Blood, Search and Apprehend, sea ice

Hi All,

Despite my expectation expressed in the last message, I made it back to town for the TWO-day weekend of Christmas. AND, I was actually here for the third and final real weekend of the season: New Year's. Today I'm headed out to the field for ten day gig, this one though in actual technical terrain... I'll actually get to use guiding related skills, not just grunt work on the Great White Expanse.

Last weekend Larry and I enjoyed a wonderful ski near town. As usual we rode our bikes there and back, which continues to be a lot of fun. The weather was calm and clear: a real treat and it reminded us of other places that we play in (minus trees, of course). The snow was sparkly and the surface was unusually great for skiing (an inch or two of facets on hardpack)... a superb outing.

Last week I received a call to come into Medical to donate blood. There was a guy with some very serious condition that needed a lot of blood of my type. This program maintains a "walking blood bank", and this is the first time I've heard of it being activated. I gave blood during the drives in high school, but this turned out to be different. With blood drives, I assume the blood will be separated into its components, mixed with a thousand other people's, and then sit in a freezer for months. This time, the pint of warm blood I held in my hand was moments from going through a filter (for clotting) and then directly into the body of someone I might even know. He received six pints before being flown to NZ. The Medical folks seemed pretty concerned about whether he would survive (no update).

I was surprised to find this process involved an emotional aspect: it's really different knowing a part of my body is about to go directly into the body of someone else, someone I might know. My friends in Medical also found this experience emotionally impactful, and they all seemed super grateful to those who were able to help. If I ever need blood here, I think I'd like to meet and thank each person, to know of whose blood was becoming mine. Intimate in a very novel way. Wild.

The other strange event last week was getting called, as part of the Search and Rescue team, to pick up two people who were seen walking off the safe-flagged route on the sea ice and deliver them to station management. They were perceived as also not having checked out as required for such recreational events. The vehicle we took couldn't cross the transition to the sea ice from where we were, so the two of us stood there, waiting for these guys to finish the loop (now they were on the flagged route). It was weird feeling like a cop waiting to bust someone. We decided that we'd been demoted to Search and Apprehend, and wondered if the guys, who must have seen us standing there, knew they were about to get ambushed, walking into a trap, or whatever the right phrase would be from Hollywood.

Turns out they had indeed checked out (we asked before assuming!), and had just temporarily taken a wrong turn to a dead-end flag-line, so taking them back to station management wasn't a drag because we knew they were innocent. Weird part of the job!


The first icebreaker, Swedish, is getting close to town. This year, for the first in four, there's been NO drama around sea ice and ships being able to get in. What a change!

And I finally saw penguins (endlessly entertaining, and the two local species are so different in character!) and seals on a de-flagging trip on the sea ice. The sea ice is officially closed now, mostly because of meltpools and mushiness on the surface near town, not because one will fall through, so we were out pulling the flags out of the routes. The ice is still up to several meters thick in most places, though the first-year ice is only about a meter or so. As the ice itself has warmed it has become less strong, but it's the surface where we drive and planes land that has become inconsistent. Plus if it got really warm for a while, the ice could possibly start to disintegrate or break up and get blown out. We hope for this so we can see whales, seals, and penguins from town, but that hasn't since '99 or so, before that giant berg B-15 wreaked havoc regionally.

My upcoming field stint involves geologists gathering samples from outcrops above snow/ice slopes, some of which are above a heavily crevassed area. It's also with my two favorite researchers (the Erebus people) and their new-to-Antarctica grad students. Should be fun. This group has their own contract mountaineer, a Brit, but the terrain dictates that they have another mountaineer, from our dept, out there as well. I taught their glacier travel course Saturday and it went well working with their mountaineer (who has been down with the British Ant. Survey) a number of times.

Other news is that Larry's elbows have been hurting enough that he has decided not to go to Arapiles to climb with me post-ice. Bummer! I will go without him (easy to find partners there), but am waiting to hear what else he plans... that might make it harder knowing he's on some other cool adventure! We are concocting a northern trip together for May-June. More on that later.

Anyone interested in incredible cragging with me in March? Search "Mt. Arapiles" (Australia) and get a better idea of how amazing this place is, in many respects. I have all the gear, both camping and climbing, so all you need is to fly to Melbourne with your personal climbing gear and I'll set you up with transportation to Arapiles (4 hours by car). Once there, it's super cheap.

Love and the most splendid year we can hope for, Susan