No photos the past 2 days. Tuesday was the death march, as it is now being referred to, and I didn’t have a camera battery that day anyway. Yesterday was a rest day for me, so nothing to photo. Functioning fairly well, considering, but resting up was the correct decision. Michelle, Pat and I flew with Helo Jack to 5 more points today. We got the Kuckery Hills, but it was a bit dodgey. Jack apologized for his curtness on our first day of flights last week when he was the pilot doing our leapfrogging. He did 37 landings that day, and 20 were in poor visibility. So, no down time, and difficult conditions. When we have close support, he shuts down and has down time while we collect data. He was very pleasant today. We agreed to get him a satellite image of the retirement log house he is building in Colorado.
When first flying out of Bull Pass camp, we had a good view of Lake Vanda, the destination of the Onyx river:
This is our first location of the day. Very cold and snowy. We needed our ECW here. We even walked around a snow field to avoid a possible hidden cravass:
ANd of course, here is where Michelle had planned for us to land. Doesn't it look like the tip of Mt. Crumpet? She looks at images and maps and tries to find peaks that are accessible, and then the pilots adjust off of that when we get there and see it is impossible, but try to land as close and as high as possible:
Here is our second location:
Very near a tall peak. I was wrong about our first location being cold. It was so cold here than any exposed skin would be frostbitten in a few minutes:
From the air, just an interesting tiny glacier that had escaped from its parent:
You can see our helo shadow in the snow below:
Here's our next location, you can barely make out the helo in the upper right, sitting in a saddleback about 10 feet square:
Though that sounded dangerous, much safer than where Michelle had picked out for us to land, maybe this is Mt. Crumpet?:
At this point, Jack said we were 3 for 3 taking him places he'd never been before, and he's been flying here for 20 years.
While we were collecting data, a few photos. That is Farrar Glacier below Michelle, which is a few miles wide:
On the way back to camp, we stopped above Commonwealth Glacier, because it was on the way. This point was not critical, merely a "nice-to-have", but Jack said we had time, and it was our last day. Looking up at the helo, which landed below Michelle's target again:
Looking down:
When we got back, Paul was cleaning up camp a bit. We haul out tomorrow. BFC Kate did not arrive today, though. Hopefully in the morning.
Pat made chicken and ground beef tacos. Michelle called at 7:00 to find out our first helo for pullout tomorrow is at 9 am not at end of the day as originally scheduled, so we are now scrambling instead of relaxing. We have to pack up the whole camp tonight except tents, and without BFC Kate. And, we had to get rid of all the consumables we possibly could:
We packed up everything we could except our sleeping tents and the Kitchen. We packed up the computer tent and all the electronic gear, the solar panel and batteries, all the food, supplies, everything. We packed up our one spare alpine sleeping tent we had been saving for Kate. The Kitchen tent was completely empty. We left it up because it was very windy, and if the morning flights were canceled we might not get it back up. We estimated gusts during the night at 40-50+ mph. No one slept much. We kept getting up to check to make sure nothing was blowing away. In the middle of the night, I took this from out of our tent door. Bizarre lenticular clouds formed by wind sheer, where strong winds in opposite directions meet. Duh.
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