Gizmologist

I grew up climbing in the mountains of Colorado. After high school I sought the busiest mountain rescue team in the state, Mountain Rescue Aspen. Several years after settling into Aspen, our team was working hard developing the now-common protocols for flying rescuers and subjects on a cable under a helicopter. One thing that I learned at this early stage in my life was to say yes when asked to join an adventure.

So in 1997 that’s precisely what I did when asked to spend a season working in the communications shop at McMurdo Station.  After four more summers “On the Ice”, I felt like I was ready to spend a winter there. So when they asked if I would stay for 8 more months I said yes.  The best months of my life were those dark months of wintering on the ice. Spring came and so did a science group that was driving bulldozers across the west Antarctic ice sheet drilling ice cores. They had lost one of their electronic engineers. They asked for help, I said yes. Two and one half months of living in an 8’x8’x12’ room on skis with 11 other scientists later and it was time for me to end my 16 month stint on the ice. Several more normal seasons on the ice were separated only by around-the-world trips. Then came the McMurdo Station Halloween party of 2002 when I met Stacy. We traveled the world together as our first date. She asked me to come to the ice with her as a diver and I said yes. The stage was set for me to scribble “Will you marry me?” on a small white slate that was mounted on my pressure gauge. At 20 feet under the ice after one of the most beautiful dives of my life, Stacy Kim giggled “yes” through her regulator, and I was the happiest diver that ever dove the southern ocean. Not having any science training made it more difficult to say yes to studying the sea but I said yes and conjured up a tool that would improve our access to the liquid ocean under the ice. The SCINI concept was born and a pre-prototype was tested during the next few trips to the ice.  And then the National Science Foundation said yes to our proposal to build and develop SCINI as a tool that would allow others to say yes to exploring the ice-covered oceans of the world!