A quick post unrelated to South Pole adventures.

I have just installed a new comment system on the site.  It should have a lot more features than the previous one.  One of the cool features is that you can respond to other people’s comments.  Next to every comment there is a reply link.  Just click on that and type away.  This also means that I can start responding to your comments directly.  Also, if you want to get notified by email if someone responds to your comment, there is a check box when you post that will do that.

Hope everyone enjoys it!  If something isn’t working right, just let me know.

A common question people ask:

“What are you doing after you leave the South Pole?”

The answer: Traveling the world!

The initial plan is to spend some time in New Zealand. IceCube pays for 4 nights of hotel in Christchurch, so I will definitely take advantage of that. On Feb 9th it is looking like I will head up to the mountains with a few other drillers. We will be taking a helicopter up to a remote cabin in the middle of the Southern Alps. Here is a map of its location and above is a picture from the air.  If you click on either picture, you should be able to see a bigger version.

After the trip to the mountains things are still in limbo.  The general plan is to fly to Brisbane, Australia to visit my friend Jack who is studying abroad.  Then fly to Singapore, take a train/bus to Phuket, Thailand to visit my friend Annie.  The train and bus system in SE Asia is very cheap, so I hope to travel around to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China if I can get a visa.  After that, who knows?

Of course if anyone wants to come join me in SE Asia there is an open invitation.  Getting there can be expensive from the US, but staying there is extremely cheap.

Along the way I will continue posting to this site, so look forward to many more updates.

Yesterday we didn’t have much to do in the afternoon, so I got to learn how to drive the Caterpillar 287 and 953.  The 287 is the smaller bobcat-style vehicle on the left, and the 953 is the large fork loader on the right.  They really aren’t hard to use when you get a little practice.  The 287 is a lot of fun.  I need to figure out how to get one for home.

I have added a little countdown to the right side of the website.   Only 5 days to go!  Many of the other drillers are gone now, and there isn’t much left to do.

Looking forward to:
Night sky
Not walking outside to go to the bathroom
70 deg temps
Different food.  Stuff here is pretty good, but it gets boring, need a change.
Humidity
Did I mention not walking outside to go to the bathroom?
Not waking up in the middle of the night because its freezing in your room.

Right now, every place in the world seems luxurious compared to
Antarctica.

Today was by far the coldest day since I have been here. Only about -25 F, but the wind was over 25 mph all morning resulting in -55 F wind chills and lower. Of course it came at the worst possible time. Today was the day that we moved the drill camp, so we spent almost all of it outside. Later in the morning it was blowing so much snow that we couldn’t see the station any more, and drill camp is only about ¼ mile away.

Moving camp involved brining in the big dozers and towing the building to the new location. We can tow up to 5 at once. The first dozer got stuck in a patch of really soft snow. We had to call in another bigger dozer to pull out the small dozer and all 5 buildings….at the same time. It was a pretty impressive sight.

The day was mostly spent hooking and unhooking tow hitches and chains. You can probably see why the weather was so harsh on our team. Frequently my baklava would freeze to a part of my face and I would have to rip it off. In addition my goggles kept fogging up on both the inside and the outside. The fog turns to ice nearly instantly, so you can’t just wipe it off. You have to jump in the van to warm them up, or try and scrape the ice off. Pretty soon, I just gave up and spent most of the day looking through a hazy ice layer and trying not to run into things or crash snowmobiles.

Hoping that today is better weather…