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Pete's Post - Dec 2004

Things are fully busy down here now. Lots of science groups, and a few "distinguished visitors". The weather has been very warm. It even made it above zero early this week. We wouldn't normally expect temperatures like this for another month.

Sir Edmund Hillary is visiting us next week. He's staying for six days. He is down here to commemorate the Air New Zealand tragedy on Mt Erebus, and to dedicate the new warm store building that is being constructed.

We have several reporters here, including TV1, TV3, and the Dominion Post. So we have to be careful what we say, lest they discover some juicy story that we'd rather not be made public.

On Tuesday I made it to the mainland of the Antarctic continent. We flew by helo about 300km south (to nearly 80 degrees south), which took about 2.5 hours. We needed to land at a fuel-cache on the way to refuel. Weather was perfect, and the view was amazing. At the refueling point, there was a Twin Otter aeroplane with half a dozen Americans digging out the fuel drums from the snow. They were surprised to see us turning up in such a remote location at the same time as them.

After filling up, we traveled south for another half-hour to an area near the Darwin Glacier. We flew around doing a recce as they looked for a site for future camps. They have quite a bit of science to do there during the next couple of years. Then we looked for a suitable place for me to put an automatic weather station. When we found this, we landed.

It took two of us about 1.5 hours to set up the weather station. We were working in a moderate breeze - I'd guess about 15 knots. It was a bit cold, but you could still work with your gloves off for short periods. We'd been left with our survival gear, handheld VHF radio, an Iridium phone, and a Codan HF radio. The helo took off with the others to continue recce-ing the area. When we'd finished our job, we set up the HF radio to attempt a test call back to Scott Base. We got no reply, but this is probably because the aerial was strung out pretty marginally. The team in the helo had also tried unsuccessfully to call the base on HF, so we've learnt that comms for the future camps in the area may be sub-optimal. We'd only just packed up the radio and moved our gear over to the helo landing area, when they arrived to pick us up. We stopped for fuel on the way home as well.

I've been selected for the joint NZ-USA secondary SAR team. We'll be the backup team during the summer, and will be deployed in the event of a large event or two simultaneous ones. They have mountain guides as field trainers during the summer, and they do the primary SAR duties. But during the winter we'll be the main SAR team. Selection for this team is quite competitive, with 160 people trialling for the 15 places. Two of us from Scott Base were successful.

We had our first training day yesterday - we train for a full day every second Thursday. The weather was calm, warm and quite similar in temperature to a nice alpine day in NZ. We won't always be working in these conditions. We roped up and wandered through an icefall looking for a suitable crevasse. We spent the day practising extracting a victim with a range of different medical problems out of the crevasse. This involves one team abseiling down to quickly assist, while the other group construct bomb-proof anchors and set up a hauling system. Great fun, and even better if you're getting paid for it.

That's all to report this month. I follow with interest everything that is happening in the club, and I'd like to say hi to everyone.

Pete de Joux from Antarctica