Antarctica, Day 8
Me a couple hours ago with my tent and the Commonwealth glacier behind me.
It's a bright, sunny Tuesday evening here in the Dry Valleys. The sun is glinting off the frozen lake and beaming into the 400 square foot wood hut that hosts the communal lab, desk, and kitchen for this field site. There were two people here for the last week and with our arrival there are now seven. Through the window, a sunbeam splashes across the dusty floor, making for a nice nook to warm cold toes. In Antarctica at this time of year, the sun never sets. Science teams like to joke "we work until the sun goes down". I remember now why it felt so effortless to stay up until 3am most nights last time I was here.
I woke up at 5:45am in my dorm this morning to take my last shower for a week and then darted off to the galley on station for a quick bowl of oatmeal before heading to the helicopter pad. The journey from McMurdo Station to the Dry Valleys is made via helicopter – about a 35 minute ride past a smoking volcano and intricately cracked sea ice. Along the way, you can sometimes see penguins, seals, and orcas. I didn't see any but the experience was still just as beautiful and thrilling. I took a chance on filming the view with my Canon R5C and lens stabilization, but notably without a gimbal (too large for me to bring), and the results were as shaky-cam as can be expected. Not sure any of the footage is salvageable but thankfully I will be on a number of other helo rides while here to make up for it. Next time I'll opt for my iPhone on a DJI gimbal.
Once we landed at our field site, my team agreed we should all take 20 minutes to collect ourselves before we began setting up our tents. Constantly drinking water is a necessity here in this polar desert, so I made a b-line to the outhouse. The outhouse here is the same as other dedicated field sites in the Dry Valleys. A tiny stall with two foam toilet seats and a funnel bolted through the wall. The first toilet seat is a metal funnel that empties into a large coffee can with a handle strapped to it. If you pee here, you have to be sure to remember to pick up the coffee can and dump it into the funnel in the wall, which empties into a large drum. You also have to remember to check the dipstick in the drum so that it doesn't fill up. The second toilet seat is for solids and terminates into a bucket. All waste in Antarctica has to be disposed of by each country on their own land, so these buckets and drums will eventually get put on a cargo ship back to the States where they'll be disposed of.
The view from the other side of my tent.
The Dry Valleys are just as monumentally beautiful as I remember them to be. The F6 field site is sandwiched between the Canada glacier and the Commonwealth glacier with the frozen lake in between. There's not a bad view in sight. Even better, it's much warmer now than when I came earlier in the season. My tent warms with a yellow glow that makes it a nice tiny refuge from the wind. I even took a restful nap in it today until the Dramamine wore off. Last time, I avoided spending time in my tent as much as possible because of how miserably cold it was.
I hope the next couple of days are as nice as today is so that setting up shots isn't too difficult. If the wind stays low, I'll be able to fly my drone down here, which I'm pretty excited about.
<3
Ariel