John, Ioannis, and James on the hunt with Mt. Prestrud in the background. The valley between Mt. Prestrud and Mt. Bjaaland made for a very scenic backdrop for today’s campaign.

 Today was a long, cold, day, but a good day. John made the call at 06:45 we’d be going to Prestrud. I have it in my head that his beard acts like a weather vane – he’s so in tune with this place. We put in a solid 10 hours, many of those hours were also spent on foot searching the moraines. At the end of the day we bagged and tagged (B&T) 7 bringing the total for this area to 9. Our B&T time is getting quite refined at this point – credit to everyone on the team for their efforts.

It was a lengthy trek to Prestrud and back. Many of those miles were in single file behind John as he serpentined his way through the many crevasses of the Norway Glacier. It is almost like he’s been doing this in Antarctica since the rest of us on Team B were learning to speak or even just an idea in our parents’ minds.
With a very thorough sweep of Wisting and Prestrud in the books, we’re going to see if we can’t get to our next recon site early. It’ll all depend on weather and the Twin Otter schedule. There is a holiday season flight pause this weekend – hopefully we can get moved before then.
The scenery today was desolate but beautiful. The great crevasses on the face of the Norway Glacier and the gigantic gargoyles on the top of Mt. Bjaaland where just two beautiful scenes of the day. It will be solstice tomorrow, the sun will be slightly higher in the sky here but will still deliver us 24 hours of ultrabright daylight.
We covered around 34 miles on skidoo today bringing our total odometery to approximately 69 miles. (Note: Those 34 miles had all of our skidoos on fumes. John reckons his was about out as we pulled into camp as he was running it by the primer pump. We did have 40L of reserve in external cans so there was no alarm.)
Posted by Scott from Mt. Wisting on 2017-12-20 at 21:15 local.