discovery hut

It has been snowing a lot recently.  The night before it snowed all night, then a good portion of yesterday, a little bit last night, and then most of the day today.  Surprisingly, it really isn’t sticking all that much but it is making everything wet again.  And it is keeping flights from coming in or going out.  Visibility is severely hampered, this is the definition of a white-out condition.  According to Wikipedia, Discovery Hut is 300m from McMurdo.  I can usually see it clearly out of my work window, but today I can’t really make it out at all. 

And I’m happy to report that, as a man, I have quickly beaten this cold into retreat.  It is not completely gone, but I do feel a lot better thanks to some great advice.  As such, I decided it would be a good idea to show this weather/cold combo that it can’t hold me down any longer and I’d go on the Discovery Hut tour I had signed up for.  And, in order to get a more genuine feel for what it must have felt like to those brave, tough explorers I disregarded the numerous warnings to dress more warmly than I thought I should.  I simply dressed just as warmly as I thought I should and got really cold.  (I didn’t purposely disregard the advice, I just forgot until I was already wet and freezing and it sounds better that I went for a more authentic experience…)

I don’t know all the details or history of the hut, but I read a lot about it on the link above and you can too.  It is a very short walk from McMurdo.  I have walked to it and by it a number of times, but they only occasionally open it up to let you inside.  So I signed up to go inside tonight.  It was almost eerie to step into it.  It sounds dumb to say “like stepping back in time” but that’s really kind of how it felt.  Like stepping back in time to a place where everything was placed carefully in the best position for a photograph.  My only guess is that some historic society put things that way, but there is no doubt that the artifacts are real.  The smell in there can attest to that.  It was dark and cold too.  It was hard to see what you were looking at.  Some things I just took pictures of only to see what they were later.  There were real, frozen, animals in there and food and supplies and clothes and tools. 

The strategic placement of some of the relics stole nothing from the fact that real men stood where I was standing.  That they cooked, lived, froze, ate, struggled, and survived there.  Almost 100 years ago.  That was very real and you could feel that.  It was an awesome experience and something I’ll cherish.  I hope to go back on a nicer day but with the weather the way it was, even though I joked about it before, I could really pretend to feel how those brave men might have felt so long ago.

I took a bunch of pictures, but, since I didn’t get a real good explanation of what everything was I’ll leave it to your keen eyes and imagination to caption these.  They are HERE.  And if you don’t have time to look through those minuscule nondescript pictures, here is one from the hut looking back at McMurdo.  I think this is how everyone there mistakenly imagines Antarctica all the time, but here it is: