Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Summit Station!
We celebrated the holidays with a rare 2-day weekend and a nice dinner. The Big House smelled of baking and the atmosphere was festive with our decorated plywood tree. Everyone enjoyed a little down time to rest and catch up with family back home.
We also all got showers which was a nice treat! We had been on water restrictions for the past week or so while we completed some routine maintenance on the primary generator. We rely on our generators to produce light, heat, and water. There are two diesel generators and a back-up emergency generator on station. During the maintenance we ran on our secondary generator, which is perfectly fine except that it’s a little smaller and thus a little less efficient at melting snow for water. We are always mindful of our water usage and limit showers to 2 minutes twice a week and one load of laundry per week.
After Christmas the winds picked up to a proper storm. 55kn sustained! We hunkered down and focused on projects indoors. Thankful for our flag and rope lines! There was lots of blowing/drifting snow and visibility was very low. High winds usually bring higher temperatures as well. So while it’s difficult to see and physically travel outside it’s rarely the cold that is the limiting factor. The storm has passed now and it’s starting to get just slightly lighter each day. There are some new and larger drifts around station, but nothing we can’t handle. The blowing snow gets everywhere though and despite the door to the shop being fully closed we still had to shovel out a nice drift that had formed overnight.
AntarcticArctic 