Running the Library with a Polar Storm

Surrounded by snow and ice, the building is shuddering in the wind; the station has just locked down under its most severe weather warning. Outside the front door, without the railing to hang on to, you could readily lose your footing. One of our own floating home neighbors is there, but I'll come back to that in a moment.

If you've spent any time around the Tenas Chuck Moorage, there's a good chance you've crossed paths with Ann Wunderlin — and if you have, you already know she's the kind of person who makes hard things easier just by being involved. I first got to know Ann while she was helping with the Keasler Cottage restoration coordination. She has a dry sense of humor, a smile with end curls that delight, and a way of working with people that's natural, friendly, and quietly effective. Without her, our FHA-to-dock coordination on that project would have taken twice as long. She just has that gift for connecting people — setting them up for success.

And she also has a gift for connecting to interesting people in interesting places.

So it probably shouldn't have surprised me that when Ann told me she was heading off on a long trip, it turned out to be to the bottom of the world: Antarctica. "This is my 5th season in Antarctica — 4 at McMurdo and 1 at Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula. That's where I was when I helped the penguin researchers," Ann adds. 

This season, Ann is back at McMurdo Station, working as a librarian in the dorm library next door to her building.

"I’m part of a 35 person Supply and Logistics team that manages the cargo arriving by plane and vessel. My role on that team work as an Inventory Data Specialist, leading a two-person team whose job is to help ensure station supplies are accurately reflected in our database. I’m one of several people who volunteer at the library a couple hours a week and weather willing, I’ll have my first successful shift tonight."

She describes her current role as a "small but meaningful" part of a much bigger effort: helping keep the station's supply database accurate so that the scientists doing groundbreaking research in extraordinary conditions can keep doing their work.

She enjoys being there and being around these friends. Like our floating home community, it has a tight-knit, DIY community spirit.

Life at McMurdo runs its own way, including its own weather vocabulary. Conditions there are ranked Condition 3, 2, or 1 — Con 3 being normal and safe, and Con 1 meaning winds and visibility have turned dangerous enough that everyone stays put wherever they are until it passes. The storm that hit the station and Ann's building was a Con-1 "Herbie," local slang for a combined hurricane and blizzard, and it rolled in on the station's day off. Rather than risk the walk to her library shift, Ann stayed in, and she and her roommate spent the day rearranging their room instead — about as ordinary an activity as you can imagine, happening in one of the most extraordinary places on Earth with a Herbie knocking outside.  

SIDEBAR: You know how everyone asks us floating homes residents how the sewer works? Well, for the Antarctica curious, here you are.

"I've been in Antarctica for two and a half years — one of those years was at McMurdo, from March 2022 to February 2023. It was so fun to see all the seasons, and especially the winter … to experience 24-hour darkness … to see the stars and Milky Way … to see the Aurora Australis," Ann says.

SIDEBAR: Want to know how they thrive down there when there isn't a Con 1 storm? Google "McMurdo Waste Barn Party." Better, just ask Ann.

It's the contrast that makes Ann's updates so worth reading. The same message that described gale-force winds also mentioned a walk she'd taken the evening before, in near-total stillness, watching the sun set behind the Royal Society Range across the sea ice. Not far off is a glacier named for Ed Waddington, a University of Washington glaciologist and geophysicist who has spent decades studying polar ice and reconstructing ancient climate records from cores drilled in Antarctica, Greenland, and Alaska. Ed, it turns out, is one of our own: he and his wife Julia live on Tenas Chuck Moorage, the same dock as Ann, and both served for years on the Floating Homes Association board.

Ann calls it a privilege to be there and to play her small part in supporting their work. We think the FHA community is lucky, too — lucky to count someone like Ann among our neighbors, someone who brings that same warmth and steady competence whether she's helping us coordinate Keasler Cottage activities with the nearby docks -- or the penguin researchers and a library at the bottom of the world.

Stafford Green. - Sept 15th 2026