Weather: Sunny, Winds 8NNW, 4F
Greetings all,
As you can see from the weather report I have made it to Antarctica, a Good thing as the surf turned up flat in NZ the last three days I was there. We flew via C17 airframe, which is a super huge military aircraft that delivered an uneventful, 5-1/2 hour flight.
Our crew has been stymied since arrival as our basecamp gear has not arrived in Antarctica and support is limited from departments here on station since we purchase all our gear ahead of time and expected no station support. We have no tents, medical equipment, sleeping bags and the such, so we are chasing our tails trying to come up with other plans. This isn't usually the drill for our crew!
A Recce flight to our proposed altitude camp was done last night and did not look as good as we had expected. Soft snow at one site and bulletproof at the other. Here was the conditions at our 1,200 foot camp: Temp. -45F; Winds 30 knots; Pressure Altitude 1,300 feet. We did expect cold windy conditions, but -45 with pressure altitudes of 13 grand was a little surprising. As this is a high risk, high altitude camp and with the current gear issues we are facing we have just about decided to change the whole plan as in, a Christmas back home in Colorado would be pretty cool nice right about now. In all seriousness, we may decide to do a light basecamp and sort things out up there for next season. Possibly no science this season, just our crew going up and checking the situation out. A little camp-out session you could say. But we shall see.
We will find out a lot more this evening as we have several meetings with the pilots and crew. Either way I still have to make my way out to Kristin's camp that she set up two seasons ago to check on our other medics who are there now. That camp is a world a part from this project.
Hope all is well up there and life is treatin' ya fair.
Tayloe
