Audio Dispatch

Hello Aaron in Antarctica, day 40. Camp position South 83 degrees 24 decimal 072 minutes, position West 080 degrees 03 decimal 516 minutes. Time traveled 8 hours, distance 10 miles. Oh that was one of the craziest days I have ever had here for travel weather that’s for sure. I got up, there was some sun out, I thought, awe this is gonna be perfect, it’s cool, the sun’s slightly obscured, I’ll get going good, I hit the road and within a half an hour, that little halo area where the sun is, that I thought, oh the fog will stay away, wrong, the fog completely closed in, I got a ground white out for about one session and then a complete white out descended on me. I kept checking my goggles to see if they were fogging and waving my hand in front of my face and no there was nothing wrong with my goggles, it was just pure white out. So needless to say a lot of tumbling and feeling drunk and everything, kinda rough there psychologically but since I already suffered through it yesterday it wasn’t as bad to deal with, but still definitely slows you down. Then about session 4, 4 and a half, the sun started coming out and that made things easier. I did have to go nuts on my goggles cause once the sun started coming out I got warm and I could not get the fog out of my goggles, it was driving me bezerk, I got so frustrated, I wanted to take them off and stomp em into oblivion, very mature activity, but of course the whole motivation of being blind in probably 2 minutes prevented me from doing that, plus they’re really nice photochromatic goggles, so I didn’t want to do that. So as the day wore on there was no breeze what so ever, which is extremely rare here. And the sun came out full force, it was weird, it was minus 15 degrees here, but the sun load is so strong on you and it feels like being in the tropics like Hawaii in July, I couldn’t believe it. I got to the point where I even took my Event REI jacket off and put it around my neck as a travel cloak and even then I was still too warm, I mean it just absolutely baked me off. So all of a sudden I have a better appreciation for the wind, that’s for sure, just a little bit to take the edge off, so I definitely survived there. Questions I received, one was from Roy and Debbie Takeda, my uncle and aunt out in Santa Rosa, they asked what a sastrugi is, a sastrugi is wind blown snow that is shaped by both the wind and the sun, if you’ve ever seen a photo or been to Sydney Opera House where you see those arched sail shapes, imagine those flipped upside down and hollowed out, they look like these weird alien space ships that are scooped and hard edged all around and some of them look like jaguars out of Guatemalan sculptures of inca era, just the craziest things ever. They can get huge, up to 10 feet high. I haven’t run into those, although I found the four feet ones and stumbling over them is miserable cause it’s all hardened snow, not quite ice but definitely tough. How much distance do I have? each degree I cover equals 60 miles and that’s nautical miles, just a touch longer than a regular mile, so at 6 and a half degrees to go I’m still staring at a good 400 miles but closing in on the halfway point so hopefully I’ll start feeling better about that. The other question was from Joann Luu over in Salt Lake about life here, there’s tons of life on the Coast of Antarctica, penguins, seals, whales, birds, everything but in the interior where I am, I am literally the only life form around for 100 miles, unless there’s another team near me, I’m it. The only indigenous life down here is a little bit of lichen and patterned ground in the mountains here so not a lot of stuff here. Out!