101 days

Here we are, the Twotter Boys, sitting in a hotel room in New Zealand with the window open, the lush green trees swaying outside in the warm wind wondering what the hell happened.  You thought it was all over, well it is now.  101 days since arriving in McMurdo we arrived back in real civilisation a little dazed and confused from a crazy last few days. 

 

Our Private LC130 and the Twotter Boyz sitting in the first class cabin (i.e. the cockpit)

After our arrival and celebration on Saturday, we spent Sunday afternoon unpacking the pallet of cargo and trying to locate the rest, which was tracked down the next morning.  Monday and Tuesday were spent cleaning, sorting and returning the masses of equipment and organising shipment of rocks back to the States.  It all happened so quickly. 

The Beard (suffering from a nasty case of Gingeritis)

An afternoon of thank you’s and goodbyes to all the people in McMurdo that have made this season possible then some wine in the bar (to help us sleep…) before being taken to the plane after midnight for a 3am night flight departure.  5 hours of sleeping fits and nodding heads later we arrived in Christchurch and it was all over. 

Feeling at home in the rain

Today we went up to Arthurs Pass for a walk in the warm rain.  As we come from Canadia (near Alaska) and Englandshire (near London) this made us feel at home.  Tomorrow Chris leaves for Hawaii and Tim stays for a few days before heading to Patagonia. 

So this is the last post before we have all gone our separate ways. A few numbers for your consideration…

7 people

98 Rock Samples

101 days

47kg cheese

1768 tea bags

14kg fresh coffee

1724km mileage on the skidoos

9 flights

19 landings

73 hours of satellite phone calls

3 beards removed (Chris, Mike & Tim I)

1 beard trimmed (Tim – Fawna, you’d be proud!)

1 “beard” removed (Danny)

1 very satisfied G097 team

A massive thank you to everyone involved - from NSF who made it possible, to the folk at McMurdo who made it happen.  We are very grateful to you all.  And now let’s get the rocks to the lab and start working it all out…

Private Jets

We are pretty fortunate really, to have our own private twin otter for a
week. Crazy when you think about it. The weather did permit for the
last two days and we got two brilliant geology days in visiting 10
sites. Some fantastic flying and landing sites and some interesting
geology (including what we have called some igneous conglomerate....)
And we only broke one cable on the skis which was good :-)

On saturday, our private twin otter left us and our own private LC130
arrived to whisk us back to the sprawling metropolis which is McMurdo.
A quick pack up of the tent and some goodbyes to Drew and Silver who
have been BRILLIANT hosts over the last 18 days at Siple Dome. Thanks
Guys!!

And so to town. Showers, beds, dark rooms at night, lashings of food
and a large dose of saturday night Gin and Tonic. Chris has shaved the
monster off his face but Tim's is still lingering for the moment. Now
they don't look like Twotter boys any more, it's more like a schoolchild
who hangs around with an old tramp.

Season's end and Art update

The only sign we have of the remaining team members in Antarctica is the flicker of activity on a (famous social network) website. Therefore we think we have detected a sign of Kakymchukky with internet access, and hence infer their location as McMurdo! We are awaiting news of 'culture' shock and rock cargo updates.

In Australia we have already had our lovely rock samples safely delivered. No small feat given the quarantine regulations for our large island. We are also writing our abstracts for the International Geological Congress in Brisbane (to take place in August) which will be the next G097 face-to-face meeting after the Lockhart camp changeover.

In the meantime Tim I has been creating some physical artwork (each about 90 cm wide) from his sketches: see progress below:

The Final Day....weather permitting

Today marked the final science day of an epic season that started Nov. 5
and lasted a total of 72 days! We managed to visit 4 sites today,
including the Saunders Mountains that has eluded pilots in previous
seasons. Thank you to the KBA pilots Phil and Tim who went above and
beyond to get us to more sites than we thought possible in two days!

The Twotter boys are scheduled on a Herc to McMurdo station tomorrow and
plan to sort cargo, return uneaten food, and as always drink lots of
tea...weather permitting.

Big Day

Wow, what a brilliant day. Gorgeous weather, 6 site visits, lots and
lots of rocks and the forecast for tomorrow is good as well. Hopefully
we'll be able to get most of our other sites done and then get on an
LC130 back to town on Saturday. Weather permitting of course. And the
last site today was under a peak called the Billboard, a 600m+ vertical
granite mammoth in the sarnoff range. Wow all over again. Another hard
day at the office.

Love The Twotter Boyz.

Scott Centenary

"Polar Exploration is at once the best way of having a bad time ever
devised"

This is the very memorable opening line to "The Worst Journey in the
World", a book by Apsley Cheery Garrard about Captain Scott's fateful
South Pole expedition(and the winter journey that the title talks about)

Today, the 17th of January, marks the 100th anniversary of when Captain
Robert Falcon Scott and his team reached the South Pole - only to find
that he'd been beaten to it by the Norweigan Roald Amundsen and his dog
team. It is still difficult to imagine how he must have felt. He never
made it back, dying from starvation in a storm only 11 miles from their
last depot of food.

We sit here at 82 degrees South (about 500 miles from the Pole) in a
heated hut, enjoying freshly baked bread and a cold beer imported from
Scott's English homeland. How things change.

The magnificent feat of reaching the South Pole is something that still
only a few explorers have accomplished, but we feel too feel like
pioneers. We believe that we, at 82 degrees south, have eaten more
cheese per day per person than any previous expedition on the continent.
Even the French. And that is something of which to be proud.

Oh, and we had a little bit of OK weather today and sneaked in a quick
flight to one location to geologise! YAY! Good to get out and get
somewhere... hopefully more on the way.

Ground-no-fog day

The plane arrived yesterday and we flew out to the Fosdicks briefly to
collect cargo from the campsite that was left when the dig team got
pulled out (they finally left last thursday, 17 days after being put in,
poor souls!!) and to recce some landing sites for today but no time for
geologising unfortunately.

Anyway, the last post was about groundhog day - where fog stops play and
the plane can't come/we can't go anywhere.

Today we have invented a new term. Ground-No-Fog Day.

Definition: When it is a gorgeous day at Siple Dome but the forecast is
for fog to arrive and it NEVER ARRIVES!!

No Fog. No Wind. No Clouds. No Flight.

Very frustrating all round (the pilots hate sitting around more than we
do) We looked at another option to return to Byrd Camp but the weather
there is pants.

More reading, more running, more eating, more tea. MORE CHEESE :-)

And every finger crossed for tomorrow. Tick Tock, Tick Tock