South Pole, AGO shoveling, season reflection

Hi all,
I am at the South Pole Station, waiting another day to get a flight out to the next AGO site I’ll be working. These are the Automated Geophysical Observatories (space weather, basically), that get serviced annually by engineers who are not necessarily deep field savvy. For the last three years 3 of the 6 original AGO sites have been maintained, having been switched over to wind power. This year they’re adding one that hasn’t been maintained in 5 years. My job is to dig out the survival cache, fuel caches, and other caches and inventory stuff, flag and GPS everything, and manage camp. Glamorous!

I was originally assigned to go to one for a week in place of one of our new guys who has an injury that prevents shoveling. (He is now working on a much more interesting project that I was originally assigned). The snow out there can be rather firm, such that one can place a steel shovel blade in a bit and then step onto the shovel with both feet and then jump on the shovel to get it to penetrate. Then if a block didn’t release, you have to wrestle the shovel back out and try again from a different angle. In climbing we love this kind of snow and call it “bulletproof”. I won’t say what we call it here. Not all the snow is like this, but a lot is and it requires good technique (as above rather than trying to ram in the blade with arms) as well as pacing oneself to be able to dig out caches. Yoga or at least simple stretching, is key.

I have assigned myself the task of writing an SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) for these sites to help the newer people know what to do so we can make it easy for everyone… starting next year. If the caches are moved to the new surface each year, they don’t require psycho digging. However, we are behind in this currently as past people looked at caches and noted that they wouldn’t be buried by the next year. A cache doesn’t have to be fully submerged to be hell to dig out.

One of the engineers made the unsolicited comment last week that I’m the hardest working person he’s seen from my dept in his 3 seasons; he started right after I had been to all sites my first season. (But I made up for that during our flight delay days by lying around reading). Given the state of the last site and the lack of inventory (of survival gear, food, etc), I am not surprised.
I don’t blame the recent others for preferring to help the engineers with the wind turbines and all! In any case, I hope we can make this job much easier for everyone in the future. Last year one of our guys got a back injury and had to be switched out (with the woman who is now our supervisor).

That week stretched into 10 days with technical and then flight delays. Our dept in crunched back in McMurdo, our usual state of affairs (we have desperately been trying to get an additional person for since I’ve been working here) and I’ve been asked to go to the next site as well, the one that hasn’t been maintained in at least four years (no one seems to know how long probably because of high turnover these last 2 seasons). I’m ok with it except for the fact that now it’s pretty clear that I’m going to miss our second two-day weekend. We get three a year: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, so this is a big bummer, especially because I have someone I really like to spend time with back in McMurdo. At least I enjoy the 3 guys I’m working with, so it’s not like being in the field with them is a drag or anything. And I did ski twice at the last site… rough skiing for sure, but fun nonetheless.

As you can tell from emails this year it hasn’t been all that lively of a season for me down here. (Whether the sea ice will go out remains to be seen, and it isn’t acting as weird/dramatic as it did last year). I’ve yet to see a penguin or even a seal, have not been to the Dry Valleys, or on a helo once. I have no delusions of getting back to Mt Erebus this year, but it isn’t sending out bombs NEARLY as much this year anyway: I am happy to accept that that truly was a once in a lifetime experience, and to savor the memory.

I have not visited dynamic places yet this year because I’ve been in the deep field a lot, unlike last year when I didn’t go at all. This past October, I did get two weeks in the field with Larry (and many others in small spaces and with a lot of work to do), which was an appreciated first. And I’ve had more fun skiing and this year biking with him than in seasons past, and that counts for a lot.

Hopefully these things simply cycle. I do enjoy being in the deep field, but it certainly isn’t the only thing I enjoy down here. The deep field is often short for the Great White Expanse… not exactly a vibrant place. It dominates the continent, but definitely not the Antarctic Program involvement with the continent. It is still a wonderful and worthwhile experience being down here, don’t get me wrong. As normal as everything gets, I remind myself that I won’t be doing this job forever, so I want to keep savoring the wide variety of experiences I have here, and to keep taking pictures, not taking anything for granted.

Love and light, Susan