First Post

8 Oct 2016

Welcome to my blog!  I'm not yet sure what this will be.  It will certainly be a place for me to in some sense document my 1-year stay at the south pole.  It will include mundane daily details, random stream-of-consciousness ramblings, pictures, and maybe other things.  Updates will be random, as internet access is limited down there.  If you're reading this, you probably know me personally, so I won't spend much time on introductions.  Please feel free to email me with things you'd like me talk about, complaints that I talk too much about other things, or any other thoughts/feedback/ideas/requests you have.  So what to talk about first?

It's Saturday night.  On Monday I move into a hotel, for what I consider in many respects to be the real beginning of my south pole journey.

The 2017 South Pole winter-over crew is meeting in Denver for the first time on Monday evening.  We'll actually start on Tuesday morning, when we head up to Estes Park, CO, entry to Rocky Mountain National Park, for three days of team building (I've been mentally calling it "trust falls and talking about the Meyers-Briggs" in a bit of well-meaning fun.  INTP, if you're curious.).  The following week, 17-21 October, will be spent in Denver doing firefighting/emergency medical training.  As there are only 50 of us spending the winter at the pole, we have to be our own emergency services.  About half of us have been assigned to the trauma medical team, and I've been assigned to the firefighting team.

In some sense, I've been headed toward the south pole for several months now, but Monday represents a real psychological threshold.  This is the day when there ceases to be a separation between "work" and "home".  For the last few months I've been living in Boulder, preparing for the pole, but there has still been an "office" I go to 9-5, and a "home " I go to out of that time.  As of Monday, that's not quite the case anymore.  We'll have training during the day, but at night we will return to the same hotel/YMCA lodging (Ha, even my pronouns have switched from the singular to the plural).  Things will be much more completely about the team, and less about my contribution to an organization.  I'll no longer have a street address, and will only travel in team-managed vans.  When we get to the pole, there will be absolutely no separation between work and home.  My world will be the ~2km circle of the Amundsen-Scott station.  Important note:  all statements about what my life *will* be like are subject to complete reversal once I get there and see how wrong I was when I wrote this right now.

Immediately after firefighting training, at 16:30 Mountain time, I'll board a plane bound for Christchurch, New Zealand.  If all goes well with the weather, I'll be there for 3 days or so to be issued my Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear, and then head to McMurdo, and then onto the pole itself.  That schedule is very weather dependent, and blogging will probably be very sporadic/unlikely as I make that transition.