Black Island

Helicopters are AWESOME!  Today’s helicopter ride was a great experience.  For those of you that have never ridden in a helicopter, you should.  If you can do it in Antarctica, that’d be even better (I might be bragging a little there, sorry).  But the experience was unbelievable.  I was a little nervous walking up to that monstrous machine with the phwapping blades, but I got over that quickly when excitement took over.  We had on these big helmets with headphones and could hear the pilots talking and when they got the go ahead to take off, it just happened.  Hard to explain, but I expected the blades to go faster or make more noise or anything to indicate that something was changing, but we just kind of lifted up.  Like we could have done that the whole time.  That took me by surprise.

The ride was only about 15 minutes but the views were pretty incredible.  It really put it all into perspective, where I am.  We headed to an island south of Ross Island and not much closer to the actual continent, but quite a different view.  We were kind of surrounded by the continent with Brown Peninsula stretching out one direction and Mina Bluff hugging the other side, anchored by Mt. Discovery in the middle.  It was also very interesting to look away from that back at McMurdo from Black Island.  It is a little dark patch on a huge, white, volcanic island.

We flew over the Ross Ice Shelf and they have recently moved the airport out there (out from the Annual Sea Ice where it had been when I got here).  It is called Pegasus Air Field.  It was cool to fly over it and see what all they have done to set up an air field in the middle of the ice.  And we were lucky enough that our pilot flew a circle around the feature that gave Pegasus Air Field its name.  An airplane named “pegasus” that crashed there in bad weather back in the ’70s.  It is still very visible and kind of eerie.

We made it to Black Island and back without incident.  We were delayed 30 minutes on our return, which made for a long day, but that was all.  We were there ALL day and the work I did was less than glamorous.  I quickly realized that I was there in place of someone who knew what was going on but couldn’t make the flight today.  I think he’ll be going over next week, but I’m just lucky I had the opportunity so don’t take that as complaining.  I took a lot of pictures but most are not of anything in particular and off kilter because I was flying in a freaking helicopter!  Either way, here is a teaser picture of an excited helicopter passenger: