Fiordland

Oh man, what a beautiful day. When I woke this morning, the first thing I saw was pink clouds reflecting the first rays of sun over the tops of the grass stocks just beyond by bivy sack. We had camped in a gravel pull-off on the way back to Wanaka, where I am now. I am typing in the Info center, in front of a full window looking out over the beautiful blue Lake Wanaka, with the high peaks around Mt Aspiring in the background. It is warm, sunny, and beautiful.

The wireless here does not seem to want to load my pictures, so you will have to see those later. Sorry!

We are back here after spending a few days in the Milford Sound area. What a dramatic landscape! We drove down there 4 days ago. The valley on the east side leading up to the crest is a long flat glacier valley with steep peaks and temerate rainforest on both sides. We stopped and picked up a german hitch hiker in the last major town of Tau Ana. Dan is in his early 20's, and his stated plan for time being is, "I'll be traveling for the next 10 years. India, China, South America, we'll see!" He has already been on the road for over a year, in Australia primarily.

We spend the night at a primitive camp site (picknick table, toilet, and a pullout). The next day we drove to the Milford Tunnel, which burrows through the continental divide. Milford Sound is in the heart of Fiordland, the drastic south-west coast of New Zealand. This rugged area is a glacier-carved territory that gets a large amount of rain year around and hence is a temperate rain forest. The very steep and deep valleys are filled with lush vegetation, and are surrounded by tall granite walls covered with more moss and vegetation. Above that are the peaks, which top out at around 2000 m and have granite summit caps above glacial hanging valleys. It turned out to be a beautiful day, but we found this out too late to climb anything big. After dropping off Dan at the tunnel, we ended up scrambling Moir's Mate (4th and easy 5th class). We were hoping to climb the North ridge of Moir, but the 5th class downclimbing would have turned dangerous if it rained and we did not have a rope, so we descended prematurely. We still gained over 1000 meters in a few hours.

The next day we drove to Milford sound early, arriving by just before 8am. This place is very busy, with lots of tour busses, boats, planes and helicopters. However by arriving early we missed many of the crowds. The morning was very pretty, with some clouds and mist and some blue sky.

That afternoon we went to one of the sport crags on steep granite that are in the area. The crag we were at was called the Chasm. The climbing was fantastic, with highly featured steep granite sport climbing. We first climbed a 3 pitch mixed gear and bolt route with short 5.10 then 5.11 trad pitches. The third pitch was a fantastic steep black dike with sandstone-esque pockeds that went at 5.12c. This pitch was called "But 't Milford." If only I had endurance I could have onsighted it...

Then down and over to another 2 pitch sport route. I wound have onsighted the 11d second pittch, but there were two exits and I chose the left hand one which turned out to be quite a bit harder than 11d. Then we went over to an excellent 2 pitch route that was the first route on the cliff, called "High Ideals and Big Ambitions." My lead on the second pitch was mostly on gear, with the 11a crux protected by 2 bolts. At the end of the day I tried to top rope one more pitch of 12a that was directly under the rappel, and made it after several hangs, content to call it a day.

Today we are on our way to the Mt Cook area. We are still undecided as to what to do, because we have 5 days left and the 3rd day is supposed to have bad weather. The big objectives that we want to do (Mt Sefton, Mt Cook) would be best in 5 days, meaning climbing on the 3rd day. So we will probably do two 2-day trips and develop plans for future years. That is about it! I'm excited for the last week here, and excited to get back to life in Chicago. It is good to be excited about what you are doing!

Mt Aspiring

Yes, New Zealand is pretty awesome. At least the mountains are! As most of you know, Orin and I made it back to New Zealand and off of Antarctica one week ago, on February 11. We spend a night at the hotel, then picked up our rental car early the next morning. The most valuable piece of advice about New Zealand driving that I got was from the man at the rental company, "Stay left, stay left, stay left!" Indeed, they drive on the left side of the road here! That also means that in our manual shift car the stick goes in your left hand instead of your right. As long as you pay attention, it is not too bad. No problems so far!

We picked up the car, mailed off Orin's extra stuff, checked out a few outdoor shops, then drove out 40 min to my new friend Kate's house. Kate has been extremely friendly and gracious in helping us get oriented and on our way for the trip. Kate is a friend of a friend from Cornell, and had agreed to let Orin and I sleep on her floor for the night. She has a very cute house with an amazing view of the bay. We slept well with bellies full of curry rice.

The next day we drove back to Christchurch and picked up guide books and groceries, then cruised down south to Wanaka, a 6 hour drive. We gave a ride to hitch hikers on two different occasions. We arrived too late to stop by the Department of Conservation (DOC), so we drove up a valley and slept in a field for the night. Why pay for a $15 campsite when you can camp for free?

The next day we were at the DOC by 8:30am to get some information about Mt Aspiring and sign in. You can sign in with trip forms, and then if you don't come back out they will go look for you. Much more formal than anything I have ever worked with. We told them we would be out a full day later than we expected, because we were not planning on needing a rescue!

A beautiful drive up a narrow canyon brought us to the trailhead, and we started hiking by shortly after noon. It drizzeled all day. The lower part of the valley is effectively a temperate rain forest and was filled with thick, lush vegetation. Following the advice of the guide book and the fact that I had a bivy sack but Orin did not, we left the trail and bushwacked through the sopping underbrush for 40 minutes to find Oat's Rock bivy. This was worth it, as we spent the night under the protection of a small rock overhang. I was soaked to the core, but it was warm so I was reasonably comfortable and my pack stayed dry enough.

We woke to a brilliant, sunny day. After a late start we hiked up to the head of the valley then started the scramble towards Bevan Col. It was solidly 4th class up the initial gorge with heavy packs, but we made good progress. After that it backed off to 3rd class scrambling and we climbed to the col by 4:30pm. The climb was about 1300 m of elevation gain, with the col at 1851m. After scouting the approach to Aspiring and eating dinner, we slept.

Up at 3:30am, the stars were amazing! A quick cold breakfast of granola and we were off. We quickly gained the glacier and crossed the Bevan Glacier. There were quite a few clavasses, but we stayed where they were small and easy to cross. We arrived at the base of the South West ridge and left the glacier at 7am. What a fantastic route! We scrambled up some 4th and easy 5th class rock to gain the snow arete. This sharp snow ridge separates the West and steep South faces of the mountain, and rises continuously at 45 to 55 deg for around 400 m. We arrived at the crux of the climb shortly after 10am, placed a solid 2-screw anchor and roped up. The gully which is often filed with ice and snow was dry, so Orin lead a mixed pitch with several fixed pitons for protection. The climbing was not too hard but engaging with plenty of exposure. The climbing was probably 5.6, but in gloves and crampons. I followed the 30m pitch, and we put the rope back in the pack. One more hour of steep snow, and we were on top by 12:30!

Orin on the SW Ridge, in the middle of the snow arete.

Orin above the crux, nearing the summit.

What a spectacular summit! At 3033 m, it is the highest peak in the immediate region. The summit is a sharp snow cone that drops steeply off in all directions. We could see all the way out to the ocean to the West, down to more high peaks to the south, up to Mt Cooke to the North, and out to the planes to the East. Totally spectacular day.

After 1/2 an hour, we began the descent down the North West ridge. This took longer than expected, 3 hours. It was full on very exposed 4th class scrambling with one rappel. By the time we reached the hut at the base of the NW ridge, we were very tired indeed! But not done yet...

Back across the glacier to the Bevan col and our packs we went, arriving at 6pm. We ate some soup and packed up, then headed back down towards the West Matukituki valley. We bivied just above the 4th class gorge in growing clouds and wind.

The next morning we woke up late and it still hadn't rained, much to our glee. After breakfast we downclimbed the gorge, and hiked out, a 7 hour day. I was really tired by the time we arrived at the car! Much more than usual.

Today it is raining a bit and we are resting in Wanaka, re-stocking on groceries, and planning for what is next. We will probably go down to Milford Sound and the Darrens, where there are long rock routes. We probably won't climb any of them though, because the weather report for that part calls for rain for the foreseeable future. Then I would like to head back up north to the Mt Cooke region and try to climb the North Ridge of Mt Sefton, but we'll see what time and the weather have in store for us! 10 more days is NZ...

Keep living your dream!

parting thoughts

Well, it is my last day at the Pole. The plane from McMurdo will arrive here at 11:30am. I will hop, skip and jump onto the plane and fly to McMurdo. After a transfer I will then fly on to Chrishchurch and the land of days and nights.

But first, Bubah is back! I don't know how we got him back, but if I find out more, I'll let you all know.

Second, a few parting pictures.

Above is a picture of Dan and a tech worker changing the gain on the optical pointing telescopes on the side of the SPT.

Above is a picture of the official South Pole Marker. Each winter the machinest makes a pole marker for the new year. This years was a miniature bronze model of SPT. It is about 3 inches high. The inset in the flat plate is cut out in the shape on Antarctica.

Curiously, it doesn't really feel like I am leaving. More so today than yesterday, nonetheless it still feels like another day at the pole when I wake up, eat, and sit down at my computer to work. Work is going great, as usual. I am continuing to work or the C analysis pipeline, which I assume that I will be working on for some time now. I am currently completely re-writing the function that reads data out of fits files and into a C struct which we can then easily manipulate. The previous function is something like 12000 lines long for a SINGLE FUNCTION, hence the reason for re-writing it. It is really fun working with smart people - in this case I am referring to Erik Leitch - who know a lot about a subject. After talking to him I have figured out a much cleaner way of re-writing the function which is actually pretty elegant. It involves writing a nested set of arrays of structures which contain function and memory pointers. Then all I have to do is loop through this pre-defined array and call one general read function for each column of data. Still haven't compiled it yet, but I am working and testing in small steps. It should be awesome! But I digress.

Yesterday I didn't feel like I was leaving at all, and just worked the whole day through on the above programs. Now it is finally settling in that I am indeed leaving in a few hours. So what are my last thoughts while here? Well, I am very glad to have had the opportunity to come here. First and foremost it is incredible to finally be down here and see the telescope that I will eventually be writing a thesis on. I have learned much more about the project than I would have in the equivalent amount of time in Chicago. This is the best part of the trip. I also feel incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to be somewhere that a small fraction of the population will ever be able to go to. Antarctica is an incredible continent. I have been living on kilometers of ice in all directions, including down. It is like being in the middle of the ocean.

I am nevertheless excited to leave and get back to my life in the "outside world." It is fun to visit here, but it puts the rest of your life on hold for that time. I am quite glad not to be staying for winter for that reason. I am sure that mentally I would be able to handle it and would have a productive and eventful year, but right now I am not willing to miss a year of my life in the outside world.

An interesting observation that one of the people on the Ice Cube neutrino detector project made last night in the sauna is that the South Pole is like living in a nice youth hostel. There are many people in their 20's and early 30's. You can hang out with other young people every evening, get to play sports and watch movies, and have parties and dancing every weekend. The only difference is that you get your own room, the food is much better, and you are surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of ice.

The one thing that I am not sure about the whole endeavor is the consumptive nature of this entire enterprise. Everything we do here relies completely on being flown in on an airplane. All of the energy we use comes from gas that was flown in. As far as I can tell the station does a reasonable job of being frugal with their energy uses - buildings seem well designed, and there aren't too many energy-consumptive extra luxuries (the sauna is an exception). However, thinking about just the flights makes me cringe a bit. There are 4 or 5 flights from McMurdo to Pole and back six days a week, weather depending, all summer. Keeping a population of around 250 people for the summer and 40 people for the winter takes a lot of food and gas.

The only two justifications that I can see are as follows. Geo-politically, the united states would have a station at the pole regardless of the science. I am certainly not convinced that this is a good reason, but right now it is a political reality. The second reason is why I am here, namely that the South Pole is very nearly the best place on earth for doing CMB science. Between the 6 month winter, the extremely cold and stable atmosphere, and the rotation pattern of the earth below the sky, this is pretty much as good as it gets without going to space. And if we are thinking about expense, a satellite is usually at least 100 times as expensive as a ground-based experiment. The science we are going after is as big as it gets - the nature of the universe as a whole. And mark my words, right now we are in a golden age for experimental cosmology. This field will open up our understanding of the universe immensely in the next 10-20 years. I hope that it will eventually lead to ways of testing and finally understanding gravity, which will probably lead to a complete revision of our understanding of the fabric of space-time itself. So is this worth the expense and the consumption that maintaining a science-support station at the south pole entails? Well my feet are saying "yes" by working on this project. I am unambiguously in support of spending lots of money on science, so why not just chalk up the expense to the name of science? I do believe that the pursuit of knowledge is an endeavor worth sacrificing for. It is what I am dedicating my life to. So is it worth it? No answers today. To my readers, think about it. One of the greatest capacities we as humans have is the ability to think. Use it!

Bubah update - pure apathy

Hello All,

In the pursuit of getting Bubah back, the SPT team appears to be bogged down in pure apathy. Since I am leaving the South Pole in 3 days, I am following our fearless leader Dan's lead. And his lead has been the stance, "We don't deal with terrorists." After a complete lack of response from us to the first email, they sent a second email saying that there was a note in "Catcher in the Rye" across the hall in the library with further instructions. Our plan is to go over there and take a photograph of the note, then put the note back in the book so they think that we never even looked at it.

It is amusing that the Ice Cube team seems more interested in the Bubah case than we do; they bring it up at meals, and sometimes come over to our side of the Science room to talk about it. I was even accused by one member of running an inside job! Suspicious? Perhaps...

Bubah's place in our shrine has been replaced. "What could possibly replace Bubah in the shrine," you might ask? None other than a can of Kraft Easy Cheese. Well, we weren't actually going to eat it!

As a random inserted side note, as usual there was a party last night (Saturday night). It is very amusing watching the social dynamic at a dance party when there are 40 guys and 5 girls.

Bubah taken hostage!

Breaking news! Bubah has been taken hostage! Bubah is our mascot, a small purple stuffed alien who talks when you bob it on the head. It has three phrases, which we have interpreted as "yes," "no," and "I'm not answering." As you can see, Bubah in crucial to our decision making process as a collaboration! He is also the only creature to actually ride on the boom of the telescope while taking observations, and this has critical insight that no one else on this planet of beyond possesses!

He went missing last night. This morning in the place where Bubah usually sits in the Justin Beeber shrine, there was just a laser-printout of a picture of Bubah with a blind-fold on, and a cryptic message saying Bubah had been taken hostage and we needed to check our email.

Dan checked his email, and there was a message from a fabricated account, something like "doyouwantBubahback@gmail.com" that contained a picture of Bubah under a snow-roller (think steam-roller for snow) with the message, "If you ever want to see Bubah again, acquire 2 unmarked 6-packs of beer. We will contact you with further instructions." We are formulating a plan as we speak to rescue Bubah and I will keep you updated. For now, keep your eyes peeled!

Pub Trivia

Welcome to Pub Trivia! The SPT team hosted Pub Trivia this past wednesday, and I was given complete control over one of four rounds. After sitting through numerous rounds of lame questions about movies and pop music in past weeks, what category did I pick? Mountains! 2 teams clearly had climbers, and 2 teams clearly did not. Out of 21 points, the team scores were 2, 3, 9 and 11.

Here are the questions, see what you would have scored (that means no looking up questions until after you have finished...) If you want, you can email me your guesses and I will email back answers. Or you could just look the answers up, for which Wikipedia is amazing!

Mountains.

1) [2pt] What is the highest peak in the contiguous united states, and what is its height to within 100 feet?

2) [2pts] What is the tallest mountain face in the world? 2 pts, mountain and name of the face.

3) [1pt] This country has produced well knows climbers such as Chris Bonnington and Mick Fowler. It's strict anti-bolt ethics brought about the climbing style "head-pointing" on its famous grit-stone. Name this country.

4) [2pts] What is the second highest peak in Antarctica, and when was it first climbed? Year +- 5. 2 pts.

5) [1pt] What peak has the greatest continuous rise from base to summit in the world?

6) [1pt] How many 14000 ft peaks are there in CO? Must be within +- 5

Extra spontaneous bonus point: Who skiied all of these peaks within one year?

7) [1pt] This asthetic mountain lies in either Angentina or Chile, depenting who you ask. It has been described as "The hardest mountain in the world." It's easiest route is the controversial "Compressor Route," put up by Cesare Maestri in 1970. What is the name of this mountain?

8) [2pts] What is the tallest mountain in Montana? 2 pts, name of the mountain, height to within 500 ft.

9) [1pt] What is the death rate on Annapurna, the deadliest 8000 meter peak? This is defined as the ratio of the number of people who die on Annapurna to the number of people who try to climb it? Statistics are as of January, 2007.

10) [1pt] Mt Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. What is its Nepalese name?

11) [3pts] What is the tallest mountain on the Oceania continent? For an extra point, what country is it in? For a third point, what man-made environmental disaster lies at the foot of the mountain

12) [3pts] Name the 6 Great North Faces of the Alps. 1pt for 1, 2pts for 3, 3 pts for all 6. See pictures below: - - The internet connection is too slow to upload these pictures right now. So you are going to just have to guess off the top of your heads. If you are concerned, please write a letter to your senator or representative asking them to support more satellite coverage for scientists at the south pole.

Fire Alarms and Saunas

Well, yes, both fire alarms and saunas, fortunately not at the same time! But first for a work update, which I know is why all of you read this blog. The past few days have been good, and I am starting to realize that I have less than a week left at the pole! We ran the schedule that I wrote for the telescope earlier this week, and after fixing one typo it seems to be working as advertised. That means that we will be running this schedule on three patches of sky between RA=0 to RA=5 hours and scanning over and over theses patches all winter. Cool! Now I am spending time learning how we actually process our data, and trying to understand an analysis pipeline in C, which is an alternate to the standard pipeline in IDL.

Here is a picture of the 150 GHz map. It doesn't look like much yet, but this is only 3 scans of 2.5 hours each. The patch is 17 deg across and 10 deg high. If you click on the picture and look in the bottom right corner, you can see a small white spot which is "point source," which is probably a star:


Ok, I realize that we need fire alarms, sure. And I also realize that in order for fire alarms to work reliably, the system needs to be tested. But do you really need to test them every other day for a month?! A fire here would be a very, very bad thing - we can't exactly just go to another building if the main station burned down. There is a dedicated fire crew of 4 people here to ensure our safety. They have automatic announcements which I can recite to you by memory: "BBBEeeeeepppp!!!!! BBBEEeeeeepppp!!!!! May I please have your attention. May I please have your attention. There is a fire emergency in Cryo. There is a fire emergency in Cryo. Disregard, disregard, disregard." Well, the disregard part is not part of the alarm, but it might as well be, because in the approximately 50 times that I have heard that alarm, I think every one without exception has been followed by a "disregard." Today after dinner we were working, and at 7pm the fire alarm went off as part of a test. It continued to go off for 18 minutes without stopping, complete with flashing blue lights. It was loud enough that I went and got ear plugs!

As advertised in my blog title, we do indeed have a sauna at the station! Apparently they even had one in the old Dome before the new station was build. It is a small sauna, but if you have ever seen how many people you can pack into a phone booth... well you get the point. Sunday night we packed 7 people in there and cranked the heat. There is something called the "300 club," which is where people in the winter get the sauna up to 200 deg F, then run outside when it is -100 F. I am now a proud member of the "267 club." We got the sauna up to 240 deg F. This required some trickery because there is a safety switch on the bottom of the heater in the sauna that pops out and disables the heater if it gets too hot. Apparently they are worried about baking people alive or something... In any case, if you reach down there and pop it back in periodically, you can manually override the temperature control and keep the thing cranking! 240 is really hot - remember that water boils at 210 F. Then we ran outside and around the geographic south pole in the -27 F weather. Wearing shoes of course. The people who wore only sandals suffered, but I was great! Well, my hands got a little cold. Ok, fine by the time we went back in I was pretty cold... Oh yeah maybe rolling in the snow wasn't such a good idea either... The think that is super cool is that any exposed hair on your body almost instantly freezes and turns frosty white. We won't mention that my legs looked like an open meadow after a heavy frost. Needless to say, I slept very well that night!

Oh yeah, and on sunday Bob and Fred might have shown up again for a repeat attempt at the tow-in paragliding adventure with a stronger rope, accompanied by a dedicated photographer Joe on a second snow-mobile. Let's just imagine that everything worked really well this time, and Fred got up the full extent of the rope, probably 150 feet off the ground. But I'll leave it up to your imaginations - bug me when I get back to Chicago.

Here I am out in the open: