Matador Mountain moraine outlining Shackleton Glacier, Gallup Glacier, and Baldwin Glacier, captured by Juliane on our first Twin Otter flight en route to the deep field. (Editor note:  I think that’s the Swithenbank moraine).

Team sets off into Tent City for a good night’s sleep.

Greetings from Shackleton!
A joint blog post today from both Juliane and Scott, perhaps the final joint post before Team A gets deployed to their field site tomorrow (hopefully).
To update last night’s brief post, we left Williams Field at McMurdo and were wheels/skis up on our third take-off attempt – it appears we had a bit too much to eat for dinner and made it a bit more trying for our wonderful NY International Guard crew to get us in the air. Upon landing we deployed two pallets “combat style” by opening the back doors of the LC-130 and rolling them off while the plane was moving (including four of our skidoos – “Sparky” included). From there we grabbed our sleep kits and found our way to our cozy tents, one for each of us! The area around Shackleton Glacier Camp is incredibly scenic and breathtaking. I (Scott) could not help but take pause and soak it in (see first photo).
This morning was as magical as last night, we are all still in awe, the area here is so beautiful! After a brief breakfast and a short briefing by the camp manager we set off to sort cargo. Brian and I (Juliane) got on a Twin Otter plane and headed out to our field site to drop off some cargo, including a skidoo, 2 fuel drums, some flags and propane gas tanks. We need 4 Twin Otter flights per team since only one skidoo can go per flight. Unfortunately the weather worsened so we could only do one flight today. The flight out there was incredible. Antarctica is such a beautiful continent, with its incredible vast plains of blue ice and snow, the glaciers flowing down the mountains like rivers, incrediblly slowly, yet visible. Our field site is spectacular, and windy. It was howling out there but the ice crystals that were moving and flying around made this beautiful clinging noise, like faint clear bells. It is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. We are ever so lucky to be on ANSMET and get a chance to experience these incredible sites. Thanks also to the Shackleton hosts who have been incredibly welcoming and wonderful.
-Posted by Juliane and Scott from the Shackleton Glacier Camp Galley on 2017-12-13 at 12:15 local.

editors note:  Some of you may noticed the pictures are smaller now;  that’s because the group is now blogging using the Iridium satellite system.  Each blog has to be uploaded at an astoundingly slow  9600 baud (max), and a pic that’s 480×360 with text might take 15 minutes to upload while the system tries to stay connected to satellites that are barely looping up above the horizon.   From now until the teams return to McMurdo, small posts are the norm.