Trip to Mt. Erebus

Today is hopefully my last full day in Antarctica.  It is the evening now and I have done "bag drag" - i.e. handed over my checked luggage and been weighed with my carry on bag and all the cold weather gear required for the flight.  If all goes according to plan, I will board a transport to the airfield at 6:45am tomorrow, say goodbye to Antarctica around 10am, and after a long 8 hour flight in crash-netting seats, I will land in Christchurch in time to see my first sunset in over a month.  But... things often don't go according to plan in Antarctica, so there's still a fair chance I'll be around for another day or two.

In the meanwhile - I was reviewing my blog and realized that I somehow forgot to post about one of the coolest things I've done here this year - I got to fly to a site nearly at the summit of Mt. Erebus!!!

Summit of Mt. Erebus, 1300 feet from the Lower

Erebus Hut.  Still pretty impressive, even from 

near the top!

Mt. Erebus is on Ross Island with McMurdo and is a familiar giant watching over operations here.  But, getting to go to it is a special treat.  About a week ago, the flight I was scheduled to go on was cancelled (a theme for the trip).  A helicopter flight took off to install a test station on Mt. Erebus, and I went to bed to catch up on sleep.  A short time later, though, I got a phone call that woke me up.  The flight to Erebus had been unable to land and had returned to base.  Now a second quick 1 hour trip was planned for a different location - the Lower Erebus Hut - and there was room for another person.  Was I interested?

Now, I did mention that I had been asleep, right?  So, when Erica was telling me this over the phone, I understood that they were flying to work on a station at the hut - and thought of Discovery Hut, a half-mile away along a well maintained road.  I wondered why they were bothering to fly when they could walk or drive and was trying to think of a polite way to say I would rather sleep than to tag along to a site I'd been to so many times.  Fortunately, it clicked before I got that far - the "Lower Erebus Hut" - as in Mt. Erebus!  So, I jumped out of bed, got re-dressed for field work and sped off to the lab.  We left shortly thereafter.

An alien landscape

It turns out that the Lower Erebus Hut is actually quite close to the top of Mt. Erebus - only 1300' from the summit.  I asked if there was an Upper Erebus Hut somewhere, but no one seemed to know.  I was extremely lucky to go on this flight.  I had no function there; there was just an empty seat and I was the lucky person it was offered to.  My official job was "picture-taker" although I also served the function of "tool-fetcher."  It was absolutely gorgeous.  The clouds beneath us blocked the view of the lower parts of the island, but you could see across the sound in many places.  The landscape looked like something from an alien world, and the rocks themselves were pretty neat.

"Ice monster" fumarole with our co-pilot for scale.

Possibly the coolest things I saw were the fumaroles - vents emitting steam and other gasses.  We were at such a high elevation that the gasses froze around the vents in the less than -30F air.  This created enormous, other-worldly shapes.  The biggest one looked like a huge monster, with steam coming from its mouth.  It actually took me a moment to figure out what these things were.  I knew there were fumaroles on Mt. Erebus, but I hadn't expected the frozen mounts around them.  I love when nature surprises me!

Zoom in on the mouth of the "ice monster" fumarole.

Some more "normal-looking" fumaroles

One of the downsides of being so high is that the air was much thinner.  I've always had trouble breathing at higher elevations, and we went from sea level to ~12000' in 15 minutes, so my body had very little time to adjust.  When we first landed, I found I was breathing heavily when I walked around.  After an hour, I (and my teammates) started noticing that I would periodically start gasping for breath while standing still.  By the time we left four hours later, I had a massive headache and had to stop four times to catch my breath while walking the 100m from the seismic station to the helicopter.  Not good!  But, not to worry, the short distance meant that 15 minutes later we were back to sea level and I started feeling better quickly.

So, we were at the Lower Erebus Hut for four hours, but you may have noticed that this was supposed to be a "quick 1 hour trip."  Why?  The helicopter broke!  We were allowed up to 2 hours on the ground, which turned out to be good because there were unexpected problems with the seismic equipment as well.  As our 2 hour deadline was approaching, I went to talk to the pilots, who told me that they were unable to start the primary engine.  They'd called McMurdo by radio and asked that a mechanic be sent out on another helicopter.   They were a little concerned that we might be stuck for a while, and it was quite cold.

We had all felt fairly comfortable upon landing, even though it was -30F, but everyone was starting to get cold.  I'm not sure if this was because the temperatures actually dropped, the winds picked up, or if it was just our perception after already having been exposed for two hours.  Whatever the reason, if you feel cold, you are cold.  And, for the next two hours, we were all pretty cold.  At one point, my two teammates were doing some rewiring that I couldn't help with, and it was suggested that I go sit in the idle helicopter to warm up a bit.  This was when I realized just how cold I was - probably colder than I ever was last year at the South Pole.  After I had warmed up a bit, I started shaking uncontrollably - I'd been too cold for that earlier.  My brain also refocussed enough to realize that in the chaos of the morning, I hadn't eaten anything and it was now mid-afternoon.  Rule #2 to staying warm (after dressing appropriately) is to stay hydrated and fueled.  So although in the cold, food sounded pretty unappetizing, I ate a granola bar (after defrosting it inside my coat) and drank some water (after breaking the ice that had formed over the mouth of the bottle.  I think it helped some, and I went back out to help my teammates again.  My task this time, holding up jackets to block their exposed hands from the wind while they finished rewiring the equipment.  They were so miserable.

In any case, time did pass, and the mechanic eventually showed up.  He fixed the helicopter by - as the pilot explained it - essentially beating on the engine with a stick.  [Apparently this wasn't a great fix because the helicopter was grounded for further maintenance once we made it back to McMurdo.]  We loaded up as soon as the helicopter was ready and left.  We were a pretty beaten down team - especially my two teammates who had been outside the whole time.   But, as we got closer to base, the heater warmed up the cabin and we started breathing the thicker air at lower altitudes and everyone cheered up.  By the time we landed, we mostly forgot the discomforts (but not completely) and marveled at the really cool sights we'd seen.