Unpacking and back to New Zealand

A side note before I get started - I am writing this post from Colorado! I am very excited to be home with Tom and Emma. This will be my last blog post for this Antarctic season. I enjoyed sharing my adventures with you. I hope you enjoyed them too.

My least favorite part of every camping trip is unpacking. 

Suz, John, and I met up on the morning of Monday January 27th to get all of our gear unpacked and returned to its various departments. First we had to get the sleds forked from the Transition. We rented a truck, drove down to the Transition, and drove the snowmobiles and sleds over to the Transition. Ed, the fork truck driver, was incredibly skilled at picking the sleds up off the ice and placing them on a pallet for transportation back to McMurdo. Thanks to his skills, this process when much quicker than we had expected.

We spent most of the day, unpacking the sleds and returning our gear. I didn’t take any pictures of this – honestly, I think I was just too tired – but something tells me that you probably get the idea.

Fortunately, our gear return went much quicker than we had expected. Most of our camping gear was returned by Monday night. Tuesday morning, I returned our comms equipment. After that we just had a few loose ends to take care of. Thinking that we didn’t need until the following Monday (our original scheduled flight to Christchurch) to finish up these things and knowing that the planners were looking for people to fly north (there were too many people scheduled to fly the following week), we asked if we could get moved to an earlier flight. Lucky for us, there was room on Thursday’s flight to Christchurch. We tried not to get too excited, because things in McMurdo can change quickly. We could have easily gotten bumped off the flight or had either bad weather or mechanical issues delay the flight, but we were fortunate. By 9:45 am on the morning of Thursday January 30th we were being transported out to Pegasus airfield for a C130 flight north to Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Cress vehicle

On our way to the airfield, the Cress vehicle stopped and the door opened. The driver told us there was a group of emperor penguins on the other side of a mill van. I walked over with my camera and found fourteen emperors. Penguins are my all time favorite animal, so I was pretty excited. This was definitely a good way to leave Antarctica.

Emperor penguins on our way to Pegasus airfield

Our flight north was good. We left almost an hour late, around 1:30 pm instead of 12:30 pm, but we arrived in Christchurch around 8:40 pm, which was only 10 minutes late. Not too bad. We went through customs, returned our cold weather gear (parkas, books, etc.), grabbed a shuttle,  and got some dinner. I made it to my hotel, exhausted, at 11:30 pm.

It was a short night for me. The airport shuttle picked me up at 4:00 am the next morning. Fortunately, I didn’t care because I was on my way home to see Emma and Tom!

Overall this was a great, successful season!

Back to McMurdo

Prior to heading back to McMurdo, we had to pack up camp. This proved to be not an easy task. We started this on the morning of Saturday January 25^th. John and I did some work on the Tall Tower AWS. This included removing the data card from the data logger. Over the course of a year, the AWS records all of its measurements to the data card. This past year, the AWS was not transmitting its data in real time, so this data card is our only source of the data. After we collected the data card, we upgraded the operating system on the data logger, uploaded a new program to the data logger (so that the data would start transmitting in real time), verified with our team back home that the data was transmitting successfully, and installed the new data card. Due to some computer complications, this took most of the morning.

Tall Tower electronics

  

After lunch, John and I removed the two Snow Web stations, which were each installed about 10 km from camp. This took us a couple of hours to complete, with most of the time spent snowmobiling to the sites.

After removing the Snow Web stations, John and I started helping Suz pack up camp (Suz had started this process that morning). John and I went to work digging out the snow anchors for each tent. Due to the fact that we had a lot of snow drifts in camp, this proved to be a tough job. Some of the snow anchors were located a few feet under the snow surface. After a few hours of digging, all of the snow anchors were free and we took a break to eat dinner. After that we took down the Arctic Oven and got it packed up. Then we helped Suz pack the remainder of the sleds. We finished up around 9:00 pm and went to bed, since we knew that Sunday was going to be a long day.

 Sleds packed and ready to go

 

We got up at 6:30 am on Sunday. We started the day with breakfast and then we each packed up our personal tents. The last tent to come down was the bathroom tent. Once that was down and packed, we hit the road (around 9:00 am). For the most part, our loads seemed fairly well packed and despite the flat light (which made it almost impossible to see where we were going), we made pretty good time. We made it back to McMurdo in about 8 hours and 30 minutes, which was much faster than the 10 hours and 40 minutes it took us to get out there.

Once we arrived at the Transition, Lee was nice enough to pick us up. John, Suz, and I were pretty excited that we made it back to town in time for dinner (which runs until 7:30 pm). Although we ate pretty good food at camp, it was nice to eat dinner at a table. After dinner, I headed back to my dorm and took a shower. After two weeks of not showering, the hot shower was really appreciated.

Driving from Tall Tower to McMurdo - the flat light made it difficult to see the "road"

 The black dot in the center is an Emperor penguin was saw on our way back from Tall Tower

Overall, it was a great trip. The logistics went well, the science went great, and I had a fun time hanging out with everyone in our group.

 John and Suz on our way from the Transition to McMurdo - Lee is driving the truck

Tall Tower Guests

As you can imagine, any contact with the outside world was kind of a big deal at Tall Tower. During our two week stay, we had two such encounters. The first was when a skua (the Antarctic equivalent of a seagull) flew into camp and the second was when a Twin Otter came to pick up Ben.

The skua visited us on Friday January 17^th. John, Ben, and I were working in the Arctic Oven. All of a sudden Suz says, “Hey, there’s a skua out here.” So we all ventured out of the tent to check it out. The bird flew around camp for a bit. He tried to land on our tents a couple of times, but wasn’t able to. Eventually, he landed next to John’s tent. He hung out for a few minutes and then was off. It is rare for a skua to travel this far onto the ice sheet. My guess is that he was looking for food, since skuas are definitely the scavengers of Antarctica.

 Skua next to John's tent

The Twin Otter picked up Ben on Monday January 20^th. It was a beautiful morning with light winds and partly cloudy skies. To be honest, Ben got lucky. I think this was the only day that we had weather nice enough for an Otter to fly into camp. Once the Otter landed, we loaded up Ben’s snowmobile, sled, an empty 55 gal drum, a full 55 gal drum of premix, and a bunch of other random camp items that we did not need. The Otter was pretty full by the time Ben crawled into the back of it.

Twin Otter at Tall Tower

After Ben and the Otter departed, it was just Suz, John and I at Tall Tower until we packed up camp and headed back to McMurdo on Sunday January 26^th.