Day 36 - June 10 2006

Although we got up early, our flight did not leave until 11 am. The 109th Air National Guard was supporting another flight to the US field camp at Summit in central Greenland, where a new ice drill is being tested, and that flight had priority over ours. Once we did get airborne, the flight home was uneventful. After we crossed the Davis Strait, separating Greenland and Canada, the white, frozen ice of the north gradually gave way to green fields and forests. We landed in Scotia at 3 pm, went through Customs and took a taxi to the Albany airport in time to catch our previously scheduled flight at 5:20 pm. We were back home in Lawrence just after 12 midnight.


Preparing to board the 109th New York Air National Guard C-130 for the trip from Kangerlussuaq back to Schenectady, New York.

So now our adventures have become a memory. Despite problems and setbacks, we were able to complete the radar mapping we had set as our goal. Of course the Danish ice drilling continues as I write and is not scheduled to be completed until around the first of July. (For updates on their progress, I remind everyone to visit the Danes' University of Copenhagen Flade Isblink website at http://icecores.blogspot.com/.)


Somewhere over Newfoundland or Laborador, the snow and ice gradually give way to fields and forests.

Dennis and I will miss JP, Simon, Andreas, Steffan, Lars, Sverrir and Bruce. They are a fantastic group of people and this has been an incredibly rich and rewarding experience. I can not say that we will particularly miss our camp on Flade Isblink or the hardships we endured there, but we will very much miss the camaraderie that was ours as we crammed together in a 12' x 20' weatherport for meals, for shelter from the cold, for planning our work for the next day, and for general group activities and socializing over nearly 4 weeks. I will also miss how we depended on one another and pulled together under adverse conditions to do the job that took us there in the first place. It was a special time in our lives and we all know it.