First post on my new blog!  I have never published a blog but thought it might be a fun new way to keep friends and family up to date on my adventures.  Let me know if you have any helpful ideas on making it better and/or if it is not working etc..  I will usually try and post most photos on galleries at my smugmug sites so be sure to click those links.

 I am in the first days of a work trip in Antarctica.  I am part of an effort to measure a suite of properties of the ice sheet at the WAIS divide ice core location.  Specifically, my partner Gary and I will be measuring temperatures in the ice core borehole down to about 3300 meters.  This information will help to advise the drill team about how much deeper they can drill, and we will use the data to create a past climate history of that location back about 40,000 years.

I left Denver on the 15th of November.  I travelled about 20 hours via commercial airlines from Denver to Los Angeles to Christchurch New Zealand.  We crossed the dateline on the way and so we actually arrived on the 17th of November even though it was only 20ish hours later.  I then stayed a couple days in the great city of Christchurch enjoying fantastic hospitality, excellent food and beer, seeing the sites (the botanical gardens are the best I have ever seen by a long-shot) and dealing with science logistics before heading to McMurdo Station Antarctica via a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo jet.  That was an excellent flight, took about 5.5 hours.

My first day in Antarctica involved an overnight safety class called "happy camper" or "snow craft 1" which was essentially an Antarctic survival and preparedness course.  We camped overnight in small tents on the sea-ice at the base of the volcano Mt. Erebus. We dug snow trenches, practiced safety and rescue techniques and generally just learned a ton of great information on the subject from our instructors etc..   It was not very cold, about 10-15 degrees F.  A great group of people and we learned a ton!

The remainder of our time here in McMurdo has been spent gathering supplies, taking other safety and training courses and working on prepping for our flight to WAIS divide.  That flight will be on a ski-equiped LC-130 cargo aircraft and it is looking like that will be on Wednesday or Thursday next week.

There is a great webcam here in McMurdo.  I will try and update the blog before we leave for WAIS, thanks for reading!

Visit this smugmug gallery page for photos from the first days of the trip.

http://pyrat.smugmug.com/Other/Antarctica2011/20175008_hvw6R4#1593275378_rTbpBvm

A bunch of these were taken with my phone so pardon the quality..