A Day Out on the Ice

Several weeks ago, I had the fortunate opportunity to get out of McMurdo for the day! I recently became good friends with someone from my Scrabble club. His name is John and he operates heavy machinery for the scientists…i.e. he has the coolest job on station! He gets to roam around Antarctica completely unsupervised, grooming obscure roads and drilling holes in the sea ice for scientists & divers. He frequently uses his power for good, though…like several weeks ago, when he decided to take two poor, lowly DAs out for a little adventure…

Our day started out bright and early, with Kira and I grabbing the brown bag lunches we had packed the night before. We met John at the heavy machinery shop and was introduced to his “baby”: a DV87 Challenger (see the pictures of the huge, yellow piece of machinery) that’s been affectionately dubbed “The Cadillac” by McMurdo community members. This machine is truly the creme de la creme…one of only three manufactured in the entire world! The Cadillac stands out compared to the other machines around here, most of which are old, rusty tanks left over from the ’60s when this place served as a military base..

We loaded up in our sweet ride and spent most of the morning grooming the roads out to McMurdo’s two airfields: Willy and Pegasus. Pegasus receives flights coming to and from Christchurch, NZ and Sydney, Australia; whereas Willy manages the smaller planes that make runs to field camps and the South Pole. Once finished grooming by the airfields, we set out for Cape Evans – an area famous for two reasons: Cape Evans is the point where the sea ice meets the Byrd Glacier (quite beautiful…looks like overlapping ice sheets), and it’s also the spot where polar explorer Robert F. Scott built his hut/base camp over 100 years ago. The hut itself has been perfectly preserved in its original state, with cans of herring and packages of soda bread still on the shelves! Scott’s crews’ sleeping bags are still on their bunks, the dark room still equipped to develop photos, hay still lining the pony stables outside. It was really quite cozy inside! I would have loved to experience Antarctica that way…soaking up the roaring coal fire, sleeping in animal skins, no electricity, no showers…

After exploring the hut and its surroundings for a while, we boarded the Cadillac again and headed back toward the ice caves for another visit. On this leg of our drive (I might get in trouble for saying what I’m about to say, but oh well!), I got to drive! Mom and Dad – I’m officially a heavy equipment operator! Don’t worry…the machine caps at 21 mph, so I wasn’t at risk of crashing into an iceberg. Lol. We spent some time playing around in the ice caves again, which was lovely, since the first time around we only had a hurried 5 minutes or so.

When we were finished there, we headed toward toward the place I was most excited to see: a seal colony at a place called Turtle Rock! I was suprised by the calmness of the seals. In fact, they really didn’t care that we were there at all! I was a little afraid of them at first, but then realized that they moved at a sluggish 0.0003 miles per hour. When I realized I could easily outrun a seal (swimming is a different story, however), I overcame my fear of being so close to an animal so huge, so foreign, and was able to take some really cool pictures! Most of the seals were mothers who had given birth in the past month…so it was a veritable seal nursery. Perhaps the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in the wild. (Have I mentioned that several members from the Planet Earth crew are currently at McMurdo? They’ve been diving to film the seals that I just saw at Turtle Rock! How neat is that?)

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