Southern Comfort

November 28th, 2008Blog0 comments

Watching David Attenborough’s Life in the Freezer got me interested again in what’s going on at the international South Pole station.

It’s called the Amundsen-Scott Station, named after the first men to arrive there in 1911/1912. It used to be a couple of underground rooms, and then it was a geodesic dome. Five years ago they built a brand new station that rises above the snow on stilts. It looks like this:

Scientists that find themselves stationed there spend six months in complete darkness and isolation — so there had better be a bar there. And of course, there is. It looks like this:

It’s fun to think that on the southernmost tip of the earth, there’s a bar.

It’s also amusing to note that this bar was probably the site of last Christmas’s drunken bar brawl where one of the participants had to be airlifted out for his own safety.

So these guys, Amundsen and Scott, were the first people to arrive at the South Pole. Amundsen (Norwegian) arrived first in December 1911; Scott (British), to his dismay, arrived a month after Amundsen.

They both arrived on foot after eight hundred miles of walking. Eight hundred miles. EIGHT HUNDRED MILES. Even typing those three words in all caps doesn’t convey the massive undertaking the phrase describes.

Walking eight hundred miles in temperate weather is one thing — walking it in -17 to -70 degree F snow storms, across shifting ground with massive crevasses and high-low elevation shifts is another.
Imagine the mental torment, the numbness of constant forward movement. Imagine the willpower required to proceed.

And then once you get there, there’s no helicopter waiting to take you back — it’s another EIGHT HUNDRED MILES of walking for the return trip.

I remember when I first started running — the thought would creep into my mind after about 2.5 miles: “We’ve done enough today, what do you say we call it quits and go eat a Snickers bar?”

Eight hundred miles. EIGHT HUNDRED MILES.

And now there’s a bar there.