July 22nd – Day 202 on Ice

Posted byAllen FosterPosted inUncategorized

Well I’m embarrassed that it’s been so long since I posted on here. The combination of being busy combined with the internet coming up early has really made it tough for me to upload things on here… that or I’m just getting lazy. Either way, here’s a quick recap of the past few weeks!

Weather: We’ve had some really cold days, getting down to nearly -100F at one point (not quite there, yet, but close!). Mostly the temps sit between -65F and -85F with windchills that can reach down to -140F!

Two weeks ago, I had a really busy time because we were holding the South Pole Olympics (or the Polympics, if you will). The schedule for the event is posted below, but essentially took most of two weekends and every evening for the week between! Also during this week, the South Pole Telescope collaboration meeting took place – which was between 3am and 9am for 4 days that week. I had shifted my sleep schedule to accommodate the polympics and the meeting, and was sleeping from 12a-3am, then again from 10a-3pm ish. It was pretty brutal.

The South Polympics schedule. I participated in every event except for the unicycle events! Also from Wednesday to Saturday was the SPT collaboration meeting from roughly 3am-9am during the DSCS satellite pass.

There were a lot of fun events, including the ECW decathlon, which was all outside and required ECW (the Extreme Cold Weather gear). Temperatures were below -85F for the entire Decathlon, so it was pretty chilly. I’m in the process of collecting pictures and videos from the events to post here, but I don’t have them all together and/or edited yet. Below are some examples from some of the events:

The high jump event was a particular success! Lots of fun was had by all, and I ended up winning Gold with my 36″ jump! We fluffed up some snow on the backside of the jump so that we could fall onto our backs without killing ourselves.
The final decathlon event – Ski out to DSL and back! I did not do well in this, taking 3rd out of 4 participants. Here you can see myself behind the 2nd place person, and if you squint you can see the headlamp of the 4th place participant back near the DSL buildings.
Starting line for the 400m “dash”…. no one is dashing in ECW! I’m in the middle here, and came in 2nd in the event (out of 3).

But not all events were outside! There were many indoor events as well, including a lot of the team sports.

3v3 dodge-ball was one of the indoor events… I of course blew out my arm immediately, but pushed on to help my team win Gold!

Power lifting was another indoor event… in which I surprised myself because I never do heavy deadlifts. I got 2nd in percent-body-weight lifted.
One of the final, and most fun events was the South Pole “Curling”… which was played out more like shuffleboard, but Zane had made nice ice ‘stones’ to use by freezing brushes into the bottom of buckets.

All in all, the Polympics were very tiring but also very fun. It was a nice change up from the usual routine.

I have some awesome videos from some of the events – like the ECW hill climb (which was a tragic comedy), and badminton – which I need to edit before uploading.

And with that, I will hopefully return to a more regular posting schedule. I don’t take many pictures myself these days, so it’s a bit more difficult to get photos to make these posts more exciting.

Like just earlier this week, I was out greasing the telescope with a windchill of nearly -140F! Brr! that was cold, but there’s no good way to explain how cold it was on a blog :/

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