WAIS

This sign should probably read, "Welcome to WAIS - I hope that you do not plan to leave anytime soon."

WAIS = West Antarctica Inland Site

Shelley and I headed out to WAIS last Monday. We flew out there on a C130 with our cargo. It was great because the pilot let me sit upfront in the cockpit for the landing. When I first got up there I looked out the front window and was worried that we would never be able to land in all of the cloud cover. It was a solid sky of white clouds. It took be about 5 minutes before I realized that it wasn't cloud cover and was in fact the snow covered ground. It is amazing, you can see white in every direction. Imagine being stranded out in the middle of the ocean with water as far as you can see in every direction. If you replace the water with snow and ice, you're stading in the middle of WAIS. Sometimes it is even difficult to determine where the sky ends and the ground begins. The horizon just looks like a blend of beautiful white to blue transistions.

The pilot motioned to me and said, "Do you see the white light out there infront? That is the field camp." We could see the field camp from probably 100 miles away. It literally looked like a white blip in the snow. The landing was smooth on the snow runway.

The plan was for us to service the Kamiko-Slade site that is about a mile outside of WAIS. This site was not transmitting and needed to get back on the air. Then we were suppose to wait for the Twin Otter to show up to service our Erin and Elizabeth sites which are south of WAIS. Both of these sites needed a tower raise. Then we were planning to fly back to McMurdo with the Otter. We would stop at the Siple Dome field camp so that the Otter could get fuel and we could raise the tower at our site there.

As I said, that was the "plan". We ended up batting a .250.

The afternoon that we arrived we got our mountain tents set up. This is quite the process because in order to secure the tent from blowing away, we had to dig down in the snow and anchor the tent with bamboo sticks. Here is a picture of my tent the first night that I was in WAIS. Notice that my tent is sitting very nicely on top of the snow.

Just a few days later, after high winds and blowing snow. My tent was no longer sitting nicely on top of the snow.

Luckily, I had an idea that this would happen and was able to get out to my tent in the afternoon and dig it out. It was better than finding it when I went out to go to sleep that night.

Below is a picture of the galley, where we ate our meals.

The galley is a Jamesway tent. It is a semi-permanent tent that is used for the entire field season and then taken down and stored for the winter. It is nice because it has two stoves used to heat the Jamesway and a full kitchen in the back. Camille and John were our cooks and the food was great.

The second morning at WAIS Shelley and I went out to Kamiko-Slade and replaced the electronics, moved the instruments up on the tower and checked everything out. We heard later that night from our team back home that the station was transmitting. That was our one success for the trip.

Later that day, the Twin Otter that was scheduled to make it to WAIS was cancelled due to bad weather at Siple Dome. From Monday to Thursday we waited for a Twin Otter to show up, but bad weather at either Siple Dome or WAIS prevented it from flying. After Thursday, we decided to cancel our work out of WAIS and head back to McMurdo. We have 4 more sites to visit out of McMurdo that take priority over the tower raises out of WAIS. It took 2 more days before a C130 had sufficient weather to fly to WAIS, land and take back off. Now we are back, have showered, no longer have to use an outhouse and can sleep at night without having to hide our heads inside of our sleeping bags to keep our noses warm (the temperature ranged from -15 deg F to 0 deg F).

"Tent City"