Beaver Lake, Tuesday, 8th January 2002
The weather was again perfect and even quite still today, and I adorned a pair of shorts to celebrate the occasion. Tom and I left again for the GPS site in superb conditions, covering the 4km in less than an hour. Although the GPS site was mostly functioning, there seemed some residual problem that the system would not boot up the batch process to download and send data at the scheculed time. I faffled around for some time to sort things out and in the end decided to give the system 24hrs to see what it does. Besides two choppers were soon to depart from Davis and we would need to finalise our Dalton Corner and TS site stuff. The choppers arrived at 1900hrs with Bill Baxter, the lanky Lancastrian who is the elderly (but not in mind or fitness) FTO from Davis, Al "Rookie" the comms man, a consumate professional and Peter the heli-engineer. They brought with them loads of goodies from Davis. Shortly afterwards pandemonium broke loose after Leigh, the fatigued pilot ended up bringing all the Terra Savoje teams in by chopper over a few late evening runs. All of a sudden there were 15 people at Beaver Lake, much hugging, groping, back-slapping and the odd dry root as everybody was in a high state of exuberance, being reunited once again. Bill was in full action frying delicious snags butties for all of us. I would hate to be a Jew or an Arab right now. Beer, well VB anyway was flowing freely and Gerard was straight into action firing up the dead quad, that all hope was given up for ! Crashed about 4 am, after all the final preps were done for DC. All the apples were full of bodies, and even two pyramid tents had to be erected to cope with the population explosion. The surveyor's apple now had Bill, Gerard lying in the middle and Inmarsat M at last to fire a few emails through the north facing porthole.
Beaver Lake (BVLK) Technical Inspection
Beaver Lake, Base Camp S 70°48'11" E 68°10'46"
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