10/23/19
Today was the last day of our long 8 day work week. My boss let me go home after lunch and Elisha was feeling sick, so she also went home after lunch. The weather was beautiful, so I took a run around Ob Hill and then up Scott Base Pass. Then Elisha and settled down for a Christmas movie in the room.
After dinner, we headed up to the VMF (Vehicle Maintenance Facility) for the town Christmas party, which is always a blast. Elisha and I participated in the reindeer games competitions (horse shoes and corn hole), took photos with Santa, enjoyed the party finger food, watched the slide show of people that McMurdo misses (mom, dad, grandpa don, gismo, poppy, bro, and mnugz, and sherman all made it into the slide show), and then danced the night away once the DJ got going. We also went into one of the side rooms to enjoy musicians playing in the more mellow acoustic cafe.
Funny thing, there was a Christmas tree that Elisha made for our room 3 years ago. She stored it in Crary, but couldn't find it last year or this year. Her cousin who works at the VMF said he found a Christmas tree with "Kayser" on it while they were all decorating. Turns out it was her tree
10/24/19
Although it was tough for me to do, for the first time ever I skipped the somewhat miserable ob hill uphill. The weather was super gorgeous, so Elisha and I grabbed some snowboards from gear issue and headed for the hike up to Castle Rock with the plan of skiing down the backside to the Scott Base ski hill and then finishing the Castle Rock loop back to McM. It was so warm that we were really sweaty. We stopped in one of the Apples (red-colored emergency shelters) to sign the book and look back at all the other times we had written in the book. Always funny to see. The top of Castle Rock was amazing. Erebus was puffing, the Royal Society mountains were glimmering and it was so still that our ears rang with the complete silence. It was also so warm that you could sunbathe up on the rock without long sleeves.
After coming down from Castle Rock, we strapped on our snowboards to ski down the backside. It was a ton of fun with good snow from some recent storms. Elisha was even suggesting coming back out again after dinner (it's a bit of a hike to get out there, so that says how much she was liking it). When we got to the kiwi ski hill, there's a little narrow area that you maneuver through to avoid a flagged crevasse. I was at the bottom looking up at her when all of a sudden I saw one of her feet come clear of the board and she crashed. When she called out for help, I rushed up to see what had happened. She had hurt her knee, so I called over the radio to dispatch to get help for getting her out as we still had 3+ miles including a pretty good hill. As we were on a snow trail, it required a hagglund (a type of snow cat) to get her and the SAR team was called out. So after a bit less than an hour my SAR friends in the hagglund showed up and transported her to medical. The doctors did a quick look at it, but said they'll know more after the swelling goes down. Plus Christmas dinner was in 30 minutes, so no time for too much diagnosis.
Elisha felt really guilty have the SAR team called out on Christmas and having the EOC (emergency operations center) initiated, which means a lot of people around station get paged. However when the head of SAR, Loomy, found out I was on the scene and he could trust me when I said that Elisha was stable and on the trail (a lot of people lie I guess if they go off the trail and find themselves in the crevasse regions), he cancelled the EOC so that only 4 SAR team members came out and 2 stood by at the SAR base running incident command. In the end the SAR folks were pretty stoked to go out, and it's a good practice one being in good weather and with a non-critical patient. After Elisha was in medical, I stopped by the SAR IC to thank the guys and gals who had come out. Loomy was pretty excited saying he was going to write in his report that SAR had a 2 second response time, since I was there.
It's crazy how fast, in a town like McM, the news spread around town. Everyone seemed to have heard about it and everyone was asking me about Elisha or chatting her up as we went to Christmas dinner. SAR call outs are a pretty big deal and then seeing Elisha walking around with a big knee brace, people but 2 and 2 together.
Dinner, despite the circumstances was amazing. We had dinner with Elisha's cousin Henry and with some carps. One of the carps, Dave, is from Whitefish and knows the Bestwicks pretty well. There was a huge spread. As much lobster and crab as you can eat (though I laid off on the crab since I puked the last 2 years here on Christmas eve, and we wondered if it was the crab), beef tenderloin, seafood chowder, fresh salad, apple woldorf salad, and many other things. For desert there was cheesecake, many different types of chocolate truffles, chocolate bark, and several other types. And management bought everyone on station a glass of wine. During dessert we moved over the Mitch's table to enjoy some Christmas time with him and so the 2 crutched people could be together.
After dinner we mostly lied around, each of us icing our various body parts and watching the movies home alone and it's a wonderful life.
Today was the last day of our long 8 day work week. My boss let me go home after lunch and Elisha was feeling sick, so she also went home after lunch. The weather was beautiful, so I took a run around Ob Hill and then up Scott Base Pass. Then Elisha and settled down for a Christmas movie in the room.
After dinner, we headed up to the VMF (Vehicle Maintenance Facility) for the town Christmas party, which is always a blast. Elisha and I participated in the reindeer games competitions (horse shoes and corn hole), took photos with Santa, enjoyed the party finger food, watched the slide show of people that McMurdo misses (mom, dad, grandpa don, gismo, poppy, bro, and mnugz, and sherman all made it into the slide show), and then danced the night away once the DJ got going. We also went into one of the side rooms to enjoy musicians playing in the more mellow acoustic cafe.
Funny thing, there was a Christmas tree that Elisha made for our room 3 years ago. She stored it in Crary, but couldn't find it last year or this year. Her cousin who works at the VMF said he found a Christmas tree with "Kayser" on it while they were all decorating. Turns out it was her tree
10/24/19
Although it was tough for me to do, for the first time ever I skipped the somewhat miserable ob hill uphill. The weather was super gorgeous, so Elisha and I grabbed some snowboards from gear issue and headed for the hike up to Castle Rock with the plan of skiing down the backside to the Scott Base ski hill and then finishing the Castle Rock loop back to McM. It was so warm that we were really sweaty. We stopped in one of the Apples (red-colored emergency shelters) to sign the book and look back at all the other times we had written in the book. Always funny to see. The top of Castle Rock was amazing. Erebus was puffing, the Royal Society mountains were glimmering and it was so still that our ears rang with the complete silence. It was also so warm that you could sunbathe up on the rock without long sleeves.
After coming down from Castle Rock, we strapped on our snowboards to ski down the backside. It was a ton of fun with good snow from some recent storms. Elisha was even suggesting coming back out again after dinner (it's a bit of a hike to get out there, so that says how much she was liking it). When we got to the kiwi ski hill, there's a little narrow area that you maneuver through to avoid a flagged crevasse. I was at the bottom looking up at her when all of a sudden I saw one of her feet come clear of the board and she crashed. When she called out for help, I rushed up to see what had happened. She had hurt her knee, so I called over the radio to dispatch to get help for getting her out as we still had 3+ miles including a pretty good hill. As we were on a snow trail, it required a hagglund (a type of snow cat) to get her and the SAR team was called out. So after a bit less than an hour my SAR friends in the hagglund showed up and transported her to medical. The doctors did a quick look at it, but said they'll know more after the swelling goes down. Plus Christmas dinner was in 30 minutes, so no time for too much diagnosis.
Elisha felt really guilty have the SAR team called out on Christmas and having the EOC (emergency operations center) initiated, which means a lot of people around station get paged. However when the head of SAR, Loomy, found out I was on the scene and he could trust me when I said that Elisha was stable and on the trail (a lot of people lie I guess if they go off the trail and find themselves in the crevasse regions), he cancelled the EOC so that only 4 SAR team members came out and 2 stood by at the SAR base running incident command. In the end the SAR folks were pretty stoked to go out, and it's a good practice one being in good weather and with a non-critical patient. After Elisha was in medical, I stopped by the SAR IC to thank the guys and gals who had come out. Loomy was pretty excited saying he was going to write in his report that SAR had a 2 second response time, since I was there.
It's crazy how fast, in a town like McM, the news spread around town. Everyone seemed to have heard about it and everyone was asking me about Elisha or chatting her up as we went to Christmas dinner. SAR call outs are a pretty big deal and then seeing Elisha walking around with a big knee brace, people but 2 and 2 together.
Dinner, despite the circumstances was amazing. We had dinner with Elisha's cousin Henry and with some carps. One of the carps, Dave, is from Whitefish and knows the Bestwicks pretty well. There was a huge spread. As much lobster and crab as you can eat (though I laid off on the crab since I puked the last 2 years here on Christmas eve, and we wondered if it was the crab), beef tenderloin, seafood chowder, fresh salad, apple woldorf salad, and many other things. For desert there was cheesecake, many different types of chocolate truffles, chocolate bark, and several other types. And management bought everyone on station a glass of wine. During dessert we moved over the Mitch's table to enjoy some Christmas time with him and so the 2 crutched people could be together.
After dinner we mostly lied around, each of us icing our various body parts and watching the movies home alone and it's a wonderful life.
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| Castle Rock and Erebus in the background |
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| Erebus smoking |
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| binding that broke off mid turn |
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| the patient |
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| messages to my pager |
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| our decorations |
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| Elisha and her cousin, Henry |
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| Elisha, me, and Nate |
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| funny green screen shots from the helo party in mid december |
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| Nate, Elisha, and me frmo fun green screen shots at helo hangar |
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| melt pools on ob hill loop |
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| apple warming hut |
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| previous entries in the Apple hiker log |
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| kiwi hagglund |
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| Elisha's plate |
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| my Christmas plate |
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| henry, elisha, and me |
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| Elisha's post Christmas plate |
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| my post Christmas plate |
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| my dessert plate |
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| the 2 gimps and me |
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| Kiefer, Elisha, me, Mitch, Tyler, and Carrie |
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