Two quick updates, one from Emilie and Lauren, and one from Jim.

A vintage view of a Shakedown Whiteout, from the 2012-2013 team’s blog posts.

 

The team made it to Antarctica! We’ve been busy with training and learning the ropes here at McMurdo base. (editor’s note- McMurdo Station, not “base”. Jeesh, such newbies.)

Johnny and Brian are glad to finally have us here. They’ve planned a jam-packed week for us so we can try to get out to the field on Friday. Our shakedown is scheduled for tomorrow where we spend one night out in the field practicing for Davis-Ward.

The internet is down nightly. We will try our best to send a longer post with some pictures tomorrow morning!
-Emilie and Lauren from Crary Library in sunny McMurdo

Jim Karner sent this to me (rph) separately (edited to remove personal info):

Got to MCM in fine time on Friday. Went hard all day yesterday, CORE training, snowmobile training, AFS training, sleep kits, tent kits, shakedown food- it was a long day.

Groomer Skidoo has been delivered to DW and John is set to deploy to DW Monday. The rest of us will go on the shakedown Monday, and we are delivering gear to the Kiwi transition today in anticipation of that.

John brought up that with the anticipated delay getting into the field, going back to DW (and then possibly onto DOM main) for next season (20-21) might not be a bad idea if we are not going to finish up. Let me know what you think about that plan?   I’d say John and Brian would have to make that decision in early to mid- January. (Editor’s reply:  I’ll tell him not to worry about that after he’s out there. Thinking ahead is fantastic,  but let’s not run too far ahead of the data).

That’s the scoop here, everyone is excited and working hard- we have to turn in food lists tomorrow morning so everyone is busy filling them out. FYI, an annoying trait of the new food list is that a lot of the categories are just general- like “Assorted Cookies”. Seems Bija and co. are trying a sneaky way to get rid of long inventory, e.g., giving everyone Nutter Butters instead of Oreos! Could be some sour folks if they refuse to give us specific flavors of cookies, tea, chips, etc.

That is all for now, everyone should be hooking up their email today as there have been maintenance outages the last couple of nights from 5:30 PM to 5;30 AM.

Cheers!

-from Jim in McMurdo