4 January 2019 Attention PolarTREC...The Wormherders Have Landed!

Alyssa Pike, Tasha Griffin, and Dr. Byron Adams, all members of "Team Wormherders" (to be defined later) are excited to get their feet planted on Antarctic ice. The day started just like yesterday. We met at the United States Antarctic Program facilities in the morning, got checked in, headed to the airport and boarded our plane. Hopefully, this time, the weather will give us a window to land at Antarctica. Me, Tom Powers, and Byron Adams excited to be past the halfway point of our 8-hour trip from New Zealand to Antarctica. Weather was looking good this time. This was our home for about eight hours as we flew across the ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica. Plenty of time to listen to good music. It was way too noisy to visit with anyone else. Here is the toilet in the front of the plane. You just stand there in front of everyone, pull the curtain around you, and get 'er done. You have to look close to see the toilet (it looks more like a sink) on the wall. After a few hours of flight, we could look out the window and see we must be headed in the right direction. We still had hours to fly. These are huge icebergs! This photo was shot out of the window of the plane thousands of feet up. Once we reached these snow-covered mountains, we were within a couple hours of our destination of McMurdo Station. We made it! On the ice with our LC-130 in the background. I was so excited to not only get to see "Ivan the Terra Bus" in person, but I got to take the long, slow ride into the station on this monster machine. The perfect ride to complete our journey to get here which we started back on December 30th.

After about an hour ride in Ivan, we arrived at McMurdo Station. We had a couple of training sessions, received our dorm keys, picked up our luggage, and headed to the lab where we will be spending time when we return from our field experiments out in the Dry Valleys, which we will access by a 40-minute helicopter ride.