Two in the morning is not a good hour to travel, but that was the departure time for Pascal and I from San Jose, California. I had driven to his home just after five that morning to fly out of the local airport. Other team members, six others in total, would fly from Boston, San Diego and Washington state. We wouldn’t meet until we met in Ottawa.
Three of our team members, Jason Soo Hoo, Rigel Cappello and John Barrett, all from the Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, would fly out of Boston. Our security officer, Sawan Dalal, flew in from San Diego where he recently completed his medical degree. Gabriel Dubé, the recipient of this year’s Haughton-Mars Project Apollo grant (which will help him continue research at the HMP), would drive to Ottawa Airport from his home near Montréal, and finally John Schutt, Pascal’s partner arriving at the Arctic Base Command from his home in Blaine, Washington.
Each group would have a slightly different flight schedule, and all were complex. For Pascal and I, the 22-hour travel day meant flying first to Denver, then arriving in Toronto, where we would go through Canada’s Immigration Service, and finally on to Ottawa to join everyone else. From there we would travel via several short flights on increasingly smaller aircraft to Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Arctic Bay and finally to the small coastal port of Resolute Bay, a far northern community and Canadian outpost of fewer than 300 residents. Resolute Bay is both home to the Inuit people of the high Arctic and a strategically important lookout point for the Northwest Passage.
Related: A Month on ‘Mars’: Preparing to Visit the Red Planet…on Earth
In Resolute we met up with the small air carrier Kenn Borek Limited who would take us to Devon the next day. Although COVID restrictions have been alive and well for Canadian airlines and masking has prevailed everywhere, few precautions have been evident at the border as the virus has spread relatively little. We checked into a border hotel for the night – more of a dormitory really – and the next morning, as we dallyed over breakfast, we were informed that the first group to fly on to Devon – five of us – were on the tarmac should be about an hour. We returned to our rooms and hastily repacked to make the flight.
A short time later we flew in a twin-propeller Twin Otter aircraft over the waterway bordering Resolute Bay. Broken pack-ice adorned the waves below; hauntingly beautiful, but also a reminder that if the plane crashed for some reason, survival would likely be marked in minutes. Then we crossed the shoreline of Devon Island and the brilliant blues and whites of the arctic waters were replaced by miles of drab plains of drab rock. Spectacular geological features were visible below, changing like a stone kaleidoscope as we continued at low altitude.
About 20 minutes later the plane turned to give us a view of the base of the Haughton Mars project, six tent-like buildings extending from an octagonal hard structure, with a large greenhouse to the north. A Humvee donated to the project by AM General provided a bright yellow splash of color. Everything appeared to be in generally good condition despite a three-year hiatus due to the pandemic, with just one outbuilding that was almost ruined – but repairable – due to the extreme weather there.
After a bumpy ride on the Otter’s balloon tires over the gravel runway, the plane came to a halt and we got out. As we unloaded our luggage and a small mountain of supplies, we enjoyed the view. As Pascal had told me in many late-night conversations, the site is truly a dead ringer for Mars — a barren, desolate, reddish expanse of rock and earth that stretches as far as you can see in any direction. If a person could stand on Mars without a pressure suit and breathe the air, this would be it. While barren and somewhat forbidding, it is absolutely spectacular in its appearance, and it was one of the few times that such a view really struck me took my breath away.
As the plane proceeded to its next destination, to return shortly with the rest of our crew, we made our way to base to unpack and prepare for our stay. Many hours of cleaning, repairing and sanitizing the grounds lie ahead – mold and mildew are a huge problem in this environment and it would take generous doses of Lysol and plenty of elbow grease to make our home livable for the next three weeks. But we had arrived and our summer season had begun.
We were finally on Mars on Earth and a month of adventure lay ahead of us.
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