DAY 12

Up at 6 – shows what a motivater guilt can be. Still managed to miss our main team’s safety meeting. I guess they get up at 5, which is just pure masochism. (I’m not getting up at that time however much they pay me). And despite getting up early all we did was send a few emails (mostly non work related) and wait for one of our contributors to finish his conference calls – which I found particularly hard having just had a cup of strong US coffee. (I never drink coffee normally but there ain’t no tea facilities here, so I don’t have much choice.)

The guy is the supervisor for the ice road and ice runway building, so he’s quite senior which meant despite my ancy-hyperactive-ness I couldn’t hurry him up. Anyway, he turned out to be a really nice guy. He spent the entire morning showing us around his operation and got pretty relaxed in front of the camera, which helps.

Basically he’s in charge of ice building. He built the ice pad upon which the entire rig site sits, camps and all. He also built the 5 mile ice road that connects the rig site to the lake where the water comes from. (They have to use ice to protect the tundra, otherwise none of this would be possible.) His final job is to make an ice runway for a Hercules airplane on the local lake. I kid you not!!!!!! They are going to land one of the largest and heaviest planes in the world on an iced over lake, and then to top that they are going to load it with really heavy shit (the dismantled rig). The sheer audacity and balls of these Americans beggars belief. But when you start to think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.

When the operation here is finished they have to get the rig about 200 miles north for another exploratory drilling mission before the short drilling season ends, and summer comes. Since there are no roads, it’s too far to build ice roads, and the rolligons only go 6 miles an hour and would take 3 days for just one load, they have no choice but to fly it.

At the moment the lake is 3ft deep and they can only land the Herc on 6ft of ice – so they have these crazy looking mini moon buggies, (one of which we bought out on our rolligon journey) called Bluebirds, with giant drills on the back that are light enough to drive on the ice as it is. These drill through the ice and suck up water to flood the surface of the lake. Each time they do this the water at the bottom of the lake is converted to ice on the top. (Don’t worry they leave enough water for the little fishes). They also have mini dozers to work on top of the thin floating ice, flattening the thickening water.

On another part of the lake the ice is thick enough and the lake shallow enough for it to be grounded, so all the really heavy vehicles are allowed to ‘farm’ this ice. This means that they shred it with a weird lawn mower like thing pushed in front of a large bull dozer, which creates ice chips or cubes (‘kinda like a giant margarita’ as our guide put it). These chips are transferred to other grounded areas (like the loading pad for the Hercules or the twin otter runway). Another huge machine called a blade then uses its snow plough to flatten the chips into ice, adding further water to solidify the chips into a smooth surface as it goes.

The lakes are also the only large and relatively flat areas that exist in the tundra – so I guess they don’t have much choice. You gotta admit it’s a smart idea though – kinda like turning your arch enemy into your allie.

The runway building, like everything here, looks amazing. The space age Bluebirds melt in and out of the thick ice fog within feet. The water they flood the frozen lake with, trickles slowly across the snow melting each tiny crystal and creating clouds of vapour as it goes. The whole scene has a seriously surreal and dream-like quality, like standing in the middle of a cloud, watching space ships docking. The buzz of standing next to relatively heavy machinery on thin-ish ice over 23 ft of deadly cold water adds to the sensation. The lights on the mini dozer diffuse in the fog and create shafts of yellow, which cut through the white out.

On our way back to camp, the sun unexpectedly appeared out of a pink haze on the horizon. We all assumed it would just set fire to the clouds at the edge of the world, adding colour but never rising, like every other day. And then suddenly there it was, an eighth of the sun hovering on the horizon. We pulled the car over and bathed in the warming rays for the few minutes it is was up. It was quite an emotional moment, especially for our guide Bobbie who hadn’t seen the sun since November – almost three months ago – and that was only cos he flew to Idaho for a holiday !!!! Now summer is definitely on its way – but it’s not such good news for Bobbie - the sun only makes building an ice runway harder.

Caught this all on camera which is reassuring. Program-wise everything seems to be coming together well – we’ve come up with a workable storyline (with different strands we can cut between) which shouldn’t be too hard to dramatise and hopefully there’ll be a few unexpected twists and turns along the way.

A story – Rig building (with human interest added by the two youngest and liveliest of the crew. One of whom will be coaching the other through his first time on the slope.) The A story’ll also include the hardships of getting the rig out here on the rolligons.

B story – ice runway building with Bobbie racing the sun to get an ice runway built thick enough to land a Herc and take the rig to its next destination.

There’ll be other mini C and D stories in the mix too – short asides and sequences about the hardships of life out here, the dangers etc – depending on what comes up.



The other good news is that they’ve got some gym equipment in our camp, in the room next door to ours in fact, and we managed to put together and activate the treadmill. I want for a run straight away, which felt great. Still, riding high on it now, and its only just in the nick of time. The chef here cooks everything with so much butter and fries everything else – it tastes good, but has got to be seriously lard inducing - I can feel my arteries clog up after every bite and the cold outside only makes you eat more. Apparently, you burn loads just standing around outside, let alone working, so they may have designed a deliberately calorific diet for the workers, but for those of us just standing around with a a camera, the treadmill is god send.

This is Ice Station Zebra over and out.