Freezer Tour: December 23, 2012

Sunday, December 23, was a windy and snowy day in McMurdo. After lunch, I went over to the building between my dorm and Building 155, where the shop and dining hall are. This building is the freezer building, and is kept at a crisp -8 F (-22 C). Today was the freezer Open House, and I walked in just as a tour was starting. After some quick facts (they have 750 crates of food stored in there right now), we got a walk-through of the freezer.

Our first stop on the tour was "Bagel Mountain", a pile of boxes full of bagels. Apparently McMurdo goes through about 1 or 2 boxes of Bagels a week, so there are several months worth of bagels in the mountain right now.

In the middle of the freezer is "The Cube", a huge pile of crates of food about 20 feet high, with only the crates on the edges and on the top accessible. On one side of the Cube is "The Crevasse", a small passageway barely big enough for a person to walk through.

Our tour guide encouraged us to climb up the crevasse if we felt like it, so I did. The crates on either side provided plenty of footholds and handholds and I was able to climb to the top of "The Cube" pretty easily, even wearing my "Big Red" parka and having mittens on my hands.

On top, there were more crates, and I could see a lot more of the frozen food.

When I got back outside, the weather didn't look too nice, so I basically spent the rest of the day inside until it was time to work. Tomorrow (December 24th) is the McMurdo holiday dinner, and the 24th and 25th are holidays in town. There's a Christmas Party tonight, but it's right in the middle of our monitoring shift, so we won't be going.