Jacking, Trivia, and Banff

I have now been at Pole for a full 3 days. Man, feels like I never left. The station is the same, and I already know my way around. Important things like dinner times and how to clean the bathroom, are old-hat. But it is good to be back.

Flying over the Antarctic Ice Cap

Inside the C-17

Thursday after arriving, I headed out to the telescope to have a quick look around. It is the summer season here, and we do most of our observing during the winter. Thus the summer season is mostly used for maintenance of the telescope. The main piece of maintenance this year was fixing the azimuth bearing. "Fixing a bearing? No problem!" you might say. Well, let's review the situation. This bearing is about 12 feet in diameter, and the ENTIRE 700,000 lb telescope sits on top of it. Add to that the fact that the whole castle is build on ice - no solid ground for over 3 kilometers straight down.

The plan was to jack the entire telescope up, pull the bearing out, pop in a new one, and set the telescope back down. Sound simple? Well, we hired a Dutch company, Mammoet, which specializes in heavy lifting, to do the job. By heaving lifting I mean things like bridge trusses and entire buildings. A 700,000 lb telescope would be no problem, they said. The jacking was supposed to begin on December 25 (Yes, people work on Christmas down here. Seriously, what else are you going to do?) Well, they had that bearing out by Dec 15, no sweat! By the time I got here, the telescope was completely back together and we had already fired the detectors back up! So ol' madam SPT was looking in tip-top shape.

Tijmen and Ross verifying that the STP is in tip-top shape.

After so much travel and being at 9300 feet above sea level, I was feeling wired and ready to rumble by dinner time (for Caswell, that was SARCASM), but my friends from the KECK experiment convinced me to sit in my chair long enough to play pub trivia. Three rounds consisting of something important that I don't remember, Wold Languages, pictures of people who you had to identify and say how they died, and random facts. My favorite answer to the person identification round was "Richard Nixon, shot by Viet-Cong." Needless to say, we got destroyed.

Friday night, I went out to the climbing gym. That's right they have a CLIMBING GYM at the south pole! It is a small wooden wall that is *very* steep, but well constructed given the small space. Lots of good holds too! Someone had changed out most of the holds from last year, which was great. I put up a new problem that is quite hard, didn't get it Friday or Saturday, but hopefully I'll get it tomorrow.

After climbing, they had a showing of the Banff Mountain Film festival in the gym. It was a pretty sweet setup - projector throwing images of people and mountains up on a huge white sheet hung on the wall - full on big screen. The films were entertaining. A crazy film about Alex Hanold free-soloing Moonlight buttress (8? pitches, 5.12d) and the Regular NW face of halfdome (23 pitches, 12b) followed by some quality heli-skiing followed by some other films? The last film was the longest and best. It captured the adventures of a British chap who decided that it would be a good idea to take a tandem bike to the arctic circle, and bike to the Torres del Fuego at the southern-most tip of Chile. By himself. The idea was that he would pick up random people to ride with him wherever he could. What a cool idea! In the end it took him over 2 years to make the voyage, and he picked up 220+ random passengers. He entered Mexico not speaking a word of Spanish, and exited as a fluent speaker. Very cool film.

Bed time for Kyle. Till next time, live life to the fullest!