 A CH-47 crew from the California Army National Guard's Company B, 1st Battalion 126th Aviation Regiment out of Stockton, California, provided the United States Marine's airlift to a remote training site at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, located near Pickle Meadows, California. We got an AMR Air Mission request from the Marine Corps to support their Mountain Warfare Training Center. They needed help doing octio-huddles and tactical insertions, that sort of thing. Part of the Mountain Warfare Training Center's mission is to teach the Marines, or whoever, it's not unique to them, how to fight in a mountainous snowy environment. So once we did our brief, the Marines practiced cold loading, so that is loading with the engines off, with all of their equipment, their skis, their sleds, all of their cold leather gear, all of their stuff, packed them all into the aircraft, and then all of them got off of the aircraft as quickly as possible, just kind of get that muscle memory. And once they were cold load complete, they felt like they had a handle on that, then we started the helicopter up, they hot-loaded. We lifted the first group up to an LZ, that was at about 9,000 feet above sea level, so lifting, it was about 4,800 pounds worth of people and stuff up to the LZ. We did the insertion in the snow, they jumped off and went into what's called an occhio huddle, so they put all their gear in the middle and all the guys and gals jumped on top of the gear to hold it down and to protect themselves from the rotor wash. They did all this about 15 feet from the aircraft, so they were still underneath the rotor disc. We took off, blasted with the rotor wash, and then went and got the next group. And then did the same thing with the next group, the first group set up in occhio huddles like they had been. We landed right next to them, again with them under the rotor disc. Then the first group got off, second group got back on so that they could practice another iteration in the traffic pattern there, another tactical insertion, more occhio huddles, and we just continued that cycle for three groups. So each one of the three groups got a tactical insertion, an occhio huddle as we departed, and an occhio huddle as we landed, and a traffic pattern in the middle. The air crew also gained valuable experience that applies to one of their critical state missions, search and rescue. There's a couple of things that you have to consider landing in snow, particularly when you're landing in snow with a group of 20 people underneath your rotor disc, right? So we have to come in to a specific location. I think by the last time we landed there, you could see all the wheel marks, and we hadn't moved more than four feet from the first point that we landed at. We were all, we were within a four foot circle every single time, and that was really based on what the occhio huddles were. Plus it's good to get the practice landing in deep snow. One of our core missions here is search and rescue above 10,000 feet. None of the smaller helicopters can really get up there. At that altitude, we're likely going to run into hard snowpack, different types of LZs that we're not used to training down here in the valley. So it gives us that skill set to go up high, have the reduced performance, have the snow to deal with, potentially have wide out conditions into an LZ we've never seen before. Working with people we don't typically work with, and all of that experience is going to help us when it comes time to pull somebody off of one of the mountains in Northern California. So getting all of that experience in now when no one's life is on the line would definitely help us when somebody is depending on us to survive.