Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Emerging from winter

Today was the first "nice" day in a while, with winds finally under 15 knots. I had a mission, to take down my flags that I had been flying at the geographic pole, so I wandered around a bit and took a few photos of what the station looks like after a winter.

Here are my flags with the Scott tent and Dome in the background. I recruited the tallest person on station, Neal, to help me get them down.

The entrance to the Dome is pretty much gone now. Tim the heavy equipment operator is going to have his hands full doing lots of grooming and digging out.
The moon is up now as you can see it above the Beer Can.
These are the back stairs to the A1 berthing wing. Once the sun comes up and starts to warm things up, the frost will melt off of things pretty quickly.

Some pretty impressive drifts formed between the A4 and B1 wings. The prevailing direction of wind is from the opposite side of the station and it's supposed to whip through under the bottom of the station and not deposit too much snow but actually we do see quite a bit of drifting on the front side and parts of the back.
Tim was already working on getting the garage entrance cleared out. Right now it's just messy piles of snow.

Good thing we have heavy machinery to do most of the big snow removal as the shovels just about need shoveling out themselves.

The BBQ in the back corner of the A2 first floor deck hasn't seen much action lately.

And the sun should be popping up in just 3 days now...

posted by Heidi @ 12:37 PM   3 comments

3 Comments:

At 11:47 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Can you fit a 'dozer under the station to clear the snow accumulated there?

 
At 7:23 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Congratulations on making it through another winter, Heidi! You set a world record this time for women, didn't you?

How'd that storage room of the alcohol stores hold up over the last six months?

 
At 8:42 AM, Blogger Heidi said...

Waterdon - we can't quite fit a dozer under the station and fortunately most of the drifting occurs on the windside and lee side where the heavy equipment can clear it away. We also have these wonderful things called GA's (general assistants)who get lots of practice with shovels in those hard to reach places. Actually we all take up shovels and pitch in when needed. Most of us.

Hey Dave - the A4 berthing hall works well as booze storage but during the summer, they think it's more important to store people there so we have to move all the beverages out next week. We drank only a fraction of what we brought in so I'm commandeering 2 out of the 3 coat closets on station to store the rest. The coats end up on the hallway floors most of the time anyway.

 

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