Ice Caves and the Haunted Were-house

On Monday I had sea ice training; I wasn’t really looking forward to it because, as I understood it, the actual learning portion of the class was rather small yet it takes up an entire day of one’s time (inefficiency bugs the crap out of me) but I had to get it done for work and had already put it off once when I was under the weather. Not that sight seeing isn’t cool and all but it’s not really why I come here and it’s more the type of thing I am into at the end of the season…right now I am just trying to get back into the McMurdo life and get used to work up at the waste barn. Also, with the whole recently being sick business I wasn’t looking forward to being out on the sea ice all day. Things went better then I thought though, still not spectacular, but it was a fairly good time. Salava was on the trip which was a good chance to hang out since I’ve been either sick or a recluse recently. Mostly it was a lot of driving around in a hagglund, which is kind of the poster Antarctic vehicle, they take tourists around in them at the Antarctic Center in Chch and drive them through really deep puddles…hagglunds are somewhat buoyant, they supposedly will float in water, which would come in handy if one were to break through the sea ice. When we weren’t driving we were drilling, we learned how to drill holes both with the hand crank and the power drill (which sounds a lot like a chainsaw when it’s going), and take measurements. All of this was on an already monitored road so we were never in

danger of being on thin ice, but we checked out some cracks and learned what widths were safe for which vehicles if we were to be in uncharted territory. Sometimes if the ice was really thick we would have to put more length on the drill (up to 3 meters) in order to hit water, which all the guys seemed really excited about…Robyn (the only other girl on the trip) and I agreed this must be a male thing cause a 3 meter power drill did not inspire us to pose for photos with it.

To top off the day we went to the ice cave that they found this year. This was the one truly cool part of the trip. First off, the entrance to the cave is a snow slide, and full grown adults or no, who doesn’t enjoy a slide? There isn’t a ton of room to stand around but the 10 of us fit in there pretty easily and it was one of those things that reminds me that my life can be pretty awesome at times, that this weird lifestyle that I’ve chosen for myself isn’t completely crazy. My roommate Jean thinks the cave is a lot like Superman’s fortress of solitude (with all the ice formations and blue light shining through) and I have to agree…it was just that cool. Something to add to list of things that I’ve done here that I would probably never get to do anywhere else like riding on an icebreaker or walking the pressure ridges. The ride home was over an hour so I rode in the passenger seat and dozed off for a bit, it was nice, like a road trip, and it was nice to know that the time out on the ice was over and we were headed back.

The rest of the week felt like one big ramp up for the Waste Dept. haunted house. We had been planning it since I got here and building props for 2 weeks, and suddenly it was time to make it happen…talk about stress! But first a little background: a few years ago there was a wastie by the name of Chris Wilt and his sister had cancer and passed away. Chris’s sister loved Halloween so he decided to put on a haunted house in her memory and take donations for cancer research. I briefly met Chris my first season down, he was one of the few winter-overs I wasn’t afraid of (FNG’s are skittish) and the haunted house thing had become somewhat of a wastie tradition (they don’t do it every year, but rather close to every other year) so I was pretty excited about the idea. Halloween here usually means just another excuse for a drunken costume party (granted, the costumes are of a little higher caliber then the rest of the season), this was a chance to really do something in the Halloween spirit, but as we began putting it together little things started to

pile up and somehow I lost all my energy behind the Halloween spirit thing…we were holding it in the beverage warehouse (our maze was made of pallets of beer) and the maze was supposed to be done at the beginning of the week so we could start setting up but we didn’t end up getting in there til the day before with the maze only a third built (rec has been a little overloaded this year) and the entire thing still needed to be “drunk-proofed” with cargo straps and gigantic pieces of cardboard. With the lights on and everything in transition it looked like a silly mess (not at all scary), and in the meantime little problems kept coming up with the logistics of our gags (the coffin broke a little, the entrance had to be different to create a fire extit, etc.) which took creative energy that we were all running rather low on…so by Friday afternoon I was verbally cursing the freaking haunted house with every breath and mentally cursing my boss for ever bringing it up (sorry James). But then Friday night rolled around, we all reconvened back at our “Haunted Were-House” in costume and turned down the lights and we had an amazing haunted house, one of the best I’ve ever seen. We had a big turnout, about a quarter of the station, and everybody loved it! I haven’t heard people scream that loud or laugh that hard in a long time, and I have to say it was the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been back on station…all three hours of freezing my ass off in the dark. It was So. Much. Fun. Worth every hour we put into thinking about it, building it, and working it…it made it a real Halloween (thanks James).