Ellen, Johnny, Con on Willy Field. “Where’s our ride?”

We have been waiting a few days to put the team into the field so we can start doing our job – find and retrieve meteorites. Days pass as we wait for flights. The following occurs between hours of 06:30 and 15:30. Events occur in real time.

 06:45: Johnny Schutt, our lead mountaineer, knocks on my door. Hard. “We’re on! We leave in 45 minutes.”

06:46: Mad panic ensues while I wake up, get dressed, and begin to pack my remaining items for the flight out to Miller Range.

06:52: I realize I’m on the second team, and not due to leave for a few hours yet. Well duh! For transport, we had split the whole team into two. Team 1 will take a 8:30 Bassler flight from Williams “Willy” Field, and the other team will leave at 15:00 on same Bassler, having dropped off Team 1 (called a “Double-Shuttle”). It takes about 3 hours from McMurdo to Iggy Ridge in the Miller Range where the Bassler can land. Jim, Brian, Nina and Morgan form Team 1, while myself, Johnny, Cindy and Ellen are in Team 2. The whole team rallies to get everything out and ready. After a long lull in activity over the past few days, this fast paced over-exhaustion was very welcomed.

07:05: Down two cups of coffee. For some reason, I didn’t sleep well last night and only got 4 hours of sleep. Figures, coz we go today!

07:29: Team 1 boards a SUV bound for Willy Field.

11:45: Team 2 meets at the galley for lunch, noting that Team 1 has probably landed and are setting up camp. We think the Bassler will take a few hours to get back, via a refuel in CTAM.

14:00 Team 2 deploys to Willy Field for their “put-in” flight. We pull our gear from the SUV, pile them up with the remaining gear for deployment and await the Bassler to roll up to our waiting area. There is a Twin Otter and an LC-130 majestically sleeping on the ice-runway. Idle.

14:52 A man in a van comes drives over. “There’re no more flights today. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news”. It takes a few moments for the news to set in.

13:00 We leave Willy Field for McMurdo base, ever so close to joining our team mates at North Miller. I guess there’s always tomorrow.

Epilogue: It turns out that pilots have a duty day; no more than 12 hours on the job. If you exceed that, you can’t fly. That duty day starts from when they start checking the weather, not when the propellers start turning, which greatly limits their ability to put teams into the field (the duty day used to be 14 hours). Tomorrow, the weather is supposed to be poor (yep, sounds like Antarctica alright) and so the pilots are taking a rest day. I guess I have another few nights of a warm shower and good meals in the galley. I’d much prefer to be with my team mates though, and I think so would the others of Team 2.

Twin Otter and a (right) LC-130, awaiting for orders. Can’t we just take one of those?! Seriously.

– From Con, standing down in McMurdo, 15 Dec Antarctic-time.