Tag: travel
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Cape Evans, Exterior
I have enough photos of the interior of the Cape Evans hut to fill twenty posts, but to get a good idea of the context for the hut, let’s do a little exploring outside, first. If you are standing facing the hut as in the photo above, the outward tip of Cape Evans is off…
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The Road to Cape Evans
Having done Sea Ice training at last, I was clear to head out on snowmobile. My coordinator’s intent had been to do a ‘shakedown’ one day – a practice run, to get used to the vehicles, how to load and tie down the sledge, a chance to get things wrong when it doesn’t really matter…
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Sea Ice: Crack Safety
Water ice is a curious material: though apparently a solid, it can nevertheless flow, bend, and wrinkle. The mile-thick Antarctic ice cap is very gradually flowing out to the edges of the continent, through the mountains in glaciers, and when those glaciers leave their channels they spread out like hot fudge (only much slower). Most…
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Sea Ice Basics
Antarctica is, as we all know, a continent of ice. But the ice isn’t just the ice caps and glaciers on the continent itself – it extends off the coast in all directions as the Southern Ocean seasonally freezes over. This fringe of frozen sea gives the penguins a place to escape their predators and…
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Arrival Heights
With the heavy schedule of trainings and breakfast meetings, I fought to get every ounce of sleep I could. Word on the street was that the light was much better for photography at ‘night’, when the sun was lower in the sky – the angle making the light warmer, and shadows longer and richer –…
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Discovery Hut Photo Tour
My first full day in Antarctica was the coldest of the whole trip. I noted in my journal that it was -4°F/-20°C – I don’t recall if that was with wind chill or without, but it was definitely windy that day, so you can imagine. The previous day’s flurries were still blowing around, so the…
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Induction McMurdo
Here’s the thing about arriving at McMurdo: It’s kind of like diving into your first week at college. You have a series of orientation sessions, a bunch of classes in different buildings with random numbers, and you meet a lot of new people with names and roles that are hard to keep straight, while also…
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Getting There
For such an enormous bird, the landing was admirably smooth, and once all post-landing checks had been completed, the hatch was opened. Long before we felt the cold, we could see our breath in the air, as the moisture levels in the cabin met the declining temperature. I had read about how stepping off the…
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The C.D.C.
The plan was that I would be on the flight from Christchurch to McMurdo on November 11th. The morning of November 10th, then, I had to be at the Clothing Distribution Center to be outfitted with my Extreme Cold Weather gear (hereafter known as ECW). A few months previous, I’d sent in my sizing for…
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Christchurch
Thursday, 7 November 2019 The last time I was in New Zealand, I was making what I thought was the trip of a lifetime. It was January 2018, and, assuming a trip to Antarctica was unlikely, this was the last gap I had to fill in my research. New Zealand being the jumping-off and landing…