fun. We rigged up a cargo strap and Thano pulled me behind the snowmobile on my xc skis (Montucky style). We got up to 70km/hr, which was pretty fast on xc skis

7/16

As I'm the assistant medic I have to give presentations at our weekly ERT (emergency response training). I gave my talk on Temperature related Environmental Safety Issues: Hypothermia, Frostbite, Non-freezing cold injuries, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. IT went really well (I included lots of funny pics including several from frozen, Ralphie from A Christmas story, and some others). My favorite picture was for signs of hypothermia. One is called the Umbles (fumbles, stumbles, and mumbles). I had a picture of the mumbly girl from Pitch Perfect, a picture of a horse stumbling head over heals after going over a jump and a picture of Cam Newton fumbling due to pressure from Denver Bronco Von Miller. As I said in my slide show "They should have checked Cam Newton for hypothermia in the superbowl b/c he was fumbling a lot" I opened the slideshow up with a little dance to Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" Several people told me it was the best safety presentation they had ever seen

I posted in the slides from the power point at the end of the blog in case you're interested in learning about heat related issues

I was officially labelled the "hottest" person on station. Do you agree Elisha? haha. One of the grad students brought up this infrared gun for his research. One of the student research groups used it for their mini project. They measured the outside (radiant skin) temperature of everyone at the galley, and I had the warmest skin of anyone on the station by 4F.

For dinner we had prime rib and the best dessert so far. A raspberry/rhubarb/apple crisp! deliciosa! So sour and tasty!

In the evening since we had so many kids, I organized a soccer game in the newly constructed SMG building, which is still empty. It's cold and not heated, but out of the wind. I got a good crowd and even convinced Danny, Bo, and Denni (French scientist) to come play. In the later evening we fired up the sauna and enjoyed some of the freshly brewed hard cider that Elissa and K-dub had made.

7/17
The kids left today and as a goodbye, Kathy made a huge brunch with salmon, special cheeses, different quiches, and huevos rancheros among other things

Got some more packages in today. Mom sent me more burt's bees lip balm than I know what to do with! haha. Also we got TONS more candy from lots of people. We definitely don't need anymore candy. Why can't someone send some margaritas, mojitos, or baileys! Elissa got some packages in from her mom and sister. Her mom sent her 4 big brewing kits and her sister sent her what appears to be an entire Trader Joe's store.

Worked a lot on my statistics today and also ran a 10k on the runway.

7/19
Our freezer trench (a 10 foot trench built down in the snow) is starting to get old, so the carps dug out a new one to store our food. They finished yesterday, so today we helped move 5000 pounds of food out of the old trench and into the new one.

We had some leftover liquid nitrogen so Hannah and I made liquid nitrogen icecream. I made an icecream with snickers, reeces, and kit-kat in it, just like a DQ blizzard. I also made a peanut butter icecream. Hannah made french vanilla and mango. Dinner was bbq ribs.

After dinner I gave an hour long talk on my master's research and my bighorn sheep research. It wasn't too sciencey. A lot about the places. I think it was very well received. I got lots of very positive comments about it afterwards, including this nice email from John, the nols guy.

"Thanks Travis for sharing the stories and photos of your field work. The cultural and ecological exposure must be wonderful memories. I'll be curious to hear more about your conclusions when you've evaluated your data and when we cross paths again. I really enjoyed the candid photos- they remind me of that book "Cry of the Kalahari" that we discussed- I think you'd enjoy it for some related but lighter reading.

See you mañana,

Js"

I found out recently that John has climbed Mt. McKinley several times. He also knows tons about avalanche stuff and could name off all of these important avalanche book. And he knows Zach's advisor Carl. John attended CU for a bit, but ended up getting his degree from UW-Madison as he is from Wisconsin originally.

7/20
Bill Nye (the science guy) is visiting greenland right now, which is kinda cool. Some of the carps were supposed to leave on a flight today and the rest tomorrow. Well bad weather cancelled the flight today and also cancelled the flight for tomorrow. When it was announced on the radio, a lot of carps chipped in with sad sounds. But the station manager said, "if it makes you feel any better, Bill Nye also won't be getting home on time either" Danny piped in over the radio "you should have led with that"
Lunch today was fish tacos and dinner was yummy Indian food

7/21

Today was an insanely warm day. It never got above freezing, but it felt super warm b/c the sun was strong and there was no wind. We quit work an hour early to throw the frisbee around in our t-shirts. On my ski today I skied in shorts and t-shirts.

Lunch today was grilled halibut and dinner was chicken fried steak and huge portabello mushrooms. I made more liquid nitrogen ice cream again today. Today the flavors I made were mint chocolate chip, rocky road, and musk ox trax (similar to moose trax)