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A fellow in a bar said he could run to the top of Pikes Peak and have enough energy left to make love to three women.Tex
I just got back from Antarctica last month working on a construction project down there. Someone quipped "Well, you can cross that off your bucket list!". Funny thing is, it never was on my bucket list. There's a lot I could talk about what it's like there, but one of the main things is the shortage of oxygen. Supposedly the earth flings the atmosphere out denser around the equator, so it's kinda thin at the poles. It's supposedly more like being at 10,000 feet even though I was at sea level. What this means is I was low energy for the five weeks there, and just hauling myself, and all the clothing, up a small hill was tiring. What I didn't know is that the body will acclimate by producing more red blood cells to capture more oxygen. So you can imagine how impressed I am by this guy's achievement:http://tinyurl.com/y334bt9m
I thought you were always low energy
Thanks a LOT, dude! I don't recall you being super peppy after helping me replace the T3 clutch that day. Thanks for the help, and I still owe you for that. Yeah, that's an amazing story, huh?
I didn't get to see the ice breaker, it left a couple days before I got to McMurdo. No boat ride for me, we flew in on the C17 - a giant military cargo plane. Five hour flight from Christchurch. We managed to get 1/3 of the job done so will be heading back probably this coming November. Maybe this next time I'll be able to hook up with some of the NZ guzzi guys. Forgot about that Matt - guess I owe you a coffee cup too.
One beautiful day I walked from Mc Murdo to Scott base and back. In the mid eighties that was like going from an old mining camp to a modern lunar station. Scott Base was incredibly well built and engineered for comfort. Whereas Mc Murdo was mostly made from the packing boxes of things shipped in back in the late fifties and sixties. The packing boxes sere specially designed to do this with being mostly insulated walls so that you could quickly build a box with an air lock type door. Scott base was built like a space station with all the buildings connected inside by tunnels so that you need never go out doors to get from one area to another. The walk was a boring look at lots and lots of snow and ice. It would have been much better on a TW 200 motorcycle.
So you can imagine how impressed I am by this guy's achievement:http://tinyurl.com/y334bt9m
Earlier in life I cranked out a lot of miles, for days, even weeks at a time. Occasionally the drive/ride would clearly reach a point of FLOW, or otherwise described as in the ZONE. For some time didn't recognize it as such; just thought I was having a good day. The first time it lasted for perhaps an hour or more, it needed an explanation. The few persons I explained it to could only say; Enjoy it' or tell me how to get there' or you're shittin*' me. A friend from high school became a psychiatrist. (he rides!) I called him. He pointed me to Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.
O'Brady's trip is impressive as hell but not without controversy. I think Ousland's crossing was the more legitimate achievement.https://explorersweb.com/2019/01/09/crossing-antarctica-how-the-confusion-began-and-where-do-we-go-from-here/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/opinion/antarctica-obrady-rudd-solo-crossing.html?login=email&auth=login-emailhttps://explorersweb.com/2018/12/27/obradys-antarctic-crossing-was-it-really-unassisted/https://gearjunkie.com/colin-obrady-polar-exploration
Cool photos, Kev! Uh... what exactly are they doing with the thingamabob tied to the back belt loops?
Bulldog - I didn't know that about Pikes Peak. I'd heard of auto races to the top, but not the run. Your story reminds me of the hill right next to McMurdo called Ob Hill (short for Observation). I'd guess it's about 1000 ft high and a cinder cone from Mt Erebus maybe ten miles away. One of the guys on the construction crew is a mountain climber and in excellent shape. He's planning to climb one of the peaks in Nepal next month just to give you an idea. Climbing Ob hill for him doesn't even get him breathing hard. Me, I had to stop every hundred feet to catch my breath and slow the heartbeat. It only takes about 20 or 30 minutes to climb, but at that rarefied atmosphere it's a work out. A 25-year-old on our crew didn't have any trouble hiking it, though he noticed he didn't feel as peppy as he would have at home. So this mountain climber decided to hike it three times in succession to get a little bit of a work out. I figured it would take him an hour and a half for the three times, the 25-year-old figured an hour. Turned out it was an hour and a half due to the snow that made some areas rather slippery. He lapped others climbing the hill who asked in amazement the second time seeing him how many times he climbed it a day??? For most of us, once a week was enough. Good point on the lack of vegetation not generating oxygen. There's no grass there, trees, shrubs - it's all just black rock and white snow. No worms, no flying or crawling bugs, only seals, penguins and a seagull-like bird called Skuas. I'd never thought if it before, but previously had assumed that the sun was up most of the time in the summer. I didn't really realize what that meant. Yes, of course it's light all day, but there's more to it than that. In the very middle of summer I'm sure the sun stays pretty much directly overhead. I wasn't there in the middle of summer - that point had already gone when I got there. What happens is the sun circles in the sky till finally in March it's dropped low enough to the horizon that in the middle of the 'night hours' it passes behind one of the mountains and there's a few minutes of dusk with some red sunset clouds. After that it happens fast and a week later there are several hours of true night. In the middle of winter there's an hour or two of dusk around noon, but black the rest of the time. If it's clear in the winter it's possible sometimes to see the southern lights. That would be cool, but winters sound miserable and horribly boring. They've played hide and seek in the winter to relieve the boredom. How bad is that???The wind speed indicator broke last winter at 200mph - who knows the top speed of that gust? I don't think you'd want to venture out in those conditions, and makes me wonder what it was like for those adventurers a hundred years ago wintering over in those small huts. I think the population at Scott base is still about the same. Those freezer doors are an interesting solution - very common for outside entrances.