Sunday, May 2, 2010

Still blowing outside

A storm system has the wind speeds up fairly high here at Pole. The drifts and sastrugi have been flowing into different forms, and at least the walk to ARO has been made more difficult as a result. We had a pretty good path trodden along that particular flag line, but when winds like this pick up paths like that change a lot. You get new blobs of soft snow that coagulate across the path. There are also areas that get all loose snow scoured out by the wind, which can make the path rougher. There are also the new, really rough, patches where footsteps have compacted snow and become the initiation point for new sastrugi. Walking around in the dark on this stuff, because lights just make things worse, can be a little challenging at times. Big blows like this also make the upwind drift of the station grow, sometimes alarmingly fast, which changes how you have to climb up and descend that nascent obstacle.

“Yes, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice.”

~Yoda

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Beautiful quote!

Becky said...

And people think the flat landscape is static and boring!