Earlier I mentioned that we had to redo the GPS survey. Well the first time we did our lowest three poles (set in a triangle), Johnny and I went down to the northwest pole of the triangle. Getting there from the previous survey point on quad #2 wasn't too bad, but then getting over to the easternmost pole of the triangle, we had to drive back up glacier more than a kilometer in order to find a place where we could cross a particularly large stream. Where we decided not to cross, the stream was about a meter wide, at least 40 cm deep, and flowing pretty fast. There was a thin crust of ice on the surface, but certainly nothing strong enough to hold a snowmobile up. Eventually we found a place to cross where it wasn't too wide. We punched through the crust, but only dropped a couple centimeters.

A few days later when we were redoing the GPS survey, Jeff and Sarah came from easternmost pole up to the northwest pole to visit Johnny and I and trade GPSes. Jeff was driving and Sarah was riding the sled. When Jeff came to the stream, he wisely asked Sarah to get off the sled and then proceeded to drive into the stream. You can see the result above. Johnny and I were unaware of what happened until Jeff radioed us for help. The back half of the tread was underwater and there wasn't enough traction on the front half of the tread to pull them out on the 40 degree grade where they wound up. When Johnny and I showed up, I disconnected our sled from our snowmobile and backed up to Jeff's. We hooked them together with a piece of webbing. The webbing was pretty short so my snowmobile was on an incline too. The sled hitch on Jeff's snowmobile was deep underwater so we left it attached - an extra 250 pounds to drag. Johnny climbed on the back end of my snowmobile to help add traction, Jeff climbed on his to drive it once it was out a ways and Sarah watched from a safe distance on the far bank. We started sliding as soon as we started pulling. We just didn't have enough traction. Then we got out a cargo strap and put it between the webbing and my snowmobile so that I could be up on flat ice when pulling. Johnny and Sarah climbed on the back for traction and Jeff stayed on the drowning snowmobile again. After a few seconds of pulling, it began to budge and then finally began to make progress out of the hole. Thankfully we were able to avoid calling MacOps with the message "Here are the coordinates of our snowmobile. Please ferry it back to us at: Project S-161, Taylor Glacier, McMurdo Station, PSC 469 Box 800, APO AP 96599-1035." With that bit of excitement over and done with, we proceeded to continue the survey.