Christchurch

I was able to spend a little over a day in Christchurch after leaving Antarctica. It was nice to see darkness again and to smell green.
This is a Maori kiwi feather cloak at the Canterbury Museum. It's a free museum, and it's actually pretty neat. The Antarctic section is pretty neat and rivals the Antarctic Center.
















The rose garden in the Botanical garden. I could smell it from a couple hundred feet away.











Another area of the botanical garden The garden is free and pretty spectacular even in late summer.

























The memorial to Scott in Christchurch. It was sculpted by his widow.

















I went up the gondola just outside of town. Normally you could see the Southern Alps across the way, but because of smoke blowing across "the ditch," the view was somewhat obscured.










Here you can see Lyttleton Harbor from the lookout at the top, which was one of the more interesting views to look at.

I stopped in at the Antarctic Center when I was waiting for a flight out. It seems rather touristy after going to Antarctica, but probably gives you the best perspective of what it's like even though it is a bit expensive. One part I did enjoy was the blue penguin exhibit. Blue penguins are the smallest of the penguins and are found in New Zealand and not Antarctica. All the animals at the exhibit are no fit for survival in the wild as many. One problem they have run into is the development of calluses on their feet because the penguins spend a lot of time on the land as they don't have to hunt for food, so this particular animal has rubber booties on to protect its feet.

McMurdo Departure

I left McMurdo on Sunday after being delayed a couple of days due to a mechanical problem and a storm between New Zealand and Antarctica.
Looking back at McMurdo. You might be able to recognize Castle Rock.












The C-17 landing at Pegasus blue ice runway.













Our ride back.













Looking towards the cockpit.













The rear of the plane. Those pallets contain all of our luggage and were actually kept on the ramp for the flight.











This is looking out the window in the previous shot where the man is taking a photo.












We were allowed to briefly go into the cockpit and have a look around.

The End

The C-17 was unable to make it down yesterday due to bad weather between Christchurch and here. It is currently on it's way down, and should be here in three hours. I am scheduled to depart at 4 pm, we'll see if they can get it turned around that quick. It's been an excellent adventure, thanks for following. I may make one more post, but it could be a few days before that.

Update

I am still in McMurdo, but should be leaving tomorrow. My flight out today was canceled because the C-17 that was supposed to fly from Christchurch to pick us up was waiting for a part to arrive in New Zealand. Twenty people of the 140 that were scheduled to leave were selected to go on a medevac flight on a C-130 today, and one of our members was able to get on that flight. That leaves two of us down here, and I have now spent the most time in Antarctica on this trip of anyone in our collaboration.
You can't see it as well in this photo as it actually appeared, but if you look at the whispy cloud below the sun, you can see a rainbow in it.











What $6 million buys you these days, and what I have to get through airport security in a carry-on.












The cargo ship arrived a few days ago, and they are just about finished offloading. They will load up all of our trash and get out of here in a few more days. You can see the blades for the Kiwi wind turbines on top of some of the containers. It took them a while to coordinate getting those off of the ship. Rumor has it the Kiwis are sending down 40 workers to try to get the three towers up and running before the last flight leaves here on the 23rd.




Our hangar as we left it. CSBF had already left at this point, so this will be much as they find it next year after it's pulled off of the berm. The scrap heap was theirs.










Erebus as I left LDB for the last time.

Siple Dome

This crack in the iceshelf is about an hour outside of McMurdo, and had to be about 100 feet across or so. The rest of the three hour flight was pretty much flat white.
















Coming in for the landing at Siple Dome.













The Siple Dome jamesway. The doors are on opposite ends of the jamesway, even though that isn't apparent in this photo.


Siple Dome is considered by those that live there and those who stop there to be a truck stop. It's between McMurdo, the South Pole, and WAIS, so it allows Twin Otters to refuel to head to the other stations. The three people there have been at Siple Dome since October 31st. Of the deep field locations, it's probably one of the nicest as it's only at 2000 feet elevation and it doesn't get all the storms that WAIS does. Flights have been delayed getting to WAIS by 2 weeks because of bad weather. One downside to working at Siple is weather observations must be made hourly starting 6 hours prior to a planes departure, and because planes refuel at Siple, they end up doing a lot of weather observations starting at 3 am for cancelled flights to WAIS.
Having some fun after recovery.













Their freezer.













They actually didn't bring much frozen food with them as the camp used to have about 30 people doing research years ago, so they just went through a lot of leftovers. We were quite spoiled as not only did they cook for us, but the food was good too.








The roof of the freezer was covered in all kinds of ice crystals.












These protruded about 3 inches from the roof.













That one was a little over half an inch across.













These were about an inch and half long.



























As with any camping, food and the bathroom become major topics for discussion. This toilet and poo stick. The hole for the toilet is made by using a heater to blow hot air to melt the snow, so every now and then the stalagmite must be knocked over to make use of the entire volume of the hole. In the background is where the pilots sleep if they spend the night at Siple Dome. The three station members have their own tents spaced around the camp so that way they can have their own space and get away from everyone else.


What no horizon defintion looks like. When the whole horizon is like that, it makes walking quite difficult as you just appear to be floating and can't make out any bumps or holes in the ground. The clouds didn't completely cover the entire sky, so it wasn't too bad. Aside from that evening, the weather at Siple Dome was pretty nice and the sleeping bags in the tents were too warm.






A little bit of color in the sky. I know I notice it more, because as of today, it's been three months since I've seen a sunrise or sunset.











The Basler, a modified DC-3, that came to pick us up and offload some fuel.












My last flight into McMurdo.

ANITA recovery

Sorry about the delay in getting these up, I haven't been able to upload anything these last few days and I've been occupied packing up the gondola and packing up my own stuff. I'm leaving Antarctica tomorrow, so I'll see what else I can post before I leave, but there may be a couple entries made after I return.

Matt, Corey a CSBF employee, and myself left McMurdo on the 28th around 9 in the morning in a Twin Otter. Kenn Borek, the company that is contracted to fly there Twin Otters and Basler airplanes sent along a mechanic, as they do whenever an aircraft is left in the deep field overnight. The mechanic was quite eager to leave Antarctica, so he was a very useful worker for us. We arrived at Siple Dome a little after noon to refuel, drop off some gear, pick up some gear and the camp manager from Siple Dome. The flight to the crash site took about 45 minutes.

This is looking out of the window approaching the crash site.












First view of the gondola. The balloon was nowhere to be seen. I've heard it lands up to 40 miles away.











You can see an indentation where the gondola likely impacted the snow.












All the drop downs were destroyed.



























One of the items we took along was an 8 foot long crevasse probe. Crevasses form when snow bridges over a crack in the ice. When you're on the ground they are hard to spot. It's essentially a 3/4 inch diameter steel rod with a handle in the end that you stick in the ground to probe the snow. You can detect a crevasse based upon the level of resistance. Normally you have to ram the probe into the snow, and it doesn't go in more than a few feet at most. The snow at our site was so soft that if you dropped the probe from about 3 feet off the ground, it would bury it's entire length in the snow. This made the probe useless, and also made walking around quite a task, esepcially when carrying heavy gondola pieces.


































Part way through the first day. We sent the Twin Otter back to Siple Dome to offload some recovered items.











The weather was perfect most of the time we were there.












As we left it around 7:30 in the evening. We left some other gear behind so that we could take more gondola pieces back to Siple Dome with us. The light was so flat, the pilots couldn't see the ground, and so they buzzed us as a heigh reference and landed quite a ways away and taxi'ed back.







On the second day, the pilots took the CSBF employee up the parachute(the lumpy snow in the distance) which was about 1000 feet away to retrieve some of the termination devices as well balloon samples. The parachute was buried in a couple feet of snow and although "nothing is left behind" I don't believe I remember seeing the parachute on the plane.







We came back to the site around 9 am the next morning, and had finished breaking down the gondola by 11:30 that morning. We had sent the Twin Otter back to offload more gear, so we ended up waiting around for it to return. As you can see not much was left behind, but a number of nuts, bolts, pins, clips, twine etc and a few tools were lost in the snow.