Still Around

We did not make it to WAIS camp for the second straight day. The upside is that this time the decision was made before having to get ready. I woke up at 5:20 AM and I immediately checked the flight status and it was delayed two hours. I went back to bed and repeated the process at 7:20 AM. This time the flight status was updated to cancelled due to weather. The next scheduled date for the flight is Monday, although no details have been provided to this point. Most all of the operations are shutdown the next two days for the Thanksgiving weekend. I'll be doing a Turkey Trot 5K in the morning and then a Thanksgiving dinner in the evening. I'll write more about that later in the weekend.

The good news is that we were still able to get out and have a productive day. I woke up to a phone call from the fixed wing at about 8:00 AM. They noticed that our WAIS flight was cancelled and wanted to know if we wanted to do a Twin Otter flight today. We had kept our tools and some field equipment as a carry-on for the WAIS flight, just in case something like this happened. We jumped at the opportunity. By 8:45 we were being picked up by Shuttles and by 9:35 AM we were in the air heading to the southern end of the Ross Ice Shelf to work on Elaine AWS. The site needed to be raised due to annual snow accumulation. We ended up having to do a fair amount of digging as well as doing the raise. Overall, it was a fairly difficult job requiring 4 1/2 hours in the field, but it went well and the AWS should be good for another 2-3 years. It felt great to get out in the field today and end the work with at least something productive done late in the week.

Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving. I will still be in email contact until at least around 10 AM on Sunday US time. Feel free to send me any updates and news, if you got it.

Elaine AWS at the time we arrived. I originally installed this AWS site in January 2005. The station was subsequently raise since that time. There is approximately 15 feet of tower buried beneath the surface.

Elaine AWS after the completion of the station raise. The Transantarctic Mountains are in the background.

Minna Bluff and Mount Discovery as seen from the Twin Otter on the flight back after completing the station raise at Elaine AWS.