Editor’s note: Andy Titterington and Shaun Meehan, two 18 year olds from Fort Collins, left Colorado in October for a four-month work stint at the South Pole Station on Antarctica. Fort Collins Now reported on their expectations before they left, and have caught up with Meehan.

Here’s a blog entry he wrote from the frozen tundra:

Current Location: Ice Cube Drill Camp, South Pole Station Antarctica
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Shuffle

A two-day weekend is not something to be taken lightly down here. What is there to do at the bottom of the world? More than one would expect. With two lounges in the main station, plus one out at summer camp, there is always something going on. The main lounge in the station has a pool table and ping-pong table with a little stereo, and a large TV room with incredibly comfortable couches and an amazing movie collection in both VHS and Beta format. Every Friday someone ships a tape of a football game from McMurdo station, but that’s the only connection to the outside world that room sees. There are a ton of cool people on station with endless stories of world travels and adventures, so you end up talking for hours in the galley. There are even plans in the works for buying a bus back in the states and going on an expedition to Alaska … which is slowly becoming real …

After the fantastic two-day weekend, work started strong again. We have now finished digging all the holes for Ice-Cube at the present, so we’ve moved on to trenches, some nearly 2,000 feet long. A trencher attached to a small bobcat first digs them, and then we come along the next day and clean them up. Due to vehicle movement, and the 15-knot winds the other day, they filled up a bit so it was slow going. Every five feet there was another little pile of snow at the bottom of the trench that needed to be cleared out before the Ice Cube cable could be installed. Then came the job of laying these one- to two-ton, extremely expensive, delicate cables. It involved a large forklift (that blew smoke rings!) and some heavy lifting.

Whenever we don’t have Ice Cube work to do we’ve been working with the Iron crew. It’s really quite exciting. For the first few days we were just working demo, but a few days ago we got to build a staircase. I’ll upload pictures soon.

That’s about all the news for now. It’s starting to warm up a bit, around the minus-30 range the last few days.