Scavenger Hut Champions!

11/20/18
Did a field camp review of the camp at Cape Royds. We got back late and then I had a SAR practice on pulleys and mechanical advantage.

11/21/18

Did a field camp review at Lake Bonney. Got back late, but in time to make it to basketball!

11/22/18

We did crevasse rescue training for SAR. We went out on the glacier and found some actual real-life crevasses. We dropped a 180lb dummy into one of them and rescued it. We also sent each person into a crevasse with our big generator powered ice chipper, that we would use to help remove a person from a crevassen if the person had been 'corked'.  It was really cool looking into the big crevasses and going down into one. Beautiful ice. While I was down in the crevasse, a gian windstorm came up and nearly covered the crevasse back up! They said when the pulled me out, I looked like a giant sugar cookie with all the snow on me.

In the evening, Elisha and I joined Danny Gregory and his girlfriend Irene in the McM Scavenger hunt. There were clues, and we had a time limit to try and go out and find all these random weird items that are around Mac Town and then get a picture with them. Over the years, people have painted random things on buildings (ex scorpion with a saguaro) or built little metal figures that they've placed around (ex. turtles, penguin with a telescope, seal with a ball), or built other random things (ex. bird house on a telephone pole). Between the 4 of us, we had a lot of town experience and interest in the weird items around town, so we did really awesome, and ended up winning! The prize was free drinks at the bar and an Antarctic coozie.

11/23/18

I was given the morning off because of all of my late nights, so I spent the morning working on edits of my paper for Todd. In the afternoon, I volunteered with the galley to cut fruits and vegetables for the Thanksgiving dinner.

Received a care package from mom!! Yay & Thanks!

Castle Rock with Linnah

Crevasse Rescue Training

Inside a crevasse

Down in the crevasse looking up

Trivia Champions! Dodgeball Champions!

11/9/18

We went to Rob Robbins' surprise party at the chalet. It's his 40th consecutive year coming down here, so we were invited to a party celebrating this. It was fun and they brought out wine, beer, and fancy food for us, all on the house.

After the party we went to Gallaghers to watch some karaoke.


11/10/18

Tonight was the dodgeball tournament, one of my favorite events at McM. Unbelievably, my team managed to win the whole thing, going undefeated in the double elimination tournament, and beating the very serious cargo team twice.

After the dodgeball tournament, we went to gallaghers bar where 3 different bands played live music, including Wyn and his band. Wyn was Elisha's supply lead last year

11/11/18

We had wanted to do the castle rock trail after brunch, but because of incoming weather, we instead hiked the hut ridge loop. In the afternoon we went to the craft fair, but didn't end up buying anything. In the evening we had a date with Spring and Jerod to have dinner and then play Nintendo on Jerod's projector screen in his dorm room

11/12/18
We went to Extreme Abs with Ellie and then in the evening to open mic night with Mitch and Linnah. Some very talented musicians on station!

11/14

For work we did a field camp review of Big Razorback camp, the group from Montana State, and the one that has Lucas and my mutual friend, Jesse.

Tonight was basketball and trivia night. Trivia happens every 2 weeks, and we usually go a couple of times per season. Our good friend Linnah is moving on to a new position soon (on the research vessel), and she is who we have traditionally done trivia with, so we went. Our goal is to not get last, and we usually find ourselves in the bottom half of the group, unless we have some person that really knows pop culture and other useless info with us. Tonight was no exception. After the 7 rounds, we were in 6^th out of 11 teams. Other than one awesome round (name up to 10 Star Alliance members…star alliance is part of United, and who I used to fly with for Sapidyne), we only got a couple of answers each round. But then they did a bonus round that the top 5 teams couldn’t compete in. The round was name as many countries without an ‘a’ in their names as you can in 5 minutes. This is a forte of mine, and we got 27 of them, pushing us well into 1^st place! So we took home the big trophy!

11/15

Today was SAR day. We did some classroom activities and then went outside on a glacier to practice glacial travel (with ropes, crampons, and ice axes), crevasse crossing, and self-arrest. It was a beautiful day, and really great to be out hiking on the glacier.  After work, I ran the ob hill loop and Elisha walked it as she has been feeling under the weather.

11/16

They had put the obtube in last week (the tube that lets you climb down below the ice to look through the crystal clear aquarium of our little bay). A couple of people have already gotten stuck in it requiring a rescue by the firehouse, so we wanted to go down in case they closed it. As usual, it was beautiful. Lots of fish and some jelly fish. Elisha walked and I ran the ob hill loop again before a big going away dinner party for Linnah.

11/18

It was our first really beautiful weather day. No wind, sunny, and warm. I got lucky and won the rec lottery for a trip to cape evans and the cape evans hut. Since I will get to go to some cool places with my job, I ended up giving it Elisha, so she got to go and explore the area on a Hagglund trip. I ended up going for a ski to Castle Rock with Linnah and a guy named JB. It was such a beautiful day for a ski, and it was fitting to go with Linnah on her last day here as she was one of my adventure partners back in 2011.

One of my jobs is to collect and categorize invasive species, usually bugs that make their way on food or luggage. Here is a funny one about a spider found in air services cargo.

From:  Michael (Contractor)
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2018 5:20 PM
To: Spring (Contractor)
Subject: spider?

Were you able to determine any info about the spider we turned in to you? Species? Name? Did it live a good life? Did it leave behind many other spiders? 

From:Spring (Contractor)
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2018 8:39 AM
To: Michael (Contractor)
Subject: RE: spider?

So far it’s in the freezer – we often ID them in batches, so no specific info yet.

Her name was Harriet the spi-der, and, yes, she lived a wonderful life. She had always dreamed of traveling to McMurdo where her great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather once traveled to. She recalled her mother reading his letters aloud when she was young and marveled at his reports of a land where there are unending warehouses as far as the eyes can see with dark nooks and crannies completely free of cobwebs – an unspoiled fantasy frontier for any arachnid. The rest of her family insisted his tales were entertaining but apocryphal and that he was in fact living in a shack in the Australian outback, not Antarctica – but Harriet always believed that they were true. She died filled with satisfaction and wonder at finally confirming that her ancestor’s wild tales were true. She leaves behind 1,000 children and 1,000,000 grandchildren, some of whom live with your beloved friends and family who they are very fond of.

Hanging up in Gallaghers Bar

On top of ob hill

Dodgeball Champions!

Hut Ridge Loop Trail

Doing soil sampling for petroleum products

practicing self arrest

practicing glacier travel

our route up the glacier

my shoveling project: shoveled out a path through this drift for a fire exit

our trivia trophy

Search & Rescue

11/7/18

I got selected to be on the Antarctic search and rescue team. I'm excited for the opportunity because it's an honor, I'll get to learn some great skills, and help out the community. Search and Rescue is used anytime someone gets lost or there is an accident off of station. Some examples of recent search and rescues were scientists lost on Mt. Discovery, extraction of someone who fell in a crevasse, search for the location of a crashed plane. So we're basically trained in many Antarctic rescue situations. In the case of an emergency, we are all paged, we grab our gear, and then load onto either a helicopter or twin otter to fly to where the search or rescue needs to happen

 We had our first meeting last night where we were issued all of our gear: technical outerwear, big puffy coats and puffy pants, sleeping bags, mountaineering boots, crampons, snow stakes, ice axes, ice screws, snow saws, shovels, harnesses, ropes, climbing gear, radios, etc.

Tonight was also the first night of volleyball, so excited to be back into that. Basketball started last week, so we are back into the swing of things with sports. Mitch is still leading insanity and beach body workouts which we have affectionately coined Mitchbody, Body by Mitch, or Mitchsanity.

11/8/18

I had a full day of SAR practice. We spent most of the day outside near the crevasse simulator learning about anchor theory and doing pull tests for various anchors (pickets, deadmans, snow stakes), then we spent some time in the classroom learning about knots. One of the coolest parts was getting to drive in the new hagglunds. They're such cool vehicles. They can climb crazy steep slopes, go on high angled slopes without rolling, and can even float in water in the event you break through the ice.They're equipped with all kinds of radar for traveling in zero visibility conditions.

the 2 brand new Hagglund rescue vehicles

doing pull tests on snow anchors

building snow anchors

pull test of a deadman anchor

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Hagglund and Pisten Bully parking lot

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New Jobs in Antarctica

McM Week 1

21-Oct to 28 Oct.

This year at McM I made a position change. I gave up being an assistant supervisor of laboratory operations to become an environmental specialist. I’m excited for the change. Although I’ll miss all the people in Crary, I believe this job will give me the chance to get out in the field more, so I’m excited about that. My friend Spring is the environmental specialist lead and a gal named Laura is my supervisor. We all share an office together, and they are both hilarious and super nice. So there’s lots and lots of laughter! I really like them both a lot. Spring was one of my supervisors at shuttles back in 2011-12, and she helped me get the job at summit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she helped me get this job. I can tell (and Spring tells me) that Laura will be a great boss. Elisha also has a job change this year. She’s working in Carp supply instead of crary supply.

The first week was a lot of trainings: lab safety, snowmobile, pisten bully (snow cat), mattracks (a truck with snowcat tracks instead of wheels), etc. We had a couple of days that were truly Antarctic like. Super windy and low visibility. We had one day where the 3 of us walked through town to a training and all of a sudden all the buildings disappeared from view behind a white curtain of blowing snow. During the training when we walked out to do a walk around of the mattrack, a few people were blown over to the ground! I had trouble walking against the wind. A bit later while we were driving in the pisten bully, as we were driving with the wind, snow chunks and rocks were blowing past us from the wind, blowing faster than we were driving. At one point a rock came straight at us and smashed into the windshield. One of the girls ducked as it came right at us, before it smashed into the windshield, so we all laughed.

We've slowly been getting back into town activities. Elisha had some various get togethers at Hut 10 with friends she met while in NZ and an arts and crafts group. We also went to a very good open mic night.

We had a pretty chill weekend. Watched some football, worked on my paper, and went to a Czech Republic independence day party with pizza and cake that our friend Amy threw for one of her teammates who is from the Czech Republic.

If you’re curious about what my new job entails, here is the official line:

The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (The Protocol) and the Antarctic Conservation Act (ACA) as amended, 16 U.S.C. 2401, et seq. form the backbone of the Antarctic Support Contract (ASC) Environmental Work Plan actions.

Environmental stewardship includes providing environmental education to all deploying personnel, monitoring human impacts on the environment, reviewing selected field activities for compliance with environmental impact assessments, and contributing to oil spill response and reporting activities.

So under environmental stewardship, we also deal with: Waste management, spill prevention and pollutant handling, non-native species monitoring, remediation of impacted sites.  And under support for NSF environmental in meeting program regulatory requirements, we do: Spill reporting, end-of-season reporting, ASPA and ASMA management, and reporting to Master Permit

Additionally we test the town’s and field camps’ drinking and wastewater.  And then a bunch of other random things as I’m finding out.

Week 2

29 October

One of my duties is to do station water sampling once a month, so I learned how to do that this week. One of our other duties is to clean up and remediate spills in the environment (such as fuel or oil), but this week there was a large, 75 gallon sewage spill, so we are going to have to put on tyvek suits and go out and scoop the poop.

2 November.

Because the old airfield that they use for flights that go to and from the South Pole (Willy Field) was at risk of becoming an iceberg that calved off a glacier (the ice sheet that the airports sit on can move up to 1 foot per day), they removed the airfield this winter and built a new one several miles inland from the more temporary sea ice. So as environmental, part of the job is to go remove anything left so that it doesn't eventually end up in the ocean. So I went out with the airfields manager in a mattrack and used a sawzall to cut out all of the bamboo runway markers. It was a lot of fun being out their on the ice shelf sawing away with power tools. It's also so beautiful out there and such a cool feeling being on this huge, empty expanse of ice that is surrounded by distant mountains and frozen islands.

A letter we got from the Hazardous Waste lead thanking us for helping with the sewage spill:

To the Sewage Spill Team of November 2018,

It’s not in the dictionary, but for me a hero is someone willing to put on a Tyvek suit and shovel frozen sewage and still be smiling (most of the time).  You all represent the very best part of the McMurdo community.  It pushes the definition of “other duties as required”, but we got the job done together.

You all made McMurdo better last week (except for the awful poo-puns, but whatever it takes…). 

Thank you so much for your time and your muscles and your positive attitudes.

~Clair

L to R: Laura, Spring, and Me

Moving spill kits

sampling water

Laura giving the enviro brief

removing old flags at old Willy airfield

Moana and Maui

suited up for cleaning up the sewage spill

frozen sewage

marble point traverse

nacreous clouds