Above is a RADARSAT image of the area where we were working. The picture is about 300 kilometers tall, and about 350 kilometers wide. The light blue triangle was our general direction and path of travel. The yellow lines are approximately the shot lines that were surveyed, drilled, and shot. The red lines are the very approximate borders of the ice streams. Ice Stream C actually has several tributaries that feed into it. The center of the triangle was at roughly latitude 82S, longitude 125W. We went from Onset-D ("OND") to the CT1-CT2 area, then from there to the C1B area, then back to Onset-D. The whole trip took a little over a month. Each leg is between 150 and 250 kilometers long.
With the traverses between the work areas, and all of the running around we did while at each of the work areas we traveled, by Ski-Doo, over 2500 kilometers in a little over two months time. Most of our equipment was hauled behind us on sleds from one work area to another. Most of the loads on the sleds were around 700 kilograms.
Some of the equipment was flown ahead by Twin Otter flights and dropped off at the location where it was planned to set up camp for a particular work area. How far in advance the equipment was placed determined how much digging we had to do to get it out of the drifted snow. The cache above had been in place for only about a week.
Each snowmobile had saddle bag baskets for carrying two 20 liter containers of fuel. Those, and a full gas tank in the morning, would usually last the whole day unless we decided to keep going a little further. Depending on the distances between work areas we would also carry several 55 gallon drums of fuel with us. On a couple of the longer legs we had drums of fuel cached for us by Twin Otter flights. We found those by using GPS coordinates.
Fortunately we had very few problems with our Ski-Doos, and no problems that made us have to do something like leave one, and, of course, someone behind. Just kidding.
Lunch time on the road was usually just tea, soup, and some crackers or a sandwich.
At the end of the day, if we were not at our final destination, we would unpack the tents and set up a quick camp for the night. Movement between the three major work areas all required at least one overnight stop.
2018-03-05