Inside or out?

This morning I went to pick up our flight lunches from the Dining Facility, aka Galley. The young woman who helped me asked, "Are you going someplace exciting?" Even though I wasn't especially excited about the day's activities, I smiled and said, "Yes, we are going to the dry valleys." Saying that made me feel more excited about getting out for the day! Sometimes, you need to have other people help you put things in perspective.
I went out to the field today to conduct lab inspections with Paulene from Crary Lab and Rae, our camp manager. We started doing this a few years ago in an attempt to make the field labs safer and think of ways that we can make improvements. In the old days we didn't have eye wash stations in the labs, so we added them. We try to make sure that all the labs have basic supplies like lab gloves and goggles. It's not exactly an exciting day of "field work" poking into the dark corners of some of the labs in the field camps. It was still great to get out and see things and meet up with the people from my science group out in the field. We went to all of the fixed camps in the Taylor Valley, and we traveled in an A-star helicopter, so it was good sight seeing.


I wanted to show a few of my pictures from today. As soon as we arrived at Lake Hoare we took all of the cargo off of the helicopter including our survival bags. The pilot was planning to do a sling load and wanted to reduce the weight of the helicopter. Sandra hooked up the load. Then the pilot took off to his destination. It can be exciting to work around helicopters, but I was happy that Sandra was the one hooking up the load and not me. The pilot came back to Lake Hoare and Sandra loaded all of the cargo back onto the helicopter and we flew up the valley to Lake Bonney. We visited with Jill and John for a few minutes before checking out the labs. Then we traveled back down the valley to F6 and Fryxell camps and visited the dive team and the limno team. The last stop for us was New Harbor. It is right on the ocean so it has a different feel from the camps further up in the Taylor Valley. You can see across McMurdo Sound to Ross Island and our favorite landmark, Mt Erebus (top picture). When we left New Harbor, we flew back to Lake Hoare to bring Rae home. We also stopped at Hjorth Hill to pick up Rachel and Marble Point for some fuel and then we flew back to McMurdo. I felt recharged after the day.