Berg

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Mountain Zone, it's Wally checking in with you from the Embree Glacier, afternoon of the 20th. Just came back from my afternoon exploration, now I'm visiting old, familiar spots. Beautiful afternoon, very clear out here, just a few little remnant clouds on the ridge tops, but boy is it cold. Today as I was ski touring, I found myself all bundled up — hood up. A little bit of wind out of the south, which is good because that's what blows off all that weather that they're still reporting to us from Patriot Hills and I guess Vinson, as well. We don't see much of it out here; it is quite clear and I just had a beautiful ski in the col.

One project I worked on out here, that I haven't really described yet, is these temperature sensors that we deploy in a rock. These were developed by Chris McKay at NASA and this little data logger that he calls a 'hobo data logger,' it's very different from these weather probes that MIT has done for us, in that no data is uploaded. The temperature sensor goes under the rock surface and the data is logged over the years...over the year...over the time that it's left. We'll be back to the Embree Glacier, so I left one of these up here, in a suitable spot — a rock buttress that had become a landmark to me.

McKay, as well as Richard Hoover, who we'll see as soon when we get back to Vinson Base, those guys at NASA have been doing a lot of work with life forms in extreme temperatures. Hoover, in particular, was showing me these little pictures he has of what he calls "his babies," these microorganisms that he grows in the lab in Huntsville, in amazingly wide temperature extremes. These [Unintelligible] interested in extreme places around the world; we've done this for him in Everest, as well, in logging the temperature profile of rock surface in a remote area like this. I plan to put some of these out for him around Patriot Hills, as well; it's an area where they can easily be retrieved by any number of people...[transmission fails].

— Wally Berg, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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