Pepe the Penguin and Goodbye to the Airfield

I think I mentioned this before, but before we left for the field, there had been an Emperor Penguin hanging out by the road out to the airfield. He (or she) stood in the same spot for weeks, seeming never to move very much.
Well, a day after the survey plane arrived back in McMurdo we were greeted with a surprise: the penguin (dubbed Pepe by some) was on the move! In fact, he’d decided to take the road and was now standing in the middle of the road at the airfield.

Leaving Byrd

I took an LC-130 Hercules back from Byrd, just like I did to get there. We were a bit surprised when the plane landed at Byrd since there had been 5 days of scheduled flights to arrive, but all of them had been diverted to other places for priority or weather reasons.

Abby, the camp manager at Byrd, monitoring the movement and loading of the herc.

Scenes from Byrd Station, Antarctica

Here’s a smattering of photos from around Byrd camp.

My tent backlit by the midnight sun.

Windy

On the right is the science tent. We had to dig out the doorway about every 20 minutes. To the left is a snow drift that grew to be probably 7-8 ft tall.

While were at Byrd part of our weather delays were related to a pretty bad 48-hour wind storm we experienced. The winds reached 35 knots, which is something like 40 mph. It doesn’t sound so bad unless your home is a tent.