The Skiers
are gone, now we are doing some more equipment loading, shown in this photo.
North Pole
Expedition 2002.
The
Skiers have left for the North Pole and now we are loading our food into
the cabin at Sredney Island. This photo shows part of the assembly line as
we passed boxes over the snow drift.
I'm not sure why we did it this way
but we flew the Skiers to the Sredney Island in the An-12 then followed
them in the An-26. When we got to Sredney, we had to take all of
our equipment off of our airplane and load the skiers equipment into the
airplane so they can go to the North Pole first. The whole point
was if our part of the expedition would have gone to the Sredney in the
An-12, which is too big to land on the pole, and the skiers would have
taken the An-26, we wouldn't have to had to do all of this loading
and unloading. The picture above shows us loading the
equipment from the truck to the cabin on Sredney. We left most of
our equipment outside but the food stuff that was in cans had to be kept
out of the cold to prevent freezing and cracking of the cans.
After everyone was in the cabin, I walked
outside and noticed that the islands dogs were marking their spot on my
bag. Later, I noticed another dog marking his spot on the bags.
It figures, here we are in Russian territory and they marked the American
bags.