JAN 27th

Well things are moving along smooth. Were down to 3 flights a day so things are laid back at the airfield now where I will hopefully spend the remaining 3 weeks at. The Palmer came in this morning. This is a research vessel that comes into port every year. The ice has been broken up enough so it made it all the way in. Before I went to work I walked out and took some pictures, it was a really nice morning. Things are winding down on station which is pretty nice.
Im starting to realize that my time left is limited and I will never be back here so im trying to get out and take more pictures now. Im at the airfield station today and we are done with flights for the day so I got bored and went out and moved all of our trucks for a photo opp in front of Mt. Erebus so theres a few pictures from that below. I think tonight myself and another guy out here are going to drive out to pegasus and see it because he has not been yet. Pegasus is an airplane that crashed here about 40 years ago and it takes about an hour across the shelf to see it. When it gets slow we tend to go on little adventures like that to take the time up. We will take one of the red 550's that are in the pictures below. Other than that nothin else is new. I look forward to seeing all of you in about a month.

Firehouse Expo!

So we had our "open house" this past sunday. This event is basically for us to set up about 6 different stations and let the community come in and see that we are kind people and we do know what we are doing haha. My station was the rope rescue station so myself and another were demonstrating to the people how to ascend a rope and then switch midway and rappell down.

Towards the end I also demonstrated how to do a "pick off". A pick off is nessasary when someone is stuck whether it be from climbing or what not but basically they are stuck hanging on their rope. We as rescuers come in from either below or above and through a series of events end up with the stranded person hanging from our harness then we rappell down with them.

All in all the event was fun. It wasnt as big of a turn out as we would like but that was alright. We also had the upstairs smoked out and we were letting people crawl through it with all of our gear on so that was pretty cool for some of the townspeople. Other than that same old stuff, As of today i have 1 month left on the ice, from here I will be going to new zealand where I plan on renting a car with my friend and driving down to queenstown. Then I will be stopping in Hawaii and meeting up with my parents and Jill so that will be pretty exciting.

The countdown is almost ready to begin

Well things are going to slow down here now. People (non firefighters) are beging to redeploy back home on January 16 up through fed 28th. The "polar Sea" is now in port, this is the coazst guard ice breaker that is breaking up the channel for fuel ship in front of Mcmurdo. It has been fun because there are about 100 people on that ship that are fairly close in age to us so we get to meet new people. I met a couple guys that want to trade fire shirts so that will work out. The picture above is the ship right in front of Mcmurdo breaking up the ice. We all were able to go tour it last night and it was actually pretty nice on the inside. The bar was about double capacity because they all could come into town and drink. The view is definatly changing because ever since ive been here everywhere around mcmurdo has been frozen ice, we even had our old runway on it and now that the ships are breaking it up we are actually realizing that its water.

Other than that nothing new is going on down here. Ive cut a little weight over the past few weeks, so well see if i gain it back, the food here is good and ther sure is alot of it.

Ill be heading to new zealand on feb. 16 and from there im not sure when ill be home exactly so i will be seeing you guys real soon!

Sunday

Today was a good day. We had the rugby game this afternoon and after a great prime rib dinner and a nap, I took a hike again around midnight. The Oden, which is one of the ice breakers has come into port so its docked down at the ice. It was a great night to take a hike, the sun was shining and not a cloud in the sky. I happened to come across 68 adelle penguins so i ended up sitting with them for about an hour. It was my best penguin encounter yet. I was probably within 10 feet of them and they were all just napping and preening. It was very relaxing to just sit there by myself and watch them. Ive noticed that the adelles have a much better personality and tend to play more than the emperors. Its pretty funny to watch. Other than that it was just another day, only 40 left.

Early AM hike

I took this at about 1:30 am last night, the sun was great for once.


So im out at the runway (williams field). We had a pretty good storm blow in today so they evacuated "ice town" at about 9 am this morning. We have just been watching movies out here and waiting for the storm to blow over. Last night at about 1 am we heard there were about 30 penguins at hut point so 5 of us hiked out there to see what we could find. We counted 33 in all and 2 seals trying to get out of the ice next to them. It was really windy but the sun was awesome last night. It was almost like a hlaf sunset with the clouds so it was pretty cool. The above photo is a picture of Mt. discovery. Its across the mcmurdo sound from where we are. We also saw a glimpse of the 2 ice breakers slowly making there way up the sound. Right now the suond in front of Mcmurdo is still ice so they are breaking a channel to get the ships in here.

This is a picture of the cross at hut point.

Happy New Years!

So we had new years and I guess its 2007 now. It was acutally a fun day. It was yesterday for us and on new years eve day, we had what is known as Icestock. It was an all day event where they set up a big stage and had bands playing all day. There was also a chili cook off that was pretty cool. Out behind my doorm which is the main building here, they set up a stage and about 12 shipping containers and each department set up there booth for the chili in a container...ex. Heavy shops had one, janitors had one and so on. We had three guys from our firehouse play in the concert and they were actually one of the better bands. They did a few cover songs from
the goo goo dolls, dispatch and three doors down. All in all the day was fun. About dinner time we were all ready for bed but we took a quick nap and then headed over to the other side of the island to the kiwi base for the new years celebration.

It was a good time, they had a good turnout over there. After that about 4 of us caught a van back to mcmurdo and went over the the air guards doorm and hung out in their "bar". It was a really good time seeing that the pilots are some of the only people on station that like us haha. We had a good discussion over a few drinks about our rules for the landing scores. I dont know if ive talked about it but when the hercs land we have a binder with 1 through 10 on paper and we grade them based on a strict criteria. Grades are based on many things. If they land quick and taxi off quick they get higher scores and if they do "sight seeing" and fly over mcmurdo a bunch of times and make us wait they lose points. For the flgihts that get in after midnight the highest score they can get is a seven because that means we have to wake up for it. They can up their score buy holding the nose up for a long time on landing, landing with the cargo doors already open, whiting out the runways and taxiways by reving the throttles when taxing in, and landing with only 3 or 2 props, if they have engine failures. They get an automatic 10 if they land with an engine on fire though. Its actually a fun game and funny to watch them get mad in the cockpit if we give them a bad score. All in all it turned out alright. A huge storm blew in after midnight and it was a condition 1 storm today (which is the worst classification) when we went to work. That means everything is shut down. We had to come out to the airfield though to replace A shift so we were the only vehicles aloud out. Now I am here and hopefully we dont get stranded out here tommorow. someone left the window cracked in our big tank looking fire truck out here at the runway so we had to clean some snow out of the cab when we got out here. In storms like this if there is the slightest crack the craziest thing happens and it snows inside.