When I say the wind screams, I mean it just absolutely howls through the camp, throwing up whirlwinds of snow, battering tents, and putting spindrift into any available orifice. It’s a tangible presence here twenty-four hours a day. Anything not locked down is gone with the first ferocious gust. Windchill is also a major factor, making anything from walking to our unheated work tent to the bathroom, to staging equipment unpleasant to say the least, and sometimes even hazardous.
All the same, we are doing very well, we’ve installed three sites in three days. Three more to go. Now if only there was some running water, or possibly a shower around here… Wait, there is a shower round here! Only its staff only, unless you sneak in at 4am.
Some more on Patriot Hills, well in some ways it’s an illustration of how very small a world we live in. There are scientists and staffers here who I have met in various places around the globe before, but a more typical sort of thing goes like this conversation I had with the night shift cook:
“So where are you from?” I asked.
“England, but I just took a year out of my studies at Herriot Watt University, in Edinburgh to come here”
“Oh yeah? My brother went to University there” – proceed to talk about good places to get curry in Edinburgh.
“So I have a nice bottle of Edradour single malt, fancy a dram later?”
“Oh yeah, that sound nice, I just had a family reunion at the Moulin Inn just next to the distillery there. About a couple of weeks ago”
“Nice, My friend Jacquie used to be the bar maid there until she moved to Edinburgh.”
“Small world.”
Or, and as equally bizarre we found out that one of the guys here is from Tasilliq in Greenland and he knows all the people I met there this summer!
Anyway, will try to upload on the Iridium again (we haven’t been having much luck with it).
Mike