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Moody Nunatak

Have you guys got enough of the hottie pilots yet?

Of course not. Neither have I.

Come Sunday, I was a bit nervous about the coming week. I had a potential 3-day field job coming up at Moody glacier, and another job at Hjorth which had to be done before Friday. Nobody scheduling flights works on Sunday, so I wouldn’t know until Monday morning where I was headed when, and how everything would work out.

Eric, with whom I was to go to Moody glacier, called me at 5:50 AM on Monday to tell me he’d just talked with Joni, the fixed-wing (airplane) coordinator, and that there was no news. We were hoping to get dropped off at Moody glacier on a Hurc on its way back from the South Pole, which meant we would go with it to the Pole and get dropped on its way back. Sweet. Then, we’d camp for a couple nights at Moody glacier and do our work by helicopter, and catch a Hurc on its way back to McMurdo.

Erik called me again at 6-something, to again tell me we had nothing definitive but that it didn’t look good, and that Joni had asked him to call her back closer to 7:30. At 7:15, he called me to tell me Joni had gotten us on a Twin Otter for the day, and that we were to be down at the Twin Otter shack on the ice runway at 8:30.

I had prepared for options A and B, but not completely for either. Especially should either happen at 8:30 AM. Still, I was only a little behind when Eric showed up in my office at 8:20 to pick up equipment and myself to head on down. Every day is an adventure.

Eric Kendrick, presently of University of Hawaii but soon to be of The Ohio State University, and Jim Spencer, Kiwi mountaineer from Fox glacier in New Zealand, and I were to install two GPS instruments on a to-be-determined location on the Moody nunatak. A nunatak is a piece of land which is surrounded by but never covered by ice, an island in the flowing glaciers. We wanted to put these GPS instruments on the nunatak for several reasons: the nunatak lies between an area studied by Eric and companions to the south and an area studied by other Ohio State folks to the north, and ties the two study areas together; and the site could be used as a base station by another group which would be using GPS out on Moody glacier starting the end of December. The purposes of using GPS in the projects are different; the first two groups want to use GPS to see how the land in the area is moving in response to plate motions and to the effect of glacial loading, and the third group wants to use GPS to track their position during aerial aeromagnetic surveys. The aeromagnetic surveys help determine under-ice topography to better understand the ice-land interaction in the area. (I hope I have that right).

Enough science? We didn’t do any science while we were out there. We man-hauled.

First, though, we flew for a bit under three hours and circled the site in the plane to pick out a spot that looked good. Good meant a spot with solid-looking bed rock which was relatively easily accessible from the snow, since that’s where the Otter would have to land. After picking a spot, we landed. And unloaded gear. And looked up the hill at the rock, to me so far away.

We man-hauled in Antarctica! I was stoked. Just like the good old days. Except that we were hauling GPS equipment, and had lots of warm clothes including lots of extra ones and we had flown to our destination and had survival bags and were only going to be out for the day and knew we had showers (with hot water) and food and beds and warm buildings and even a sauna if we wanted it waiting for us when we got home. “Home.” Other than that, though, we were just like the early explorers. Hauling a sled loaded with equipment by cords caribinered into harnesses on our waists and tied with prussic knots to a main cord attached to the sled. And we (Erik, Jim, and I) looked like this:

[Me, Jim, Eric. Photo compliments of Trevor.]

Jim was our fearless leader. “Ready dogs?” he’d ask. “Mush!”

We made our way up the hill. About two thirds of the way up, something hilarious happened to the snow. Eric only thought it was hilarious for the first couple minutes. The snow turned to hoare; that is the soft but otherwise normal snow gave way to a thin, brittle crust underlain by unconsolidated, non-compacting, large, recrystalized ice crystals which could be scooped up by the handful and thrown gleefully into the air. This makes walking difficult. Talk about post-holing. Every step was up to the knees, and some deeper—some immediately to the thigh—and we’re still pulling this thing behind us, although by this time we’ve dumped one of the heavier items alongside our tracks to pick up later, and every time we go in very far we end up crawling, groveling along the snowy icy crystally slope until we can again stand, and I laugh and laugh at the ridiculous of it but we stop often because it is also exhausting and slow going. While Jim goes back to the sled to remove another heavy box, Eric plays penguin, lying on his belly and eating the snow before him without using his hands. He later tells me this is the only water he drank all day. I play dumbfounded until I realize that I didn’t have any water, either. I didn’t have much, either, says Jim, just a liter or so. Eric and I roll our eyes. Silly mountaineer. A liter is a lot more than nothing.

[Eric playing penguin. "I can't believe I actually smiled," he said the next day, as we looked through the pictures together.]

We had to leave the sled where the snow gives way to rock. While Eric explored, Jim and I went back for the abandoned boxes.

[Jim tries to sled down to the upper box. If you squint, you can see two white boxes along the tracks. You can also see the two Otter pilots on their way up the hill, and the plane down at the bottom.]

The two Otter pilots, Scott and Trevor, must have felt sorry for us. Or, they might have realized that if they didn’t help out a bit we would take forever.

[Scott and Trevor.]

By the time Jim and I had made it to our first box, the pilots had reached the second and were bringing it up. We put both on the sled and hauled it up to the rocks. Eric reported that the rock was beautiful, solid and abundant, and we began to ferry the gear over the rocks to his preferred spot. “Where would I be most useful?” I asked. “Here, helping you guys put this in, or going back to the plane to help the pilots with another load?” It sounds like I was being nice, but really I had motives. And no, they didn’t have to do with spending time with the pilots. Well, maybe a little to do with that, but it had more to do with the sled.

I left Eric and Jim to work on the installation and went down to join the pilots at the rock-snow transition. There was no question in Trevor and my minds of how we wanted to get down to the plane. Scott, for some reason, was hesitant. You guys go ahead and see if you can get it going, he said, and if it works I’ll hop on. Are you sure, Scott? we asked. Come on, Scott. We badgered him into it.

Now, I think Scott loves us.

Trevor in the back, Scott in the middle, me in the front (how’d I score that?). Ready? Go!

We made it all the way down. We made it all the way down through the soft snow, all three of us, a comfortable pace—doesn’t sound very exciting, but it made for a nice, long, joyous ride—, ending within 10 or so feet of the equipment by the plane. We tried leaning to steer, which didn’t work very well, but I used my hand as a rudder to keep us angling left and I think that’s what did it, and there we were at the bottom with one glorious smooth sled track behind us. That was the best sled ride ever.

[Our sled-riding hill. Also our man-hauling hill.]

I wish I could bask in it, but we couldn’t really then, either. Time to load up the sled again, with the rest of the goods, luckily lighter than the last load, and we stuck Trevor in the middle (where he’d end up pulling most of the weight) and started up the hill. It was easier than the first time, having a slightly packed track to follow. Plus, we had just gotten to sled down. Life was good.

There was still a bit of work to do. After a bit of basking,

[Trevor hero shot.]

[Scott keeping out of the wind. Check out the horizon. What's my deal?]

the pilots took off on a hike to the summit

while Eric and Jim and I worked on the GPS installations.

[Eric.]

[Eric, Jim.]

Or, from the looks of it, Eric and Jim worked and I took pictures.

The final result was lovely.

If you’re into that sort of thing.

And we were off, only an hour or so late. 7 PM.

Ah, the work day is over. What, the pilots still have three hours of flying ahead? Bummer. It’s hard enough work for me just to keep my eyes open. They point out that they can sleep, too, since they have autopilot. But it’s too beautiful to sleep, really… Did I fail to mention that the day was absolutely gorgeous, with not a cloud in the sky? In fact, just how perfect the day was didn’t strike me until we were flying over Black Island, almost back to McMurdo, and I observed thin wisps of clouds far below. Clouds? What are those foreign objects? My goodness, we’ve seen nary a one yet today.

Before heading home, we stopped at the Beardmore camp to refuel. The Beardmore is a camp established this year to accommodate six or so science parties who wanted to do research in that area, about 3 hours south of McMurdo by Twin Otter. Just the day we were there, a group looking for fossils found a big ol’ dinosaur femur. Strange to think there was once abundant life in this place. What’s even stranger is that the land was supposedly not too much farther north than it is now—the world was just a warmer place.

[The land from above. Antarctica was once a continent much like any other, with plants and animals and rivers eroding valleys and depositing sediments. The rocks reveal this history in its sedimentary layers, indicating times of shallow sea formation and of mountain building, leaves and bones preserved in these layers as fossils.]

The stop at the Beardmore was short. Just long enough for me to get a hug and a short conversation out of my friend Andy, who’s out there for the season, and for our fuel tanks to get filled. Back on the plane, and back north to McMurdo.

[I call this Niagra Ice Falls. Ice falls, and ice falls, and ice falls.]

[I just like the way the ice curves around the island, joining in gentle lines stretching down-glacier.]

[Big glacier. Fat glacier.]

Luckily, the scenery eventually got a little less spectacular and I was able to catch a nap.

I woke up in time to see Mt. Discovery from a new angle.

We landed around 10:30 PM. On our ride back to town with the Otter folks (mechanic Kevin in command, claiming to be the short bus driver. But he's tall.), we stopped to say hello to the emperor penguin who's been hanging out by the ice runway and who was preening alongside the road.

By the time we were done transporting and dealing with gear, it was closer to 11:30. Only an hour until midrats, the midnight meal (lunch for night workers). But, I went straight to my room and went to bed. No, I went straight home and changed into clean clothes and then went to midrats to grab a quick bite. Or maybe, just maybe, I went straight to Jen and Melanie’s room where there was still a group of folks exchanging foot massages and painting each other’s toenails. Refuse a foot massage after a day in the field? No way. So I put on some of Jen’s pajama pants and one of her tee-shirts and cuddled on the couch and she rubbed my feet and life was good. Still good, I mean. Then, I went to midrats. I met up with Eric and Jim there, and would have met up with Scott as well who I guess was walking right behind us but he’s just too darn hard to recognize without his sunglasses and big Carharts jacket and hat and gloves. Sneaky chap, that Scott.

And then I went to bed. Really.

Posted by beth at December 16, 2003 08:43 AM | TrackBack