And we're off!

Hello Friends!

You read that correctly. Our flight is scheduled to take off in a couple of hours. At about 5:15 yesterday evening, Kat checked her e-mail. The flight operations folks had e-mailed to let us know that we are unexpectedly scheduled to fly out this morning! A day early!!

This of course unleashed a bit of a frenzy among our team. Any time you fly out of McMurdo you have to "Bag Drag" the night before. To Bag Drag, you have to lug yourself, your checked luggage, your extreme cold weather gear and your carry-on luggage to the Movement Control Center (the MCC!). The friendly staff there weigh your checked luggage in preparation for palleting it. You leave your checked luggage there for the night. They also weigh you, your ECW and your carry-on luggage, which you promptly lug back to your room!

Michael and Seth at Bag Drag!

Our schedule this morning is as follows. Our transport arrives at the Movement Control Center at 7:15. We're scheduled to depart from the Pegasus Airfield at 9:30. Yesterday, it took Chris and Greg about four hours to get to our field site. 

We'll spend 1-2 nights at Camp Neptune where our cargo was left yesterday. Greg says everything went very smoothly! The plane didn't even stop! It simply opened up, released our pallets, made a U-turn and took off! Camp Neptune is on a bit of a snow dome, and Greg says the plane was able to take off by accelerating off of the dome. The C-130s we're using are also equipped with Jet-Assisted Take-off (JATO - basically rocket packs for the plane!!), which they could use in the event of deep snow!

The first thing we'll do upon landing is call McMurdo on a satellite phone to check in and establish our camp connection. We'll then set up a Scott tent for shelter and get to work! We'll spend our time at Neptune flagging a route to the Schmidt Hills via snow mobile and organizing our gear. We'll finally transport half of our equipment to the Schmidt Hills via a caravan of snow mobiles and sleds! We'll spend 2 weeks in the Schmidt Hills, sampling glacial deposits from rock surfaces and using ice penetrating radar to determine the ice flow history. This information will tell us when, how much, and at what rate this sector of the ice sheet has thinned!

Once we're done at the Schmidt Hills (likely ~ 2 weeks after arrival), we'll had back to Camp Neptune, regroup, and then traverse and move camp to the Williams Hills the rest of the season. 

A typical day will begin at 7:30 when we'll check in with McMurdo via HF radio. We'll all come together for oatmeal, cereal, and/or cheesy bagels ( a camp specialty! ) for breakfast. We'll then pack lunches, thermoses of hot water, and our field gear and head out for the day! We'll typically work in 2 groups of three. One group working on the radar on the ice surface and another group working on sampling glacial deposits above the ice surface. 

Our days will end with dinner together in the cook tent. The time will range. Our earliest days will likely end ~ 6 PM. We'll stay on McMurdo time while we're out there. 

We'll share camp duties such as cooking, dish washing, and melting snow for water by rotating dinner-through-breakfast shifts between the six of us. 

In the evenings we will discuss what we saw during the day, read our books, write in our journals, and write letters to be mailed upon return to McMurdo.

Christmas will be our only day off, unless we get bad storms that prevent travel and work. We'll sleep in, swap gifts, assemble a celebratory meal and spend the day however we like!!

We'll keep in touch with our families with satellite phone conversations every 1-2 weeks. 

We'll  keep clean with baby wipes, face wipes, and antibacterial lotion. The biggest challenge will be our hair which will turn very oily by the end of the first week. Dry skin and sunburn will other challenges we face! We will pack all of our waste out with us when we leave.  

We will see no other living things while we're out there except for possibly lichen!

Most importantly we will be happy. It is incredibly exhilarating to be in the mountains above the ice sheet. It will feel good to work hard every day. It will be spectacularly beautiful, and broad daylight 24-hours a day. We work well as a team and are all excited about our common goal of investigating the ice sheet's history.

Thanks for following us this far. Look for a new post the week of January 17th. 

We can't wait to be in touch again soon.

Happy Holidays! Signing off, 

Claire and the Pensacola Mountains Team!