Yep, that striped stick I'm standing next to is the South Pole. I flew down Tuesday, Dec. 19, on a ski-equipped LC-130 flown, as always, by the New York Air National Guard. I'm returning to McMurdo on Friday.My first two days here set record low temperatures for those dates, both 25.something degrees below zero. That's cold for mid-December (today is the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere) but it is far from cold by South Pole standards.
When Sir Robert Falcon Scott reached the Pole, he wrote in his journal (which was recovered alongside his frozen corpse about a year later), "Great God! this is an awful place." How true. I'm tickled to have had the chance to come ... by plane ... and stay in the new station you see behind me. And I'll be glad to get back to McMurdo tomorrow, another day closer to returning home, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment