Happy Camper School, with a special surprise.

Hello All.

Today's post was to be all about my time at Happy Camper School, the nice weather we have been experiencing, and the fact that Mainbody starts next week. Well today's topic has changed.

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week myself and 10 other newbies attended Happy Camper School. It is a school on how to survive outdoors in Antarctica with the survival gear provided in any vehicle that you can take out of town. So kind of like camping in Yosemite just 100 degrees colder.



Here is a photo of our camp. The tent is a Scott tent and in the front you can see the snow wall that we made to protect our mountaineering tents. Please take note of the vehicle that you see. It is a Nodwell, and it will be the focus of our story very soon.

So we had survived the night outdoors without any major incident and we packed up came to head back to MacTown. On our trip back in the Nodwell we had 2 instructors and 2 stundents riding in the cab of the vehicle and 9 of us riding in the passenger box in the rear. We were headed up the long hill from Scott Base which is allot like Warner Hill road above the RR tracks (if you are not from South Wales, imagine a very long gradual climb) when at the top of the hill we had a problem. The driver was just starting to make the turn at the top of the hill when the vehicle stopped and then we started to back up. Us in the back thought this was odd, but we didn't see a problem with it yet. After a few seconds, I looked out the window and saw us rolling backwards across the shoulder of the road and not stopping. Well after that things only got much worse. We suddenly dropped off of a 20 foot embankment, followed by another, and another, and another. Each one seemed to get larger time and time again. After what seemed like an eternity we came to a very sudden stop. All nine of us were piled up in the back of the Nodwell and beat up pretty good.

After about 1/10th of a second we started to check to see if everyone was alright and we quickly determined that two people couldn't move themselves. So someone opened the rear door to get out of the Nodwell, and as soon as they did we realized our next major problem. We were on the edge of another 75 foot cliff. So we couldn't get out the door. So someone found the roof hatch and jumped onto the roof. Each time someone moved the vehicle rocked back and forth, this was not reassuring at all. We were very certain that we didn't want to take another drop. The first round was more than enough, and this one we could see how high it was. So, everyone got out but myself and the two injured people. That took about 45 seconds and then one of the instructors got onto the tracks to get in (he is a Physicians Assistant back in the states), I had him knock out a window to make an access hole to get the injured people out. He got the first person out while I checked out the second. We quickly make a splint out of some tent stakes that we had and then we got the second person out. The entire time we were worried about how stable the vehicle was. As we got the second person onto the roof of the cab, the Fire Department arrived and help get him off of the cab and prepared to go to the hospital. The rest of us were taken to the firehouse to warm up and be checked out.

So we later found out that we dropped about 4 times and about 150' and the sudden stop was when we struck an empty above ground fuel pipeline. So, after 19 years of arriving just after the accident with the Fire Company, this time I got to experince it first hand. And hopefully I can go another 19 year at least before I have to go through it again. Everything is under investigation here, and so I am not going into great detail, but one preson that went to the hospital is off of work for a few days maybe up to a week. And the second person has a leg injury and he is flying out Tuesday on the first flight to Christchurch for futher examination of his injuries. But nothing was life threating for either.

This photo is a side view of the hill. We came from the top left side of the photo, and we stopped right where you see the pipeline crest over the ledge on the right side.



This shot is front the very bottom. The pipeline at the edge is where we were wedged.



I escaped with only a burise on my calf. So I was very lucky. Everyone was quite sore for the next few days, and we have become a pretty close group of friends all of the sudden. We have gotten together several times to talk about everything and we will be finishing the classroom part of Happy Camper school on Tuesday this week. So, this wasn't part of the big danger of being in Antarctica, it was just a vehicle accident that could have happened anywhere, it just happend to be here and in a funny looking vehicle.

So that is it for now. I'll resume my whitty story telling next week. And everyone enjoy the weekend. And maybe stay out of tracked vehicles for a little while.
R.J.

Condition 2 (Not Code 2 Jeff)

Well we were in Condition 2 for two full days this week. And both days we were very close to going to Condition 1. Read on, you will understand what this means in a minute. And no Jeff it doesn't mean that we were driving around using lights and sirens. Here is the definitions of the three weather conditions in McMurdo:

Weather Condition III: which is defined as having winds less than 48 knots, wind chills warmer than -75 F, and visibility greater than 1/4 mile. This is to be considered the normal weather condition in McMurdo.

Severe Weather Condition II: which is defined by one or more of the following conditions: wind speeds of 48 to 55 knots sustained for one minute, wind chills of -75 to -100 F sustained for one minute, or visibility of less than 1/4 mile sustained for one minute.

Severe Weather Condition I: which is defined by one or more of the following conditions: wind speeds greater than 55 knots sustained for one minute, wind chills colder than -100 F sustained for one minute, or visibility of less than 100 feet sustained for one minute.

Don't you like that, wind chills about -75F are considered normal conditions here! So this week we had two days of snow, actual snow falling out of the sky not just snow blowing around, and winds that were in the 35 to 45 knot range consistantly. So visibility was very limited. Day one, which was Wednesday, was like a good storm in Buffalo. It was quite windy and the visibilty was down to 100' but walking from the shop to the galley for lunch wasn't too bad. Did I mention that along with the storm came warm temperatures. I was between 10F and 20F on both days. A very nice change.

On day two, when I left the room in the morning headed to the galley I actually stopped at the corner of my building to see if I wanted to go out into the wind. It was blowing so hard I actually had second thoughts about going outside. Visibility was down to 25' at that time. It was a very interesting day.

So, what happens when Cond. I or II is called. Well Cond. III is normal so you can travel by foot or vehicle any where on in McMurdo without checking out. If you go out into the field or onto the sea ice, you have to checkout with the fire house and give a headcount and a time of return. When we go to Cond. II only essential vehicle travel is allowed in McMurdo and any foot travel is suggested to be in pairs. So not much of an problem, just some commonsense stuff. When Cond. I is called NO travel is allowed outside at all without station managment approval and an escort by the SAR team (Dearch and Rescue). So if we went to Cond. I at any point you have to stay in the building that you are in until the weather changes. So if you are at work during a Cond. I this is bad. In your dorm, this is good; in the galley, this is great.

But we survived the storm without and Condition I in McMurdo. However it was Condition I on the sea ice every night this week, so the second shift crew of equipment operators had the entire week off. This put a dent into the airfield preperations. So it is now Sat. night and the operators are out working tonight.

Mudaholic meet Iceaholic

Mud sucks; Ice is where it is at. For those of you that haven’t seen a Mudaholic, you will have to trust me when I say that it is slightly less menacing looking than this Delta. And it is allegedly street legal in NY.



Stumpy, try to beat 66x44’s. You might have to do a little fender work to get these under them.

So this is an example of a Delta. This particular vehicle is a Delta II; we also have Delta III. The question of the day is: what is the difference between a Delta II and a Delta III. We will have the answer on the next session.

We have lots of Deltas. They are used for fuel trucks, cargo trucks, personal carriers, and anything else that you can bolt onto the back of a truck. The Delta III has to be 50’ long. They are very impressive when you pull one of them in the shop. They articulate in center for steering, and they are old Navy spec. vehicles and so they are very simple inside. I am going to be a Delta driver for the rec. department during Mainbody. They use these for field trips out to points of interest out on McMurdo Sound. I will post more about my Delta driving when I know more about the job.



Well the weather has been much warmer here this week. However it has been quite stormy to go along with the warmth. Today it was 18F with light winds which was enjoyable to be outside in. I was outside for a while today doing jumpstarts on several vehicles, so I was able to enjoy the weather. However, we have had two storms come through in the last two days. We had snow and 50mph winds yesterday during the afternoon and the evening. And tonight at dinner time the winds and the snow came back for another storm.



Here is a shot of some of the vehicles that we will be digging out soon. We have many of military 5 tons. We actually have one as a shop truck. They are used allot during ship unload in January to move the containers.



We are two weeks away from the start of Mainbody. WINFLY is actually fairly nice because things are fairly quiet and you don’t have to spend much time in line for anything. Computer time is easy to get, and you don’t have to wait in line in the Galley for dinner. But once the crowd gets here we will have more activities and we will get mail and fresh food regularly. And to answer some fan mail, we had ‘freshies’ for the first week down here and the second week we were down to a few ‘freshies’ and now we have basically none. Freshies are any fresh fruit and vegetables. So we haven’t had much for bananas, oranges, salads, etc. lately. Our meals are pretty good here, there is always two choices for a main entrée and lots of cold and hot selections. Most entrees have a sauce on them. Mostly to cover up the fact that you are eating year old food that has been frozen all winter. So we are looking forward to mainbody for some new food. We have a shipment of chocolate and tea coming from Buffalo right now. That should keep us for a while.

And this week we will be participating in the station MCI drill. Paula and I will both be assigned to the Medical Auxiliary. Basically we will be acting as EMT’s in the event of a large station emergency. So we will get to play in the firehouse on Friday. That will be interesting.

That’s all for now.
R.J.

WELCOME BETH

Are you happy now? I have no clever story for you. We have three bars here and no bank, but we do have an ATM machine.

WELCOME BRIAN!!!

Today's post is to Welcome Brian Greeson to our blog. Many of you don't know who Brian is, and those of you who do know him really don't care whether or not Brian reads it. But I wanted to thank him for taking time out of his day. Brian requested a segment on Ice Fishing. Well, if I were to go out onto the sea ice and drill a hole for ice fishing I would likely be escorted off of the continent on the first flight. (Oct. 3) So, I will show you where I was on the ice this morning and most of the afternoon.





Right here the ice is about 6 feet thick. It is on the road to the Ice Runway. I was out there installing two Detroit Diesel generators in a hut somewhat like the ones you see in the photo. So as you can imagine it would take a fair amount of time to drill that distance through the ice. But I bet there are fish down there. And I am sure that the beakers (scientist) will be out there drilling holes once main body gets here to go diving. But I doubt they bring any catch up to the Galley for dinner. But there was beer battered fish for dinner the other night.

Well Brian, I hope you enjoyed your post. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as you should. I know Jamie will because I included a photo of snowmobiles.

Tomorrow we will return to our regularly scheduled blog.

Thanks for listening.
R.J.

A fun Saturday in the shop, for everyone.

Our shop has three shifts. The day and night shifts are working five 12 hours days right now M-F. And my shift is currently working six 9 hours days M-Sat. And Paula is on 5 twelves but she is Tues.-Sat. So it is a strange arrangement, but it works. On Friday nioght at the end of the week for the ice runway crew, they bring all of the Snow Blasts that they are using to clear the runway into the Heavy Shop to thaw out for the weekend.



There are five of these that are run continuously from Sunday night at 6PM until Friday night at 6PM. They only shutdown for shift change, and refueling. So they get allot of abuse. And when we have them in the shop, we try to get all of the preventative maintenance done while we have our hands on them. Well with part of our crew off on the Black Island traverse we had to bring in some extra hands.



Paula spent the day working in the shop with me. It was fun to have her out there, and I am sure that she was very happy to get out from behind the desk for a day.



Our job for the day was to do a 250 hours PM check (Preventative Maint.) on a Grizzly Snow Blast. Shown above. The photos up top are of RPM Snow Blasts. We run 2 Gizzlys and 3 RPM's at a time. To give you an idea of the size of these machines, the RPM's have a 300hp Cat engine in them, and the Grizzly's have 439hp C-10 Cat. engines. The C-10 is basically a tractor trailer engine. So we spent the day changing oil, filters, fixing junk that was falling off because of the strain that the machine is usually under. And I was snapping photos of Paula while she want looking.
R.J.

WE HAVE SUN!

Ok, first to defend myself. I know how to spell stroll. If I actually proof read my drivle I wouldn't provide Beth and Gary the opportunity to attack me in a public forum and I wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. And besides I am too lazy to take the time to reread my work. Ok you two get out your red pencil and start correcting.

Now back to the regularly scheduled program. The Sun. It has appeared. And it looks the same here as anywhere else that I have seen it from. But it has been two weeks since we have seen any.



While the sun was out, Josh and I spent 6 hours outside thawing out trucks that we in hibernation for the winter. They are all light vehicles, Ford pickups and vans. They were parked on the Helicopter pad in Feburary, and they would like the Helo pad back now. This is one of our shop trucks, Rock n Roll. Most trucks and equipment have names. Not always good names, but names. It feels like I am driving #5 again, but with out the cool lights and sirens, but now I have a crane! FYI it was -15F with about a -35F wind chill. Did I mention that I love my ECW.



Here is a photo of some of my handy work...



This is two of the three Pisten Bullies that are currently out at Black Island. It sounds like they will be there for a few more days. It sounds like a very rough place to be. The brown building is the gym, and the green building is the Helicopter maintaence building. If you look in the upper left of the photo, those are the Ford trucks that we warmed up on Tuesday. Oh yes, go back to the last photo and see the yellow contraption on the rear of Rock n Roll? It is a Herman Nelson heater. I will go more in depth about them at a later date, but I have to say they are the greatest thing going down here. Jamie would love them, they are 40 years old, and they keep putting them back together. I hear that a replacement is about $30,000. And did I mention that I now have a friend that is a helicopter mechanic, he is going to show me around the ships when they get down here. Maybe I could be a helicopter mechanic next year. Scary.

And I have to mention that I have taken none of these photos. I have a bunch of photos of my own, but I have found a common directory down here that many people post there photos to. So, if you see a really nice photo on the blog from now on, I likely stole it from someone else.

Here are some shots of the Ice runway progect. They are kinda cool, and I have not made it out on the ice yet. This is the main project underway at this moment.







It is a very impressive project. The size is unimagable. And if anyone ever wanted to know what they plow the roads with in Antarctica, here you go.



Until next time. Stay warm. And remember only a few months until McMurdo will be warmer than Buffalo.
R.J.

A beautiful Sunday morning for a strool.

Well we got up this morning and decided to go for a strool out to Scott Hut before we went to brunch. The weather is very nice, well for here it is. There is no wind which is great, but the temp. is -27F right now at 2PM.



Scott Hut is on the point to the west of town in the harbor. If you look at the photo of the harbor that I posted on Wed. Aug. 20th you can see the point on the right side of the photo. It is a mile long walk out there. And as you can see we are finally starting to get some blue sky here. But clouds is still more common than clear. This photo of Paula is at Scott's hut looking towards the mountains to the north. Maybe someone smarter can tell you what he dome is?



Here is a photo of Scott Hut and McMurdo from Hut point. Scott's Hut was built in 1902 to support Shelklton's (I don't know the spelling I will report back with the correction) expiditions here in Antarctica. I don't know much of the history of it yet. But it is open for tours from time to time, and it is just as the early explores had left it. Actually sitting on the outside is a seal skin from the early 1900's. I will get a photo of that later for you all to see.

In the background is Mac-town. The 4 large brown buildings in the foreground are all dorms. Only one is open right now. And the first tan building to the left of them is dorm 203-B which is our dorm. The green buildings to the left of the photo are supply buildings, and the Heavy Shop where we work is on the hill just behind them. And the two poles out on the ice between Mac-town and Scott's Hut are on the Ice pier where the cargo and tanker ship will dock in late Jan. and early Feb. Notice the smoke from the powerplant in front. It is going almost straight up. That is very unusual here.



And this is what happens to you when it is -27F. It really is a pain in the butt when your eyes water and then freeze closed. But in reality, with the clothing that you are given, after an hour walk in -27F it isn't too bad at all. I have been much colder in Buffalo in the past. Think of standing out on a 15F day in your full turnout gear. Same kind of cold.

And then went we returned from our walk we had a nice camp fire to warm us all up.


R.J.

1 week down, 13 months and 3 weeks to go.

At least that is what my brother-in-law thinks. Time for today's lesson. I have attached a map of McMurdo sound. Again, if you click on the map you should get a little larger version.

We are at McMurdo, which is located on the very southern tip of Ross Island. At the end of the peninsula that you see. And Ross Island is in the Ross Sea. If you are not sure where that is then Google it and you will see. We here at McMurdo are in a radio dead zone. And so all of our communications are transmitted to Black Island, and it is sent north from there. Well if you look at the trusty map and see the dark island, some could call it a black island. Well that is Black Island. And look right next to it, see the white island? All together now, it is White Island. And the amazing thing is, if you are standing here in McMurdo and you look out towards the islands; one is black and one is white. Black Island has lots of winds on it and so the volcanic rock is exposed and White Island is snow covered.



Why am I telling you all of this? Because it is -22 with a -58 wind chill and I don't want to walk back to my dorm room. Actually there is another reason. There will be a traverse to Black Island on Monday. I spent the day today working on Pisten Bullies that will make the trek over there.



Pisten Bullies are really cool! And the heated seats are a big plus. The unit in front was driven there. You can turn these things within there own footprint. They are powered by a 4 cylinder Benz diesel and the hydraulic steering is done with a Moog controler system. Kind of like what Paula use to make, but these don't shoot at people.

So, the weather has been fair here, but mostly overcast. So there has been no sign of Auroras to this point. But we are still getting a fair amount of darkness, so there is a good chance still. However this afternoon the windchill droped to -55. And I just looked at the forecast online, and they are calling for -45 air temps for the next few overnights. With the day time highs of -20. So, this will be a fun weekend.

And Marty, I have the video of the whrilpool. I will try to post this weekend.

Have a good Labor Day Weekend. We don't get the day off. But then again, it doesn't feel like Sept. here.
R.J.