A great perk of being the Met Tech is that here at Casey station there are a few weather stations out in the field, some as far as 125km away. Later in the year I'll be making a traverse or two to visit the stations at Law Dome and Cape Poinsette, but recently I was at Haupt Nunatak which is located next to the Vanderford Glacier, near Browning Peninsula. These names and places probably don't mean much to you without a map, so here it is:
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| This is our world. Outside of this map, there be dragons |
The weather was rather spectacular on the way out and was forecast to
go to shit deteriorate the following afternoon, so I made the executive decision to do the necessary work on the station on the way, rather than drive back from the hut in the morning. Luckily all the instruments were within calibration and no extra work was required as the sun was setting fast and we were getting cold.
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| Steve the sparkie, Scotty the chef and Gav the mechanic lend a hand |
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| The Hagglunds parked on the hill |
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| Another spectacular sunset |
Next morning as we prepared the quads (ATVs) for getting to the sea-ice and drilling into it to check the depth, I took myself to the dunny, which is a completely different experience to the shovel required on Macca. Here, the huts have a little room off to the side with a toilet seat over a bucket lined with garbage bags. Whatever you do,
only poo in the bag and bucket, then wipe and cover with talcum powder to reduce the smell. There's a separate drum for piss. Why is it so? Helps with disposing back at station. Anyway, the door handle is a little stuffed on the Browning Hut dunny where it will close, but the plunger on the inside is hanging on a piece of string instead of being installed correctly and allowing the door to be opened easily from the inside. I happened to be happily going about my business when suddenly the door burst open and one of my fellow expeditioners was looking at me aghast and in his haste to close the door allowed the plunger on its string to go flying outside so that when I'd finished... I was locked in. Luckily it didn't take long until I was let out.
Quads are by far one of the best ways to get around, unfortunately the helmet visors fog up quickly, as do our sun glasses and even the anti-fog ski goggles. The problem with the fog is that in sub zero temperatures (we averaged around -20ºC on this trip) it ices up instantly. Anyone got a really small heater?
The sea-ice wasn't thick enough to travel on, so we hopped over to the elephant seal wallow to see the happy seals trying to breath through the ice and get onto land. Poor guys looked really tired from the effort.
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| A nose in the ice |
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| I think I can |
That afternoon the blizzard came in and we became 4 guys stuck in a hut at the end of the Earth, playing cards, eating, drinking a little, snoring, farting, talking absolute rubbish, but most importantly: sleeping. I think we were in the hut for about 36 hours, except for those times we had to dig the snow out of the dunny so that we could do our business.
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| The blizzard started to dissipate on the second evening, only to build up again later that night |
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| Playing the now favourite card game "Man Bites Dog" where you get points for making up believable newspaper headlines such as "Teen Nurse Weds Dead Urologist" |
