Beard Award

Because Elio is in town (Tristan too), he was able to bring me my award certificate from the BIBLICAL category of the 7th Continent (that’s Antarctica) Beard and Moustache Competition. My flight home was the evening of the contest, so I was unable to retrieve the certificate myself. Enjoy! (I know I do.) […]

Antarctica 2010-2011: Panoramas

In addition to the “title page” images”, one other already existing set of images I really like are the panoramas. I have recollected them into this post. […]

Antarctica 2010-2011: Title Images

After taking over 13000 photographs—and posting almost 2500!—I have a lot to show for my trip to Antarctica. I would like to fulfill a request to come up with a set of my favourite images, but the task daunting. While that work is in progress, I do have one premade list of images I liked: […]

C-17

Finally, just after dinner on the 21st, Matt and I happened to encounter the Runway Czar. He’s the one that decides whether or not the C-17 can land, and thus the one who had been delaying my flight. He said that while the flight would be delayed a few hours, it would definitely land later […]

Last Day

After one more delayed flight, on the 21st of January I was getting bored of McMurdo and really eager to go home. My boredom was at least partially due to doing almost nothing, so I spent the afternoon with Annamarie. She, like me, was done work and just waiting for a flight. We went back […]

Delayed, Oden, PENGUIN!

On the 20th, my flight back to Christchurch had been delayed. The unusually warm weather was making trouble for the ice runway over at the Pegasus Airfield. Flights had started to land only in the coldest part of the night—if they could land at all.

I woke to find a new boat in the harbour, […]

Sauna-to-Pole, Leaving

On the 19th I left the pole, back to McMurdo and eventually home. In the previous evening, I had convinced a few people to join me spending some time building up warmth in the sauna and then dashing outside to the poles (and then right back to he sauna, of course).

Back in McMurdo there […]

Waiting

LDB is waiting. Matt and Elio are waiting for good weather near the gondola to fly out for recovery. Most of the riggers, techs, and the super-pressure balloon team are waiting for good weather to launch. Everyone is waiting to go home.

I am waiting for a flight to pole, where I will spend a […]

BLAST Ops

A few days ago, Don randomly showed up on his way to pole. Naturally, he visited us in the BLAST Ops room. Since he was there during one of those rare times when all six drivers were in the room, we had him take a mosaic panorama of us working. It was a pain to […]

Termination

At 9:31 local time (NZDT) BLAST-Pol terminated. It now rests about 630km away, roughly along the South Pole Traverse.

The gondola is at rest, we think it might be upright-ish, and systems still work good enough for us to guess that it might be upright-ish. So, at least for now, things are in good shape.

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