"Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god; below the 60th no common sense and below the 70th no intelligence whatsoever." — Kim Stanley Robinson.

I find it a strange thing to find an entire continent of people with the same personality disorders as myself. People never satisfied with the things that are. People who shun the ‘convinces’ of the city and turn toward the simplicity of the land. Whose hearts always ache for horizons beyond. People sacrificing the comfort and love of family and friends for the adversity and solitude of a life lived at the margins. By our very nature people such as us seldom if ever even meet, much less congregate in one restless and anxious mass at the edge of the earth. McMurdo is electric with this kind of energy, building and replenishing in its power. Although it has been difficult, I have found some peace among close quarters of camp and am now able to write in a mood more representative of the way I feel most of the time down here. A place that fills me with as much humility as gratitude and satisfies but also intensifies my wanderlust.

We continue to tag and weigh seals although the pupping season is rapidly slowing down. We have been spending more and more time away from the large colonies and searching for seals in the more inaccessible corners of Erebus bay and McMurdo Sound.

I spent one day at the base of the Erebus Ice tongue, nestled up against the titanic ice falls pouring off the south face of Mount Erebus. Here we roped up to travel, over, and across, and through shattered and enormous glacial seracs to find seals pupping along the cracks in the sea ice on which they are so haphazardly strewn. A jumbled icy mess where a fall could mean twenty or thirty feet onto jagged blue ice, or into a gaping black open-water hole.

Another day I got to fly south across the Ross Ice shelf to tag and count seals using the tidal crack that forms around White Island. The same White Island used by polar explorers in their navigation across a startlingly flat and barren plain of ice larger than Texas. This trip as exciting as it should have been on it’s own, was even more so owing to an Emergency helicopter landing after an unidentified electrical fire. Once we got safely back on solid ground we rescheduled another flight (with a different and hopefully not burning Helicopter) for later that afternoon. Of course and in proper accordance with Murphy’s Law the weather deteriorated in those few hours between fights. By the time we finally made it to White Island we were met with light so flat that even our pilot was surprised when our skids bounced off the snow on our landing, as none of us could tell how far above ground we were owing to a complete lack of reference points on the griddle flat shelf. As we exited the helicopter we were met with friendly 40 MPH winds and a classic ground blizzard. After thirty minutes tagging and recording the 6 seals that constitute the farthest south living population of animals on the planet we hurried back to the shelter of the helio, only to find that we could not take off in conditions so extreme. Twenty minutes later our pilot (growing impatient) arbitrarily decided that we could in fact take off, and better do so before the weather got even worse. A few shaky seconds and we were above the whiteout shrouding the seals and ice below, and heading toward Ross Island and McMurdo under bluebird skies.

As disjointed as they may be, these are the thoughts and experiences that come to mind today, the first I have had off since Halloween.

“It is a pitty that I cannot write more” – R.F. Scott

P.S. in reference to the title of this posting I should note we are well below the 70th parallel and almost to the 80th at 77.85 degreees south.