South Pole (I)

Richard W. Frank

South Pole (I)

A Cold Day in Pole

Life here is good and everybody loves the food. They all want to get in good with the cooks because they know where the true power is! The site for Pole pictures is: http://________. There is only one galley down here so the ones you saw are where I spend every day down here. I found sites on the Huntington and enjoyed reading about it. We also found Kathy Ireland's as well. By definition things are the same down here and am looking forward to the holiday season. Keep in touch and thanks again for dinner. It all seems so far away and unreal. Then again where I am now is really surreal. Am reading about Amundsen and Scott and the race for where I spend each day.

Stuck in Operation Deep Freeze making cheesecake,

Rich

Back to Antarctica

I'm Heeere!

Two weeks later, we have arrived. The end of the world is indeed a hostile place. Wind chill was -88°F today with a physiological altitude of 11,000 ft. We left McMurdo at 8:30am and arrived at 11:30am. The altitude has hit us hard with headaches and nausea. Walking up stairs are an effort. Our living spaces are sparse in the extreme under long arches of insulated tarp. I have my own curtained cell that is six feet by nine feet and we are all going to know when anyone does anything. The bathroom is centralized and blue. We are allowed two 2-minute showers a week and one load of wash. It is a five-minute walk from Summer Camp to the dome. The dome isn't heated, and our frozen food supplies are crowded around the rim. We were shown around but none of us really was in a condition to remember. I am to work the breakfast and lunch shift from 4am-2pm tomorrow. Walking out to the actual physical South Pole was a surreal experience, and I would not change places with anyone.

Just spent the last two hours surfing the net! It appears that there are two satellites that give us windows from 1-4 pm and 1-4am. I went through Netscape and Magellan and found some South Pole websites. It was extremely bizarre to pull up pictures of the Galley and the Summer Camp. If you pull that Summer Camp picture, my Jamesway is the third on the right from the square blue building in the middle, which is the head.

All this technology is surreal. From the South Pole I can price airfares, look at art at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, and plan a metro journey in Calcutta.

Buried C130 at the end of the runway

Packing our bags

Drug dog

Boarding the C130

On our way

Back to Antarctica main page

Onwards to South Pole (II)

Landing at the South Pole

Jamesways

Upwind at Science