Well, we're here! We left McMurdo yesterday around 10 a.m for CTAM (Central TransAntarctic Mountain) camp on a C-130 Hercules. This is another military transport airplane that is much smaller than the C-17. In addition to the flight crew, there were 19 people on board along with all our personal gear and science cargo. Unlike the C-17, which has wheels for landing gear, the Hercules lands on giant skis.
The flight yesterday out to CTAM was a relatively short flight - we were only in the air for about 1 hour 45 minutes. We flew at a lower altitude, so the view of the mountains, from the back window was amazing!! We could see glaciers flowing off the polar plateau down toward the Ross Ice Shelf. We were so close to the glaciers that we could see huge crevasses (cracks that penetrate deep into the ice) and blocks of ice fall at the heads of the glaciers.
Just after the plane touched down, they opened the back ramp of the plane and released their cargo. It simply rolled off the plane and was left behind us on the runway!
After we came to a complete stop, we disembarked and were able to watch them unload the plane. The plane never shut down and immediately after they had unloaded all their cargo, they immediately took off and returned to McMurdo. We collected our carry-on gear and headed over to the Jamesway camp. The people who run CTAM and those scientists who work out of CTAM live quite the life of luxury. There are 7 Jamesways. These are long, Quanset-hut-type insulated tents. They have metal archways and stays covered by thick, double-walled, insulated canvas material. The galley Jamesway even has skylights! There are Jamesways for the medical facility, Helicopter pilots' sleeping quarters and Twin Otter pilots' sleeping quarters (they can only fly for 6 hours before they must rest), galley, communications (all radio operations between CTAM and McMurdo, CTAM and helicopters and planes), and then two for scientists who do a majority of their work in camp. (Many of the scientists fly in helicopters out to their field sites every day.)
Everyone sleeps in "tent city" which is located about 200 yards from the galley. In this camp everyone has set up their tents in a grid system - this allows the snow groomers to keep the drifting snow manageable. We had three scott tents to set up, which with all 7 of us working, went quickly. It helped that there was no wind!
After setting up camp we went and found our cargo. Some of it had arrived before us and was lined up in the cargo staging area. We had a bit of a scramble, as one of our large tri-wall boxes had been commandeered by camp - they thought it contained material for their search and rescue (SAR) team. Once they were alerted to the mistake, they readily rounded up our gear or found replacement gear for us. We organized our food and divided our cargo into two piles based on priority. There will be two helicopter flights required to move all of us and our gear out into the field. All in all, we have about 2,700 pounds of gear to go with us. Items classified as priority 1 include things like tents, sleeping gear, stoves and fuel, a little food (to get us through about two days), personal gear, and radios. The second load will contain items like scientific research equipment and the bulk of our food. We will fly out with the first load of cargo. If we don't have our tents set up by the time the helicopter arrives with our second load, they will stick around until they are assured that we'll be okay in the field until they come back.
Organizing our gear was quite an ordeal. Once again we had to weigh everything, including ourselves and personal gear since the helicopter is only capable of carrying a certain weight. Food was sorted and rearranged.
We were finally done with that monumental task around 10 pm. As we were in the galley, we discussed the hills to the southeast of camp. The snowmachine mechanic overheard our conversation and offered to stay up late to be our point of contact (POC) if we wanted to check out snowmachines and go explore. We took him up on that in a heartbeat! We took a radio and GPS and checked out 2 snowmachines. Brenda and Gordon were on one, John and I on another and we pulled a sled with Perry in it. The top of the hill was about 2.5 miles away and we were afforded amazing views of the glacier on which the camp is set as well as the surrounding mountains.
This morning, we were up at 6:30 and off to breakfast. After breakfast, we broke camp and began to work on transporting our cargo to the helicopter pad. These two tasks took us about two hours. We are now waiting for our helicopter flight which is scheduled for 12:45. There's no guarantee that we'll leave on time, but we are hopeful we'll leave today as planned. If, for some reason, we can't leave today, we won't get into the field until Monday because they don't fly on Sundays. (Everyone down here works 60 hour weeks with only one day/week off - Sunday.)
I'm so very excited for my FIRST helicopter flight! I hope I get a window seat so I can take lots of pictures! Once we get to our camp at Cloudmaker, I will have my first attempt at sending email via the Iridium (satellite) phone, so submitting journals may be much trickier. Because of this, it may be several days between journal entries and they'll probably be much shorter. Right now, I'm writing this journal at CTAM where it will be emailed to PolarTREC. They'll upload it into the journal format you're used to seeing. CTAM is amazing in that it has wireless internet! However, the only capabilities it has is email.
Stay tuned for future updates from the field and spectacular Transantarctic Mountains!