As one might imagine, food on traverse is pretty basic. One of our standard dinner options is a heat-and-eat curry or stew, over rice or instant mashed potatoes. We have a microwave, but usually use a military style RAK heater to warm up these - with 6 people to feed, it’s more time-efficient to slowly warm up all the meals in parallel, than serially through the microwave. ...

Just a quick update for now, to say that I’m on traverse! Things are going well, just haven’t had time to put together a proper post yet. We’re keeping up a good pace, and have crossed the halfway point in terms of distance between Scott Base and KIS3. ...

My role in the traverse is “Tech Support”, which largely relates to the ground penetrating radar (GPR) that we use to detect any crevasses that might be in our path. Nearly all the crevasses we encounter will be covered with snow, and essentially invisible from the surface. The radar uses 400MHz radio waves to detect any discontinuities in the ice, such as layers of snow or between ice and the void of a crevasse. ...

Crevasses are the hazard that justifies my role here, today we spent a while learning about how to climb out of one in case a fall were to happen. This was the second crevasse rescue training I’ve been on in the last few weeks, and we’ll have at least one more - outside in a hole dug for the purpose, called the SARchasm. ...

My last few work days have mostly been filled with a series of smaller projects. Today for instance, I divvied up a pile of handheld VHF radios and associated bits to our team, removed some seats from the back of a PistenBully (which we typically call a PB - more on those later) to make room for a couple beds, made a backing plate for a laptop mount in that same PB, sorted out a spreadsheet problem for our medical inventory, received a bit of training, did what I guess could be called rigging for the boom that extends the Ground Penetrating Radar in front of the PB (more to come on that too). It’s been fun, but doesn’t leave me with a lot of time nor energy for blogging! ...

Our Friday morning C-17 flight to the ice went smoothly; we got away a little later than planned, but the seating and temperature in the plane were comfortable, and the crew let us visit the cockpit! Our flight had something like 110 passengers, just about all USAP folks bound for McMurdo station. Disembarking on the Phoenix airfield felt very familiar, bright white and crisp cold, no smell except burning jet fuel, fata morgana at the horizon. We had gorgeous weather for this time of year - calm and mid -20s C, and the view never gets old. Some folks had driven a Haaglund (a “hag”, as we tend to call them) out from Scott Base to meet the kiwi contingent, and something like half an hour later, we arrived at Scott Base! ...

Somewhat unexpectedly, my Saturday was quite social, mainly due to participating in a huge protest to do with our local hospital, and while I didn’t have a lot of packing to do, I was glad to have a couple hours Sunday morning to finish it up! The bus ride to Christchurch on Sunday went smoothly, and Monday morning I met the other three traverse folks who weren’t here for the earlier training session week before last. ...

A big trip away wouldn’t be complete without a few loose ends to tie up right before departure. For the last few years, I’ve had an experimental (which sounds so much more professional than “temporary”) drainage arrangement in my back yard, involving an inexpensive garden hose. Before cutting the grass, I’d roll the hose up to avoid damaging it with the mower, but this time the sunlight-brittled plastic hose snapped. ...

Despite being up early at the hotel this morning, I somehow had it in my head that we would start at 9am and got to work about a half hour late. Of my AntNZ work days so far, this was probably the worst to be late to, as I held up the beginning of kit out for our group of four. ...

Most of my work week has been filled with trainings about various things relating to my specific role, about working in Antarctica, and about working with Antarctica New Zealand. We’ve had some other tasking as well, such as shopping for a few items of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment - insulated work gloves, tinted safety glasses, safety toe boots) for our roles, and gathering some equipment that we’ll need this season. ...

The first time, you go for the adventure. The second time, you go for the money. The third time, you go because you don’t fit in anywhere else. ...

As someone who’s never identified as a gamer, it amuses me how much adult life can feel like I’m playing one of those ’90s RPGs, except instead of guiding Ness through collecting whatever it was that Ness collected to save his 2D universe from the bad aliens, I’m running around collecting bits of paper to make progress in a 1D bank account. ...

A program called QGIS has been on my radar for quite a few years now, since I was involved in developing FreeCAD and there was some cross-pollination between the two projects. Today, I finally spent some time playing around with QGIS and making some maps with data from Quantarctica. ...

I ordered a GoPro Hero 12! ...