Sunday, January 11

Falafel and rice for dinner last night. It is about all we could come up with until the frozen food boxes show up with meats, etc.

Here are a couple of shots of the kitchen tent, from each end. We have propane and 2 colman 2-burner stoves:





Our "recycling center":



I share a "Scott Tent" with Ryan Currier, a geology PhD student from Johns Hopkins. The Scott Tents are the tall rectangular ones.

We each get a sleep kit, with a cot, a 1/2" air mattress, an insulated pad, a fleece liner, a sleeping bag, and small pillow. And one pee bottle. Our backpacks come with two each.

Oh, and one more thing on the cargo flight that didn't make it because everything was delayed yesterday: Poop Buckets. We have a "Poop Tent", but no 5-gal buckets with toilet seat to use. So, we use an "Emergency Poop Kit", also known as a large zip-lock bag.

The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are under an international treaty, and a specially protected area. The most environmentally protected area on earth. We cannot spill anything. The gas generator for charging our stuff has to reside in containment base. We have to dump all pee and "grey water", what we use to wash dishes, etc., int a 55-gal drum that gets hauled back later. All our garbage gets put in separate bags for return and recycling, including food waste. If we spill anything anywhere anytime, we have to call in immediately and report it.

We also have call in via radio each morning to report that all is well by 10 am.

For breakfast kate made pancakes and we had canned peaches.

After that we hiked up Bull Pass on foot to see what it was like, and take a few data points along the way for practice. This is what we'll be doing the next 2 weeks all over the mountains, usually flown there by helo, but in the valleys we'll get dropped off, hike a while, and get picked up after the helo does something for some other group somewhere else.

We're supposed to walk single file to create as little disturbance as possible:



Looking back down Bull Pass after a little while, you can see our camp:



A "Ventifact", which is caused totally by wind erosion:


More:



A tiny amount of flowing water, very rare in Bull Pass, caused by last night's dusting of snow:



Ryan pointed out a boulder with a depression worn in it by the rocks being blown around by the wind, but not out of the depression:


We often had to wait for Ryan and Ziggy to complete their geologic discussions:



Ryan was very excited to see a feature he could use to teach class with, so took a sample. The white rings indicate where some lava had been flowing at some point in history:



Here we are collecting a point, looking at the satellite imagery on Ziggy's toughbook. Too many people, and we really didn't need this location, but it was good to shake out our procedural problems before we break up into pairs and are under the pressure of limited helo support time. Kate was happy to go on a hike, because most McMurdo support people are stuck there all the time. There are about 100 scientists like us in Antarctica this season, and it takes over 700 people in McMurdo to support them/us.



Whithout my hiking boots, it was tough going in my "FDX" boots which are meant for cold, not hiking rocky terrain. Michelle's backpack was also in the missing cargo flight, which contained some of the electronic equpment we would need.

For the hike packed a lunch of trail mix, a fruit bar, and a jam-and-pancake sandwich. In my thermos I made warm "Raro". It is a New Zealand powder like Kool-aid, but was not very good.

My FDX boots and Raro. No, it's not a pee bottle......




The last point we took before heading back down the pass was on this boulder by this little pond, which is frozen:



Some of the terrain heading back down to camp:





For supper Kate made Shells & cheeze out of a box, because we had 3, and added some dried vegetables and a can of salmon. Very tasty because we were all hunger after the long day's hike.

I am charging my laptop and camera battery in the computer tent while taking these notes, shown here. We have solar power, but if it's cloudy it doesn't charge everything we need, so you see a generator also.



Michelle is loading the GPS data into her laptop, and we had to get over a couple of hurdles figuring it out. Ziggy is planning the collection of our first set of points with helo support using his "Tough-Book". Essentially a hardened tablet suitable for military use in the field. The battery holds an 8 hour charge. However, we couldn't see all the features we needed to using the satellite imagery, so I helped him do a contrast stretch on the images we would be using, and features such as large boulders are now much more visible.

We receive word of the next day's helo schedule each evening at 7 pm. We're told the rest of our cargo will arrive tomorrow night at 8 pm. Also, the Prince of Monaco wants to visit us on Thursday. He just signed on to the Antarctica Treaty, and wants to visit some scientists in the field. I guess we'll have to fake it.