Food, glorious food……. – ANSMET, The Antarctic Search for Meteorites

After the weekend shakedown cruise, we are ready to get going! And so began a whole day of preparing. Each tent team had been given a list of food items available to be requisitioned for deployment. The list must have had more than 100 items on there! In the last few days, we had already selected and constructed the meals we wanted to consume that would last us the many weeks in deep field. We started with pulling the dry items; cereal, chocolate bars (so much of that!), potato chips, biscuits, pasta, sauces, soups etc… You name it, they had it. And beef jerky. I’m pretty sure we emptied the town of that. Line by line, we’d go down and grab our favorite food items and stuff them into storage boxes. These boxes were weighed and tagged for the flight out. More than 900 lbs of just dried food!

Frozen foods were next. Huge metal cargo containers had been turned into walk in freezers. There, we pulled the frozen stuff; bacon, steaks, fish, veggies and fruit. We had enough to feed an army, an army of meteorite hunters! Again, the food was weighed and tagged, producing another pallet of goodies.

To further complicate things, we had food already stationed at CTAM, the Central Trans- Antarctica Mountains camp, where gear and food from previous seasons had been stored in deep freeze. We would fly from McMurdo base on the peninsula to CTAM, before heading off to the Miller Range search site. So for some of us, we had to also take into account those stores as well. Needless to say, we turned from being ice campers to logistics experts overnight!

To further, further complicate matters, a two man team would split up at the end for 10 days and redeploy to another remote site. Brain. Explodes! ABOOM!

Other things were also packed and readied for flight such as tents, sleeping bags, stoves, gas cylinders, stakes, stuff that we trained with over the weekend and that we would need to set up camp. Finally, we prepped and repacked our personal gear. There is so much gear and supplies that these (plus our skidoos) would eventually fill two LC-130 Hercules. And if we had prepped correctly today, we would become this unstoppable force for science – an ANSMET team.