March 27th – Day 88 on Ice

Weather: Windy and overcast, temperatures near -65F, winds up near 20mph keeping the windchill down below -100F. The pressure altitude has been pretty high over the last few days; above 11000 ft.

We got our winter-over numbers yesterday; I’m number 1581. This means that (including this year) there have only been about 1600 people to have wintered at the South Pole. Some more facts and population breakdown can be found here:

https://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/wo.html

It’s a pretty humbling number. I’m one of only 0.00002% of the population of people on Earth to winter-over at the South Pole. To put that into perspective, THIS YEAR 891 people reached the summit of Mt. Everest, and a total of 565 people have flown in space!

So far, our winter-over group has not had any problems and seems to be a tightknit group of respectable folks! Hopefully I feel the same way in 6months… I suppose they don’t call it ‘Stabby September’ for nothin 😛

With the disappearance of the Sun, snow is starting to build up on the outsides of the buildings. This really gives the quintessential ‘cold place’ movie look. It feels almost surreal, looking at the buildings, like I’m on the set of such a movie. But as the station manager likes to say “There’s death outside”, which is really true as windchills are consistently below -100F, even in full ECW you feel the cold begin to seep in before too long.

Today we had an Emergency Response drill, with all-hands participating. Things seemed to go well, and in the debrief we were commended on how smooth it went. Unfortunately, since I missed the fire and medical training before coming to the ice, I was not able to be on either of those teams (though, I probably wouldn’t be able to handle medical team… I hate hospitals!). I am now on the logistics team, which helps provide the fire or medical teams with anything they need; in today’s case we provided a spill kit to contain and clean up the hypothetical spill which caused the emergency.

Tonight is volleyball night; which usually goes for about 2-3 hours and I inevitably dive too much and get skinned knees. Before then I have to get to the climbing gym to keep working on one of the routes, and to do my 7000lbs of lifting for the day. According to my marathon training schedule, I also have to run 2 miles today (which wouldn’t be hard, but I hate the damned treadmill so much!!).

Cheers!