McMurdo station is a pretty large (by Antarctic standards) logistics hub for the rest of the stations on the ice. Most US cargo flows through there at some point. As far as I understand it, the C-17s are too heavy to land at the south pole
station. So all cargo (including us) is unloaded and reloaded onto the "hercs" (LC-130s). These are much smaller prop driven planes and the accommodations are much more spartan than on the C-17s.

In any case, having unloaded, we hop into vehicles (some of which appear to be at least as old as anyone reading this) and are driven to a building containing the mess hall and laundry. I have to warn you that my descriptions will be a bit vague. Being that we are "Polies" and therefore transients, they do not waste maps on us. We are given a pretty simple briefing dominated mostly by safety, waste, and medical, a bit about return travel, our Diamox (more about that in a bit), and sent on our merry way.

The safety part of the briefing boils down to reinforcing that the environment has many interesting ways to kill you. Make sure you gear up appropriately, and stay on any marked trails if you decide to go touring. Stay away from critters (not that they're dangerous, but we are all about wildlife preservation), have fun. Watch out for the big machinery that can squish you. The basics.

Waste is a big deal. There are probably 50 categories of waste. All of it has to be shipped back to the states. In addition, water is a precious commodity, so they get you started on thinking about your water usage right away. The only water usage they don't worry about is drinking water. In fact, they encourage you to drink a lot.

Medical is a bigger deal for the Polies than most of the rest. The pole is at a elevation of 9300 feet. Throw in low temps and varying barometric pressure, and you can hit well over 10,000 feet. In fact, a veteran of several winters has experienced elevation over 14000 feet. We don't get the luxury of acclimating slowly since they fly us in. This puts us at risk of altitude sickness. There are two serious forms of altitude sickness that can kill you, so you need to be aware of it. To help you acclimate, they give you a drug called diamox. It helps remove some of the byproducts of acclimatization from your blood stream. Major side effects include peeing a lot, tingling in random parts of your body, and altering the flavor of carbonated substances (for the worse).

Our job at this point is to find the laundry to pick up our bedding and find our rooms. Since they didn't give us maps, this is a terribly amusing operation. Buildings are designated entirely by number, but all of them have aliases handed out by the more permanent population. We have no map, so we are reduced to wandering around and hoping that someone will take pity on us and point us in the right direction. This is a dangerous proposition as practical jokers are rampant. However, I eventually find my room in HoCal (Hotel California); aka "man camp."

It's a bunk room with about 30 guys packed into close quarters. It's hot in the room, and crowded. Ear plugs are a good, good thing.

The temps were mild, around 15F, so we could easily walk around in nothing heavier than a fleece and tennis shoes. I walk up to the checkin building to rifle my luggage for the battery charger for my camera. I didn't find it, and was feeling fairly miserable. So I repacked a bit to get all of my unnecessary gear into checked baggage, so I wasn't lugging around so much weight. Back in my room I found the charger for the camera stashed in a small bag of misc stuff. Sadly, I had packed the camera into the checked bag rather than lug around a brick, so still no pictures - arrrgh.

Fortunately, we got what I'll call a "sling-shot" meaning that our flight left as scheduled the next day.

It's an interesting dynamic with the Polies and McMurdo. Talking to long time Polies, you would swear McMurdo is a kind of purgatory. The worst thing that can happen is to get stuck there for a few days, or sometimes a week or two. I've seen this before on my trips to Isle Royale. Actually, there are a lot of similarities between wilderness camping and a trip to the pole. In any case, at Isle Royale, you arrive at the main port (Rock Harbor) and get a briefing. The veterans have to get the briefing too, and you can see them chomping at the bit to get moving. As soon as the briefing is over, they grab their gear, get registered and bug out to make sure they get to their destination early so they can grab their favorite spots.

That's what it's like at McMurdo. In addition, you have no real work there, so you kind of get to feel like a third wheel pretty fast.

But for us, we fly right on through and one noisy plane ride later, I finally arrived at the south pole station, my new home for the next six weeks. After six days of travel (OK, five due to the dateline), I stepped off the plane with the temperature a balmy -44F.