Mt Henderson hut

In 1977 during a clean up, a small Freighter van was brought back to Mawson from the Moore Pyramid camp in the northern part of the Prince Charles Mountains (not far from the current Mt. Jacklyn camp) It was still in its original form, with cyclone mesh fold-up bunks and 1950s smell and the 1978 expeditioners were quick to realise its potential.

At the time, there was only one hut in the Framnes mountains and that was at Rumdoodle, so it was decided to place the hut at Mt Henderson. 

It was towed into the only position to do it justice, high on the saddle, and if one looks at the mountain there is nowhere else a caravan could be placed. (except in the melt lake area, but the magnificent view would be lost). 

In 1983 the hut was returned to Mawson, and the interior refurbished by the station chippy, who placed the manufacturer's plate (Freighter Industries Serial No. FB611) on the end bunk. It was returned to its site the same year and has been there ever since.

The hut suffered a small fire in the insulation between the walls in 1984, due to static on a radio aerial, and luckily it survived. Mt Henderson hut is the closest hut to Mawson in the Framnes mountains and is a good place to escape for the weekend and the base camp for climbing to the summit of Mt Henderson and exploring the surrounding area.

Mount Henderson is a massive mountain, 970 metres (3,180 ft) high, rising through the ice sheet eighteen kilometres southeast of Mawson station and forms the eastern boundary of the Framnes mountains, in Mc Robinson land, Antarctica. It was discovered in February 1931 by the British Australian New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) under Sir Douglas Mawson, who named it after W. Henderson, Director of the Australian Department of External Affairs, and a member of the Australian Antarctic Committee in 1929.

Mount Henderson is a beautiful mountain and is the first dominating feature you see when sailing into Mawson station and makes for a stunning sight. It has the classic pyramid mountain shape rising up to a pointy summit which I have climbed twice now.

On the summit is a garden tap and a double power outlet. Shortly there will be a telephone as well. This gives expeditoners an excuse to go out and do some routine maintenance. History dictates a plumber must carry with him a large eight kilo gram pair of stilsons on his first climb. This is classic polar humour.

Mt Henderson

Mt Henderson hut

Location of the hut (orange) Hugglands (green) 

 

The magnificent view from Mt Henderson hut

 

Thursday 18th July 2013

Today I had a hell of a day. I spent all day working on completing the wiring in the bar. I must have made five or six trips back down to the Operations building or to the green store getting bits and pieces or a new battery for the battery drill, then a charger for the battery drill, or a bloody drill for the battery drill. Then the wall that I wanted to bring all the cables down had a steel stud blocking the path and once I got around that there were two PVC pipes concealed in the wall that I had to deal with.

It was a basted of a job that took me all day to complete. At one stage two blokes came in and were going to give me CPR as they thought I'd passed out from drinking too much as all they could see were my legs sticking out from under a table. I'm not one to give up and eventually I finished around six o'clock and then I had to vacuum and clean up as Thursday night is the foreign movie night and the bar will be full later on. All I can say is thank god that's done. It looks bloody good though as the previous crew had left wires dangling all over the place and I now know why.

Tonight's foreign movie was Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso 1988) which was a great movie. Unlike Hollywood movies, European movies rely on touching human emotions rather than over loading the sensors with action, violence and unbelievable heroic bull shit. I'm not saying Hollywood movies are no good, just don't write off an SBS foreign movie because it has subtitles as you might be surprised what you're missing out on.

Bugger me, after the movie we were playing some video clips on the bar projector and the sound was coming through in mono, so that means I will have to take a look again tomorrow and sort it out.....Doh !!

Storyline:

A famous film director remembers his childhood at the Cinema Paradiso where Alfredo, the projectionist, first brought about his love of films. He returns home to his Sicilian village for the first time after almost 30 years and is reminded of his first love, Elena, who disappeared from his life before he left for Rome.

The movie won the Palme D'Or and Academy Award for Best Foreign Movie plus many other awards. It goes for 167 minutes.

Nice and tidy

Hidden out of sight

Klub Katabatic

No more dangling cables from the ceiling

Wednesday 17th July 2013

Today we had to do an audit on all the hard drives and memory we have on site to prepare for the resupply. We have been going through so many hard drives this year for some reason. Once we got this out of the way my mission for today was to run permanent wiring in the bar for the video conference unit.

At the moment I have temporary wiring strung all across the ceiling which has been hurting my eyes. It took a while to hunt around for all the material I will need and I know it's going to be a bigger job than it looks but  if I go hard I am hoping I will get it done today and that will be another crossed off item for this month.

Well as expected, it turned out bigger than Ben-Hur so it will have to wait till tomorrow. After dinner for "The Peoples Night" Chris put on a slide show about his expedition to Heard Island which was very interesting, next Jeremy played a promotional movie from Hagglunds and I put on a slide show and some movies from my time in Baku, Azerbaijan which every one found fascinating.

Azerbaijan - what a contrast to Antarctica

Tuesday 16th July 2013

Today I had to write an article for Icy news. This might sound simple enough, but it's getting harder and harder to come up with something interesting that no one else has done before. After racking my brain for a while I decided to write an article on the weird things I have found out on the sea ice. I thought it would also be a good way of finding out what they are, which I did, but in the process I got into trouble for "collecting" protected items. Everything down here is protected and cannot be disturbed whether dead or alive. To disturb or collect specimen for science you need a permit, so from now on I will leave the Nephtyid polychaete sea worms stuck to the ice bergs.

The rest of the day was spent changing out the spare X-cooler in the ARPANSA building which has been failing ever twenty two days since we got here. The X-cooler is a refrigeration unit that cools down the gamma radiation detector to minus one hundred and seventy degrees Celsius. So now we take readings every day and monitor the temperature for the next twenty two days and hopefully it won't fail.

After dinner I worked on my blog till very late before hitting the fart sack.

The X-cooler refrigeration unit

The digital gamma ray spectrometer

The gamma ray detector inside the lead shield

Monday 15th July 2013

Today after smoko we all went down to the mechanical workshop to do Hagglunds sea ice recovery training. It was pretty full on and we had to run through a mock recovery pretending we had broken through the sea ice. First we had to unload all the heavy recovery gear from on the roof of the caboose and set it all up. This consisted of two heavy hinged ramps, cables, chains, ice anchors and three turfers. Once setup we winched the Hagg back up onto the ice and then packed all the kit away.

Next demonstration was setting up and using the electric winch. Now I am finally free to use the Hagglunds out on the sea ice. After lunch I did some more work on my underwater camera. I made a rudder to hopefully stop it turning or spinning in the current or from cable twist. If this does not prove successful then I will attach a heavy weight on a one meter cable below the camera to hold it still on the sea bed.

Before dinner I had a BPSK digital QSO with a guy on Reunion Island who I had talked to before from Perth. After dinner Keldyn and I started making a souvenir ice axe. We cut the two ice axe head pieces out of some five millimetre brass bar and within a few hours we had roughly shaped them and I had started to cut the teeth into mine. Every Monday we will spend a few working on them and it shouldn't take too long to finish and they will be nice souvenirs to take home and remember our time spent down here.

  

The start of my ice axe

Taking shape

Sunday 14th July 2013

The plumbers were cleaning out the grease pit this morning and the mess smelt putrid so I had to have breakfast and coffee in my room. It was a perfect day with no wind again so I tried to organise a Hagg trip out to Welsh Island & Bechervaise Island but no one wanted to go, so instead I went for a walk in minus twenty four on my own for a couple of hours taking some nice photos. I went back to a place near the station where there was a large ice fall from the plateau several week ago which smashed up some of the sea ice and rolled over some ice bergs exposing their underside. At the time I was surprised to see many sea worms attached to what would have been the underside of the berg, now frozen solid. They were mostly about 25mm in length, tan in colour and with around 40 legs on both sides and you can clearly see their four eyes on their head. I wanted to get some samples to later photograph and identify.

I sent the photos to a biologist in head office I know and they were identified as nephtyid polychaete. They are predatory worms that roam the seabed preying on other small invertebrates. They are quite large for a polychaete worm and fairly common, circum-antarctic. There are several species, but you need a microscope to tell them apart.

Later I made up another sixty meters of cable for my underwater camera making eighty meters in total. When there is more light and on a fine day I plan on drilling a hole through the nearly two metre sea ice and lowering the camera to the sea bed to film the sea life below to make a time laps movie.

On the way back to the red shed I stopped in at the green store and had a relaxing spa for an hour while reading my book. I heated up a bowl of soup for dinner and latter worked on my blog all night that I have let go for several weeks.

Nephtyid polychaete

Nephtyid polychaete stuck to the underside of an overturned ice berg

Ice fall in West bay

Saturday 13th July 2013

This morning was a perfect day with no wind when I woke up late. I was hanging out to get off station but we still haven't had sea ice recovery training for the Hagglunds so I couldn't take one out and non of the guy's trained were interested in going anywhere. I did consider taking a quad bike out but changed my mind as it was minus twenty five.

After brunch I made up an underwater camera mounting with twenty meters of cable for my movie camera. Later in the afternoon I had a spa and read my book and after this I then helped Cookie cook Saturday night dinner. Following the usual after dinner discussions we adjourned to Klub katabatic for a few drinks and later we watched “Meet the little Fockers” and a couple of episodes of “Red Dwarf”.