Feb 14th – Day 46 on Ice

Last day of Summer!!

The last LC-130 flight will take the remaining few summer crew people out in a few hours (mostly fire-crew who needed to stay here to bring in the LC-130s). Yesterday more than 60 summer people left, and the station is now preparing to move into winter schedule.

The weather has been getting colder over the past week as well, and we’ve had some steady winds keeping the windchill quite cold. Today we were nearly at -40F with windchill down near -70F.

As we move into winter, the station feel is much different. Obvious differences are the lack of people, the quiet hallways and galley, and the lack of heavy machinery driving around outside. The attitude of those left behind is general excitement to begin the winter. There are tons of rec activities planned already, including, of course, the annual start of winter tradition of watching The Thing – a movie about an alien shape shifter taking over an Antarctic research station. Something I’m excited about is the so-called South Pole Triple Crown; a fitness goal for the winter season where we strive to complete 3 fitness challenges (see image below).

The three activities, to be completed before station open in November, include:

Distance: Running, biking, rowing, or stair-climbing to McMurdo, which is a distance of 835 miles; approximately 3 miles per day assuming 250 days.

Weight: Lifting the equivalent weight of what the LC-130’s brought to South Pole this summer (something like 1.75 Million lbs), which amounts to about 7000lbs per day assuming 250 days (which is actually not that much, though it seems like it).

Elevation: Climbing the elevation equivalent of Mt. Everest using the stairs in ‘The Beer Can’, which is basically a cylindrical aluminum stairwell that runs from the station down to the arches underneath the ice. 542 beer cans — about 2 per day assuming 250 days.

Running on the treadmill is the worst… so we will have to see if I can adapt. I imagine outside running will become very difficult once the groomed paths blow over with snow, it gets dark, and the temperatures continue to drop.

Anyway, that’s about it for now. We are awaiting the last flight to leave before we can officially celebrate the beginning of winter with The Thing!

Since the sun is still up, it doesn’t feel much different from Summer, just a bit quieter, and I’m not jammed in a corner of the SPT area in the B2 science lab 🙂