To begin with, we continue to see seals. When I first wake up and walk to the outhouse, seals. All day every day I travel around on my snowmobile purposely looking for seals to catch, and then come home in the evening to find more seals surrounding camp. Being in the constant company of seals, one starts to feel like they are your friends, like they understand you, like the National Park Service isn’t doing enough to protect them, Like you are their only true savior, and that you would die for them because you are Trent Trentwell and you live in the Seal Maze the most dangerous place on earth.
Sorry. I wandered a bit. Anyways, I have been amazed at how everything down here is so completely dependent, and revolves unfalteringly around the weather. I will now attempt to provide anecdotal evidence to prove my point.
On the evening of the 20th a team of communication 'experts' came out to camp to help focus our (already working) internet in an effort to make it run faster. The resultant loss of internet was seen as no big deal (since they just went back to McMurdo that night anyways) and they would be back the following day to fix it. When we woke up on the morning of the 21st a heavy ice fog flattened light and destroyed all sense of depth perception. The world was white, white ice below, white fog in front, and white sky. An amazing but erie example of sensory deprivation. This is what being blind must feel like. To retain our senses and sanity our crew huddled inside the kitchen hut where there was more than nothingness to confuse our minds. We would just wait it out and work later in the day. After 15 hours of this it became obvious that we wouldn’t be going to work and we all settled in for the evening and decided to make up lost time on the following day. I went to sleep that evening in the silent and death like calm that pervades everything here, only to be awakened by being nearly shaken out of my top bunk. Our little refrigerated cargo container had somehow gotten onto a train and was roaring down the tracks. Things, metal things, banged and smashed into the sides as the box shook and rattled. At times our train took sharp curves so fast that I feared that we might tip over. I was going to put a stop to this, and crawled off the bunk and pealed back the thick black curtain that is our night in this world of constant light. Fully expecting to look out and see the North Dakota country side whipping by, I was surprised to find that we were neatly positioned next to the girls refrigerated cargo box, and since trains rarely run side by side I concluded that we had not moved and we are still in Antarctica. I stepped outside just to make sure. Quickly I am met with more white than the day before (if that’s possible) but this time a literally howling wind knocks me off my feet and I struggle towards the kitchen hut, only 5 meters downwind. As I break the refrigerator-door-seal it bursts open, and I am thrown inside. I look dumbfounded outside for a second before closing the door and looking at the monitor of our little digital weather station. Wind 65 MPH, Temperature -30 F, Wind chill – 86 F. This is ANTARCTICA. We are having our first ‘Herbie’ or Katabatic Blizzard, and it will remain like this for the rest of the day. We sit in the kitchen hut all day and stew in each other’s stale air, making sure that everyone has caught the cold that someone brought from town. In the afternoon our outhouse (tethered to the Ice with truckers cargo straps, and two-foot-deep V-Threads) is starting to go, 2 straps are already broken, and if we loose anymore the outhouse will end up at Cape evans, (if we are so lucky). Shawn, Glenn and I bundle up and head out into the frigid hell. We are all knocked off our feet once, but manage to get another V-Thread anchor set up and replace the broken cargo straps. The entire ordeal takes less than 5 minutes but I come inside with useless hands, searing ears and nose, and numb legs. We decide to not go outside anymore.
I was rocked to sleep that night and felt sure that this weather would never let up (not more than five miles from here, Scott’s men endured a blizzard of greater intensity for six weeks). I was therefore surprised to wake up to only moderate 30 mile an hour winds and a paltry ground blizzard. We all bundled up and set out for work. Today I was to head into Hutton Cliffs, and since I had never been there I would follow Jess and Shawn who had. The trip there was questionable at best. We could just barely make out the next flag that marked the ‘road’ to the two-hundred foot tall ice-cliffs, and so we went one flag at a time, never sure if we would reach next. To complicate things even more, the wind hand sculpted the snow into immense sastrugi that could easily flip a snowmobile if one wasn’t careful. After nearly an hour crawling down over concrete hard snow sculptures as large and manageable as park benches it was a relief to see the massive overhanging cornice of the Cliffs. We walked in and out of unearthly blue pressure ridges all day tagging seal after seal, trying to make up for the lost time of the past two days. By day’s end we had tagged nearly 30 new pups and quite a few moms as well.
When we pulled into camp that night we heard that the blizzard from yesterday had destroyed miles and miles of Sea Ice, and now the open water edge was only 20 miles to our north. We joked about seeing Orcas, Leapord Seals and Penguins soon. It was therefore all the more ironic when I was awoken at 1:00am by a very familiar, yet new and strange sound. I lay in bed waiting to hear it again. After the second time I jumped/rolled/fell out of my bunk and ran to open the door. As the unwelcome light flooded the room, I clearly saw about two dozen Emperor penguins standing in front of and looking up quizzically at our piston bully. Pants. Shoes. Hat. Coat. No not shoes. Boots. Camera. Wrong Lens. Quick. They are going to leave. I ran outside still pulling my clothes on. The rest of the crew, now wide awake came out too. The penguins were celebrities calmly posing for our impromptu photo shoot , but like true models do not act for the camera, they are naturals. They wandered through our camp questioning the construction of our buildings, and our choice in color schemes. Soon they have had enough and they march ( yea I said march and it’s not too cliché because it’s true) off toward the Ice tongue. We are all still so excited at having penguins walk through camp that we don’t stop to consider that they are more than twenty miles from open water and will likely die if they continue on.
We wake up the next morning and see three lone penguins on the horizon to the west, but the rest of the two-dozen are nowhere to be found.
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