The plane used for the aerial photographic survey mission was a small Twin Otter

The mission entailed two separate flights, 12 hours apart, to capture the scene with shadows lying in opposite directions.  On each flight, we would make several passes of the station, at different altitudes and along different paths, to try to get a complete survey of the area.  The plane was a small Twin Otter with a special glass window installed in one of the rear doors to allow clean crisp images to be taken from the relative comfort of the cabin.  Unfortunately, as soon as we were air born and began our first flight, I leaned close to the window to start snapping away, and the glass instantly fogged over with ice from my breath.  Inside the plane it was a balmy -20°F, not much warmer than the -35°F outside.  With the special photo window iced up, and the other windows in the plane being made of old plexiglas, which were cloudy, dirty and scratched, the mission was quickly becoming a bust- but the co-pilot saw what was happening and came back to fix the situation…

To my surprise, he pulled out his Leatherman, opened a screwdriver bit, and began to unscrew the fasteners holding the glass window in place!  He asked me to put my hand on the glass to hold it as he removed the last screw from the bottom of the frame, and then said in an unconcerned Canadian accent “So, I’m not quite sure what this window is going to want to do when you let go.  It might fly open, or it might be sucked close, but whatever it does, just be careful, eh.”

Because the window kept getting iced up, the pilot unbolted it so we could open it and stick our cameras outside

Up until now, my only notion of open windows in flying planes came from bad action movies, where without fail, after an errant gunshot from a villainous hijacker breaks one of the airliner’s windows, a nearby screaming passenger is sucked bodily through the small opening.  With a scene such as this running through my mind, you can understand my hesitation to take my hand from the now loose window.  But the mission had to go on, so I bravely pulled my hand away, and… the window calmly fluttered open, buoyed by the force of the rushing wind, and suspended by a hinge at the top of the frame attached to the door.  The co-pilot shrugged at me, and climbed back to the cockpit.

The South Pole Station

Now that the window was movable, we took turns shooting photos of the station with one person holding the window open fully, and the other thrusting their camera out into the freezing air to try and get some quick shots.  We had to be quick, because flying at 90 knots, in -35°F, the wind-chill was somewhere close to -100°F.  Not only did my fingers almost instantaneously feel the biting wind through my thick mittens like stabbing knifes, but the camera lens became sluggish to adjust, and my face alarmingly began to freeze to the back of the camera body when I held it close to see through the view finder.  Considering these slight discomforts, we traded our position at the window often, and spent our turn holding the window open trying to regain feeling in our frozen hands.  For all this, we came away with some great shots of the station, and a hell of an experience to remember.

A 360 degree photo of me with the planes

Last Saturday was the big day for this year‘s SPIFF, and the whole station crowded into the galley to see what our collective creativity could come up with. There were 12 entries this season, with the following being a selection of my favorites (that, and they were the only films already uploaded to the internet that I could repost here).

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The first 3 are from our fellow kitchen mate, the breakfast cook and creative genius, Mikey Kampmann.  At home he is a comedian, has appeared several times on a TV show filmed in his home town, Portlandia, and had us all rolling in tears when he MC’d the SPIFF. He has a great blog which does a good job showing the lighter, funnier side of the South Pole- Mikey Going Down.

Tubin’ with Mikey from Mikey Going Down on Vimeo.

Picnic at the End of the World from Mikey Going Down on Vimeo.

Tunnelin’ with Werner Herzog from Mikey Going Down on Vimeo.

The next film was made by our own fabulous Sidney Clewe, fellow DA and artist extraordinaire.

A Day in the Life of a DA by Sidney Clewe

The last selection is absolutely hilarious, was produced by a group in McMurdo, and has already gone viral on the internet- though there are a few instances of profane words, so if there are kids in the room, you might get out the ear muffs.

Drunk History: The South Pole from sandwichgirl on Vimeo.

To solve this temporal dilemma, and to keep everyone at the station from getting sauced at all hours of the day, the South Pole has been officially designated the same time zone as New Zealand, which is conveniently in sync with McMurdo and the Antarctic Program’s base of operations in Christchurch.  This little fact normally does not carry too much significance for us, aside from trying to judge an appropriate time of day to call home, but on December 31^st, right about at 11:59pm, it happened to become very important, for we were poised, along with a small fraction of the world, to be the first to step into 2012 (It turns out that there are actually a few cheeky South Pacific island nations that have officially ’moved’ themselves from one side of the International Date Line to the other, thereby jumping from the back of the “bringing in the New Year” line to the front, and technically trumping our claim to be first by 1 hour.  But if everybody just went around redrawing time zones, the world would be a mess, so I for one choose to not acknowledge this most devious of publicity stunts).

Four fantastic bands played the night away

Being such a prestigious position to hold, leading humanity into the New Year and all, the station does its best to represent,  and throws a huge party, complete with a stage, strobe lights, four live bands, costumes of all sorts, decorations, and champagne.  Well, we actually had to buy the champagne from the store, but they did make a point of stocking the shelves with bubbley a few days before in preparation.

The party was a blast, and right at midnight, with champagne glasses chinking, people kissing all around, and the elated, ear deafening din of spinny noise makers, kazoos, and those funny rolled up blowers that remind me of an elephant’s nose, Kacey and I looked at each other with the same exact expression:  This is perfect, this is just how it is supposed to be, and we wouldn’t give this experience up for anything in the world.  And then, or I guess I should say now, it was 2012.  A few more hours of dancing, and then we ran out to the Pole to take a memorable first photo of the year.

Happy New Year's from the Pole

Aside from the party and celebration, New Year’s Eve was also the day of another “race around the world”, this one much longer though…  It is a tradition that the men’s and women’s winners of the real Race around the World, the one held on Christmas Eve, get a free trip to McMurdo to participate in their annual marathon.  But, last year, on the day before the marathon, when the winners were supposed to fly to McMurdo, an awful storm blew in and the flight had to be canceled.  Normally, this would have been only a moderate disappointment for the lucky two who were northward bound, but last year, the male winner was actually a professional runner, who had taken a job as a humble steward here at the South Pole, for the sole purpose of getting a chance to run a marathon in Antarctica.  I can imagine how distraught he must have been, seeing  his dreams slip away with the onset of the storm, especially knowing what he had had to sacrifice in the dish-pit merely as a means to an end for realizing his ambitions.

He was a resilient man though, and didn’t let misfortune in the form of a few snowflakes alter his destiny.  He cajoled a few of the station’s other runners into action, and together they organized the first ever South Pole Marathon.   Four runners completed the course that first year, with Ricky, the professional, setting the record at 4 hours and 2 minutes.  Now, that may seem slow for a man who regularly runs, and wins, marathons all over the world with sub 2:30 times, but here at the Pole, conditions are not all that conducive to running, let alone any activity outside.  To start, we are sitting at 9,300 feet above sea level, but due to the thinning of the atmosphere at this extreme latitude caused by the spin of the earth, the barometric altitude is somewhere closer to 10,500 feet.  Add to that the -15° F average January temperature, -35° F wind-chill, and crumbly snowpack course, and you can see reason for Ricky’s subpar finishing time.  All said though, he was the first person ever to complete a marathon at the South Pole.

And we made it! 26.2 miles at the coldest place on earth.

Now, the reason I am relating all of this is to give background and credence to my next statement… that Kacey and I are now two of only eleven people to ever run a marathon at the South Pole!   The 2^nd annual South Pole Marathon was officially held on the morning of New Year’s Eve, with four more hearty Polies completing the 26.2 mile course.  Unfortunately, Kacey and I had to work that day.  But, like Ricky, we were resilient.  Knowing that we couldn’t run with everyone else, our first plan was actually to run the marathon on Christmas Eve, following the Race around the World, but as you can tell from the video included with that post on Christmas, the conditions were truly appalling, so after about eight miles we decided to bag it, and try another day.  Well, that day came last Saturday, on January 7^th, when we were both given the day off as a replacement for working New Year’s, and along with our fellow kitchen mate, Jase the cook, we set off on our own “galley version” of the South Pole Marathon.

The scenery doesn't change much running up and down the skiway 5 times

There are not actually that many places where the snow is packed enough to comfortably run outside here at the Pole, so to accumulate 26.2 miles, we basically ran up and down the 2 mile long skiway a bunch of times.  But don’t be mislead by my use of the word “comfortably”-  yes, the skiway is groomed regularly to accommodate the frequent planes, but even on the hardest packed sections, it is more akin to running on a sandy beach, rather than terra firma.  At one end of the skiway, our awesome scientist and runner friend Sara (who was the women’s winner for both the Race around the World and the SP Marathon), placed a duffle bag full of warm drinks and caloric goodies to keep us energized and motivated.  The three of us ran at our own paces, but routinely regrouped so that we would finish together, which we did, hand-in-hand at the Geographic South Pole, where we promptly collapsed in exhaustion.