January 17, 2005 Delayed… again
“As I walked along
the supposed Golden Path,
I was trembling with fear – o the lines and wizards yet to come…
And I see in the distance, silver mountains rising high in the clouds
And a voice from above did whisper
A shining answer from the womb…”
- The Flaming Lips
Today the otter again cancelled for tomorrow… Ahhh…. Yet again, a beautiful day, no transport to our only remaining work site! The irony of it all…
So I went for another run today – just another run, yet one where I was given the privilege of witnessing a landscape largely untrodden by humans, and only seen by a handful of others. Truly I was running along the supposed Golden Path, where all I could see were Ice Sheets and Mountains rising high in the clouds… I could not even see our camp, as the distance I had run across the ice obscured it to a tiny dot amongst the sastrugi. The only visible human influence in my entire view, were the ski-doo tracks we had made.
After my run I read a bit, and then took a nap (the two most popular past-times amongst our crew). I was reading about Amundsen’s depot journeys before his final trip to the south pole, and my dreams were infused with visions of the “Great Ross Ice Barrier” and running sled dogs.
When I awoke, I overheard that the otters were coming to jettison the retro and take Sujoy out to prepare for his classes at Harvard University. After steak night the otter did arrive, and Miles (the pilot) promised to come back the next morning – therefore Sujoy stayed for his last night in the Ohio Range. We toasted to his last night over some Glenlivet, and after some great conversation about all the applications of cosmogenic nuclides, it was off to bed.