On my last night at Taylor Dome, the Herc came in rather late in the evening and it took us until almost midnight to actually leave for Mactown after some failed cargo loading attempts.

The pictures kind of lay out the sequence of events over a 3 hour time period. To start, it was a pretty foggy and windy night, making for a nearly aborted landing, but they ended up coming down after about 5 passes. The C-130s can't stop their engines while at deep field camps as a safety precaution, so as the plane makes its taxi, it drops cargo out the back. Once it stopped, Drew proceeded to hop into the dozer-CAT and begin work on the snow ramp, which was necessary for loading the unusually large pollated sleds. There were about 15 of us all out there shoveling like the dickens for a good 30 minutes while the engines covered us in diesel fumes and windburned any exposed skin.

Our fist attempt was unsuccessful as the flight techs were worried about the ramp collapsing and causing the sled to damage the aircraft since we only had a few inches to work with on each side. As shown in the fifth photo, the two CATs were trying to pull the sled over as it slid off the ramp.

After aborting that attempt, we doubled the length and width of the snow platform and tried again; however, there was trouble once more. Additionally, the pilots were running low on fuel, so when it was all said and done, they only loaded up a small pallet of ice cores and just flew Paul and I home... oops.

Apparently, they went back later that night and were able to load the pallet. I bet that was a late night for the ITASE folks.

~G