The Basler plane landed successfully at Davis Ward yesterday and Cindy, Nicole, Marc and I are now back in McMurdo. We took 3 of 8 snow machines with us in addition to two tents, the meteorites, and a bunch of other gear. The rest of the team is scheduled to fly to McMurdo tomorrow (today is Sunday, so there are no flights). The best parts about being back, at least for me, are (in priority order): 1. showers, 2. real apples and eggs for breakfast, 3. seeing lots of open water and some whale spouts from the library, 4. laundry.

I’ll give you a brief timeline about our day(s) of leaving the field, so you get a sense of all the work and logistics that goes into transporting cargo (including people) around the continent. The night before our flight, Brian was notified about the planes scheduled to arrive at Davis Ward (using the runway that mostly Alex has been maintaining, i.e. driving up and down the snow with a snow-groomer). We were the primary assignment for the only Basler (DC3) airplane and primary and secondary assignments for a number of twin otters (in case the Basler couldn’t make it). The planes that could actually make it were dependent on good or bad weather in 4 different locations around Antarctica. It is difficult to plan when one doesn’t know how many planes are arriving until a few hours before they do. Brian came around at 6:50 am to tell us that the Basler flight was activated (meaning that the pilots and cargo loadmaster were preparing to take off in a few hours).

We cleared out the inside of the tent in about an hour and began to shovel the tent out of the snow drift that formed around it (there was about a foot deep of snow on the upwind side of the tent!). Once our luggage and gear were on sleds, we had a short break before taking down the tents at 11:15 am (the flight was scheduled to arrive around 11:30 am and we waited just in case the airplane had to turn around en route). We saw the plane circling overhead shortly after we finished taking down our tents. The Basler made a smooth landing and then we began loading the 3 snow machines, meteorites, gear, and personal bags. After saying goodbyes to the rest of the team, we quickly took off and witnessed some amazing views while flying over the our camp and the Transantarctic mountains.

We landed at Willie field around 3 pm, helped unload, and then we were driven to McMurdo. Thankfully we arrived before 5pm and were able to drop the meteorites off in the storage freezer. And then it was time to get clean and go to dinner! After a good night of sleep, we stayed busy today preparing the samples to be loaded on the cargo ship and re-organizing stuff.

Tomorrow we will sort garbage and clean gear that we borrowed from McMurdo. The following day (Tuesday Jan. 28th for us), we have a flight scheduled to Christchurch! It’s all coming to an end!