Without having done even an informal poll of ANSMET team members other than Morgan, I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re feeling pretty beat after today’s adventure. We got our flying traverse completed, albeit with more flying and less traversing, and the whole team is together again. The Basler returned two more times to the new camp to drop off our remaining cargo and teammates. Thanks guys! We spent the remainder of the day hauling gear from the plane to the camp and around camp to get organized. This doesn’t sound so hard in principle, but imagine that you’re moving all the things in your home to a new home, except that you don’t have a house yet and you’re dressed like a chubby teddy bear with a full face mask, and it’s also blowing snow at 25 mph right at your eyes. Now do that for 8 h. Fun! Our new camp has less soft snow and more blue ice, which makes setting up tents harder (need to auger out holes for every single tent stake) but water gathering easier (melting ice to get water is more efficient than melting snow). I think today was probably the most difficult for the team coming from the old camp (Cindy, Ellen, Con, and Johnny) because they had been planning on traversing most of the gear via skidoo. With the winds making that impossible, they had to scramble to get all of the remaining camp gear ready for pickup. We folks who got to camp yesterday after our fun traverse really appreciate the extra effort they put forth to get us together once again! Overall, now that it’s done I”m very proud of our hard work, in a sleepy proud kind of way. I didn’t manage to take a single picture of a person today, but please enjoy this view of our new camp setup from the water ice chipping location. It has great views in almost every direction, especially when the blowing snow dies down.

–Posted by Nina from New Sparkle City, south Miller Range, 29 December 2015