GOLF 4-3-9 Antarctica Expedition 2008
Report Day 25 -- Thursday 20 November 2008 -- Our Trip to the Royal Society Range
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GOLF 4-3-9 Antarctica Expedition 2008 |
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Another glorious day for field work in McMurdo, and we are actually scheduled to fly out to the Royal Society Range. We have the company of Mary Lynn Price from San Diego who is one of the sponsored artists at McMurdo, and her role is shooting videos for podcasts of women doing science in Antarctica, in conjunction with a major video production by Norbert Wu for the BBC.
The flight is glorious, sunny, and beautiful sights all the way to Walcott Glacier. Hotel Sierra is going nuts shooting ice patterns because he is convinced that everybody wants to have those shots as desktop patters on their computer. The flight is relatively quick and we do a hot offload, which means the helicopter does not shut down as we get out and unload our field gear, survival bags etc.. We all have to concentrate not to make any mistakes, properly shutting all the compartments and making sure that none of our gear is blown into the rotors as the helicopter takes off a few meters away from us.
We find our site quickly and begin digging a hole in the ice. We were taking our time, making sure that everything is done as we want it, but it seems it took us only a very short time to finish the deployment. Just about as we were considering a nice walk for the remaining ground time, we receive a message from helo-ops that they would like to extract us from the field pronto because a major weather front appears to be moving in. We climb back out of our canyon to meet up with our survival bags that we left at the helo landing site.
We were told that Hotel 36 is going to pick us up in fifteen minutes which gives Mary Lynn just a little time to have a first stab at the interview of Lauries. Pilot Paul Murthy got us out in the nick of time, and it seems the weather was closing in behind us as we were flying towards a (still?) sunny McMurdo in the distance.
| GOLF 4-3-9 Antarctica Expedition |