Busy Sunday

 The wind finally calmed down in time to see the sun! We did a bunch of work on Sunday (technically our day off) to catch up on all the things we couldn't do because of the wind.

 We started doing the snow accumulation survey around station. Basically walking back and forth on a predetermined grid pattern to see how much snow the camp has accumulated since the last time the grid was walked. It is about 15 km long, it will take two days to walk the entire thing.

After two days of condition 1, nothing beats a front row seat for sunrise and sunset over a lunch of homemade dumplings. The sun is up for less than 45 minutes now. Tomorrow will be the last time it goes above the horizon until next year.

 TAWO often reminds me of some sort of dinosaur.

I walked over to the SMG (Science Mobile Garage maybe??) it's a new building, not in use yet but that is where the camp bike was stored. I pulled it out of storage to ride around for the afternoon. I think I'm going to keep it out of storage and use it to get out to TAWO on good weather days. 

Wind Storm

This is just after noon, we are heading to the Big House for lunch. Can't see the big house from the greenhouse!!

It's been blowing about 40 knots consistently all day. The big house is rocking in the wind (I was starting to feel like I was on a boat). The the wind is very loud from the inside of the greenhouse. You can hear the snow battering against the walls and the wind whipping through the cracks and around the corners. 

 The drifts are getting bigger. I wonder if this is the storm that drift over the whole building.

It's creeping up. I see a lot of shoveling in my future!

Food and Fun

On Saturday we all cooked dinner together and we made some really awesome sushi. I made vegetable tempura to make tempura rolls. It was a lot of fun!!

A friendly flamingo now guards the entrance to the Greenhouse.

The sun doesn't make it very high above the horizon and with a storm forecasted for the rest of the week, I probably won't be seeing it again until January.

The other tech brought up a big kite that he attached a small camera to before flying it above the station. This is one of the pictures he was able to capture with his kite. 

Another balloon launch picture, I really like how this one turned out!! This is a fairly rare direction for balloons to go, normally they are carried away from the station towards the north, not towards the south like in this picture. Trying to capture the little green light on the radiosonde is shaping up to be a pretty fun project!

Day and Night

 The big house just before lunch time. Having a few hours of daylight each day has been nice to get outside work done, but that luxury is fading fast. We have only 4 hours of official day light left and are losing about 20 minutes a day (we will lose more the closer we get to the last sunset).

 We have one week until the last sunrise and sunset!! Hopefully we get a few more clear days to see the sun a few more times like this before it leaves us.

 This is TAWO, the Temporary Atmospheric & Weather Observatory (I think that's what that stands for, it was only supposed to be temporary but it's now been in use for a number of years, at least five I think)

 This is the Big House front door, with the Summit Station sign.

This is the entrance to the freezer trench, where all the frozen goods are to get us through the winter.

 Inside the freezer trench.

 There was a huge aurora show covering most of the sky a couple nights ago. There was so much going on in the sky it was difficult to figure out which direction to look!

 The snow drift around the greenhouse is almost level with the roof now.

 Super cool spiral!!!

 Climbing the TAWO meteorological tower. Really tough work.

 This is on the walk out to TAWO. It's about 700 meters away from the main station area. A good 15-20 minute walk with all my ECW on.

Last flight

 Last chance, next service 400 miles. Next plane, end of February.

 The old crew left and now it's just the five of us left here for the winter months.

 There it goes!!

The plane brought us a huge shipment of freshies!!

We carried them up the stairs in to the big house and sorted everything out into the "freshie fridge"

All the fresh stuff for five people until the end of February.

There is a freezer trench outside in the snow with all the frozen food stuffs to get us through the winter. I'll get pictures of that eventually. I skinned and sliced up all the old wrinkly apples from the last freshie delivery a few months ago and put them outside to freeze on trays. I'll use these frozen sliced apples to bake with later in the winter when we run out of fresh apples.

Wooohooo!!! Winter!!! I made apple crumb cake from the older apples to celebrate. And we also had a delicious salad at dinner. 

Hard at Work

 I launch this ozone sonde once a week. That's me on the left.

 I also launch a weather balloon every other day. There are two weather balloon launches a day and we rotate the duty between three of us. I have every other night balloon.

We need to climb the instrument towers when the frost builds up on the wind birds, air inlets, and temperature sensors too much. This is really tough work, climbing towers, in the wind and cold, with ECW on and also doing fine motor movements with a paint brush to remove frost is a big challenge.

There is a bunch of other science that I take care of up here but these are the big glamorous tasks that are fun to take pictures of!

First Week

 This week has been a lot of training. Learning how to take care of the instruments, launching balloons, making dinner on my night of the week to cook for everyone, making bread. Fun stuff!

 We currently have 5.6 hours of day light. Sunrise is at 11:30 and sunset is at 17:10. It hasn't been clear enough to get any good sunset and sunrise pictures.

We planted a few new seeds in the mini garden in the big house!! The last flight was supposed to come today but there was bad weather over the strait so it was canceled. Maybe tomorrow we will get that last shipment of freshies and the fall crew will head out and leave the station to the remaining 5 of us.  

A Break from the Wind

The wind finally calmed down and I was able to do a little walking around outside. Visited the berm (There is only one here!!!) and dug around a little bit with a few others checking for some helium cylinders. It was very nice to be able to see the horizon.

This is the big house.

This is the green house. Where I sleep.

The big white tent like building is the SOB, I forget what that stands for but that is where I launch the balloons from. The generator, heavy equipment shop and snow melter are also in that building.

Fuel tanks and bladders to get us through the winter.

The moon was out!

Great aurora show right before the night balloon launch. Weather balloons are launched twice a day. 9 AM and 9 PM.

It's nice that the skies were pretty much clear for the aurora.

Feels good to be back on ice and under the stars!