After many days of delays, we finally made it out on Nov. 12th! The flight from Christchurch to McMurdo is just about 5 hours on the C17. The highlight of the trip was when we started flying in over the frozen sea ice and the Air Force crew let us come up to the cockpit one at a time to look out over the frozen continent. We landed at Phoenix airfield, a packed runway plowed into the snow on the frozen sea ice around McMurdo. We walked off the plane onto the snow into an enormous open field. Just foggy enough that you couldn’t see anything in the distance except white in all directions. Took a bunch of pictures, and then they hustled us over to a big “bus” (an enormous tractor pulling a big bus), and took us over to the base. We had a brief orientation where they gave us some maps, useful information, and training schedules for the next day or so. They also gave us our keys to our rooms.
Nathan P. Lourie 