Hello again Friends!
This post is the second of the day; scroll down for a report of the first part of our day. After we collected our equipment from the Mechanical Equipment Center, we headed up to the McMurdo Food Room to "pull" all of the food we require for our field season. We will be in the field for ~ 35 days. When calculating the amount of food we will require, we often determine food quantities using "person-days." This field season we will have 6 people in the field for 35 days, or 210 person-days. We also pack an extra week's worth of dehydrated meals in the event our camp pull-out flight is delayed. Today we pulled only non-perishable food. Tomorrow morning, we will pull our frozen food.
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| The first order of business is to "pull" the food from the food room shelves. |
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| For breakfast, we pulled 120 packets of instant oatmeal, 60 liters worth of fruit drink mix, two tubs of quick oats, 20 boxes of cereal, 400 tea bags, 70 cans of fruit... |
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| and 60 liters worth of powdered milk! |
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| Every morning after breakfast, we will pack our own lunch to eat at field sites away from our camp. Lunch options include cookies, chocolate bars (we packed 420!), clif bars, peanut butter (6 jars!), dried fruit... |
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| 28 boxes of crackers... |
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| 60 bags of GORP... |
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| and 200 packets of instant soup! We each take a thermos full of boiling water to keep us warm during a day's work; a cup of soup at lunch is quite satisfying! Tomorrow, we will pull lots of cheese from frozen food storage to supplement our lunch supplies. |
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| Most of our dinner options will come from our frozen food pull tomorrow, but today we packed all of our starches: quinoa, couscous, pasta, rice, polenta, dehydrated and canned vegetables, and some canned fish. |
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| We also pack a lot of spices and sauces! |
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| We think we might be done! |
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| The head of the McMurdo Food Room, Peggy, scans bar codes so that our research grant gets charged for all of our food. |
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| We then boxed all of our food in rock boxes lined with plastic bags. The plastic bags preserve food items so that we can return unopened food to the food room. Windblown snow has a way of getting into rock boxes! |
Greg set his camera in corner of the food room. For two and a half hours, his camera took a picture of our progress every minute. He assembled the ~150 photos into this time lapse movie. Enjoy!
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| Finally, we palletized all of the rock boxes. This pallet weighs 1027 pounds! |
More photos to come! Tomorrow, we're hoping to prepare our frozen food, hazardous cargo, and remaining non-hazardous cargo. This weekend, we will practice our crevasse rescue techniques!
I hope all is well with everyone at home!
Claire
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