Traversing the Space Between

One of the most impressive operations here are the traverses. A few seasons ago, I posted about the SPoT team (South Pole Traverse) that drags fuel and cargo from McMurdo to the South Pole, usually three times a season. They are always a team of hearty people that get through tough conditions, driving their tractors for ~30 days each way.  HST getting set up in the background This season I've been spending time to get to know the Heavy Science Traverse (HST) team. This will be the first year they take their modules to the South Pole and then head even further than anyone has been before to take scientists to locations they need to do their work. There are 6 tractors that will go on this trip. They will follow SPoT1's trail to Pole, but then go further than the South Pole. They leave in early November and do not return until mid-February. Can you imagine?! You have to take everything with you for all that time and only stop at a station once (at Pole). You can only do things lik

There's really only one activity that I do here besides work, and that's go to the gym. Sometimes it's really hard to get motivated to put on all the clothing, walk through the wind, and get to the gym only to remove the outer clothing and start to warm up. Fun fact...the dumbbells can be really cold on your hands. That's the gym building So you can imagine my frustration one day when huffing it through crap weather to get to where I can work out, expecting all the treadmills to look like this: And they looked like this: At that point, we only had ~400 people on station and only 1 working treadmill. It was like the Hunger Games trying to get to use that one. After gym raging a bit, I asked the contractor to look into fixing at least some of the treadmills that all went belly up at the same time. Luckily, a tech was able to get 4.5 of them going. The treadmills are so needed for our mental and physical health here. Only the craziest of people can run outside in these con