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Check-in Dec 18, 2002

More cables, more cold, and the onset of wind.

December 18, 2002

Another day of Hut livin’. No helo scheduled until 2 PM, so we split in the morning to take care of various tasks: Nelia and Bill to the crater rim, where Nelia tied cables together and Bill worked on the camera permanently pointed towards the lava lake; RE (Rich Esser) and I spent another morning splicing and laying cable, which ended considerably short of our goal, and then connected batteries together for powering the monitoring site at Nausea Knob. Sarah and RK (Rich Karstens) held life together at the hut.

A word on laying cables. It’s not the worst task (piling rocks still takes it), and actually isn’t too bad when the cables are behaving and/or when working with another person. It’s not a task that any of us get excited about, though; most cable-laying tasks seem to require laying cable for long distances, on steep slopes. We’ve been currently working on laying cable from the crater rim to Nausea Knob, a task requiring about 2,000 ft worth of cable. Seems crazy. How can the cables even survive at the volcano’s surface, in this climate? Time will tell. Some cables have faired poorly in the past, either yielding to the elements (cold and wind) or to the volcano itself (Rich and I observed some burned-looking cable, apparently severed by a bomb). The newly-laid cables will be tied together—five cables total: two data cables for the infrared sensors, which will read crater lake temperatures (from the rim! Wow!), two power cables (one positive, one negative), and one mistake—and covered with rocks. Mmm, rocks….

I finished quite cold at Nausea, and ready to go to lunch. There was, as usual, a hot lunch waiting for us. No time for a nap today, afterwards, though. The helo came to pick up Bill to drop a sling load of batteries at MACZ, and then came to pick up Nelia, RE, RK, and I to go to BOMZ. BOMZ is reputedly windy, but when Phil and I went to do campaign GPS, it was lovely. Not the most exciting spot on the planet, but not bad. Today, it was windy. It sucked. Nelia put up solar panels, RE and RK disconnected and connected batteries, and I worked to install a single-frequency GPS system utilizing the existing campaign monument. Unfortunately, not much got installed. Problem number 1 was the monument: the monument was ill-suited to my antenna. Monuments on this mountain generally consist of a stainless still post (small—maybe 10 inches) with a mark on top epoxied into a hole drilled into bedrock. Unfortunately, there were two posts—the first was a mistake, probably drilled at too much of and angle, and the second was the established monument that I assume I was supposed to use. Unfortunately, the antenna is shaped such that it collided with the first monument, and with rock surrounding the monuments as well (the dual-frequency antennas ride higher). I decided to take a sledge hammer to the site. And partake in a little monument extraction. If this was a bad decision, I plead cold. Needless to say, the first post is now bent and in the Hut, to be added to our ‘museum,’ and the second has a not-so-natural, hammered away surrounding. Hopefully, the monument is still stable. Problem number 2 was that the cables on the GPS receiver are too short to reach both the GPS antenna and the radio antenna. So, the GPS and associated cables are still in their box, isolated from the world, weighted down with rocks to discourage destruction by the wind.

We were all ready to leave BOMZ. We sent the helo off with a sling load, and prayed for its return. Well, I hunkered down on my knees to protect myself from the wind, and RE thought it looked like I was praying. And I did want the helo to come back. (“Please let the helo come back for us,” I said. “Really, I’m a good kid.”) We all agreed it would not be at all in the least even a little bit pleasant to spend the night at BOMZ.

Back at the hut, the wind is picking up. From calm in the morning (less than 5 knots), we’re up to 15-20 knots. Snow’s moving outside. Nelia called McMurdo for weather, and when I looked at her inquisitively gave me the thumbs down. Sounds like a big storm’s moving in. Literally (whoosh). We’ve agreed that a day or two cooped up in storm wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Sarah’s been sick all along, RK’s just getting over a cold, and RE’s going down into one. The rest of us are tired. Good for us, bad for the McMurdo folks who are trying to get north for the holidays, and have already been delayed. Up here, we’ve agreed that two days of storm would be fine. Beyond that, we’d probably get antsy. Wish us (maybe bad and then) good weather.