This is my dog Zion.  If you haven’t met him, you might assume he’s a labrador retriever of the Canis Familaris species. But spend 10 minutes with him and you’ll figure out he’s a slightly different creature;  Canis Ballhounder.   On this very frosty morning in northeast Ohio he is interested in one thing, and one thing only-  chasing a tennis ball,  running as fast and hard as he can. His breathe pounds the air with steam;  and the hawk in the tree, looking at him run,  just grunts and snuggles deeper into her fluffed-out feathers. Zion is a creature motivated by motion, and the cold is just a reason to run harder.

Here’s the good news;  Zion is not the only one on the move this morning.   As of yesterday, Brian has officially departed for Antarctica.   He spent a day or two with John before departure.  I’m not 100% sure where Brian is I write this,  but it’s somewhere high up, west and quite a bit south of the continental US. By any measure, he’s moving in the right direction.

With Brian on his way, and an imminent government shutdown now kicked further down the road,  yet another barrier between ANSMET and renewed fieldwork is out of the way.    We received an additional welcome sign of progress on Friday- the rest of this year’s field party members began receiving their individual itineraries from the USAP travel contractors.  The result was (as you might expect) a few butterflies, a few “are we really doing this?” questions.  Though it’s easy for me to say this because I’m not actually going, I’m not worried at all.  Even if this field season is something quite new for us  (we’ve never returned to the field after 3 years off before),  we HAVE been doing this for nearly 50 years-  there ain’t no Antarctic project with better muscle-memory on making this fieldwork come together. Between Jim and Brian and our field team there’s almost a quarter century of Antarctic experience.  They got this.

Today being Sunday,  as you do whatever you do to honor or thank this universe for letting you be a part of it,  send a small “Godspeed” out to Brian and a bigger “you got this” vibe out to the rest of the team.   In just a few weeks they’ll be out chasing their own version of tennis balls,  and retrieving quite a few (I hope).

-Ralph (and Zion),  from seriously-radiatively-cooled Novelty, OH.