Happy Camper

These clips are from our second day of Snow School (Happy Camper), where we practiced the famous bucket exercise (only we didn’t have any buckets, just hats pulled low). Normally everyone puts a bucket on their head to simulate white-out conditions then ropes together in an attempt to find a companion lost in a blizzard. In this case, I was the victim who had wandered off. I sat behind one of the snow vehicles waiting for them to find me, which they did fairly quickly–putting me on a sled and hauling me back to the A-frame building. Apparently our group made one of the best times ever in this exercise. You can see that even in the “mild” conditions we had to practice this, it is an extremely challenging task, mostly because everyone gets disoriented and sometimes frustrated, leading to more and more problems.

The McMurdo area was hit with a little weather this week, most of it blowing in the night we were out at Happy Camper, making it a burly night for us. You learn how to recognize signs of frostbite, hypothermia, and other problems, as well as how to use all the gear that is stowed on each aircraft or vehicle in case you get stranded. Basic stuff like a tent, sleeping bag, stove, and maybe some food. For our Happy Camper we drove onto the Ross Ice Shelf and dug around in the snow, using handsaws and shovels to cut out igloo-like blocks to build a wall and sleep trenches. You are not required to sleep in the trench, but a couple of us did and it wasn’t that bad. You can build them a bunch of different ways, but ours were basically like shallow graves, with our bodies covered with slabs of cut snow (it sounds and behaves just like styrofoam), and with an opening to the outside over our heads. The temperature was well below zero (not counting wind chill), but it wasn’t the cold at night that bothered me. What was hard was figuring out how to put your clothes on after a snow drift accumulated over your head overnight, spilling snow over you with every move you make in your sleeping bag. That was a design flaw on my part I think.

The other thing I want to mention quickly before I head off to the Dry Valleys later this afternoon: On my homepage, I inserted a random assortment of photos taken over the past week; at Happy Camper, around McMurdo, and from the C-17 flight. It is an automatic slideshow changing every 1-2 seconds. I’ve been shooting RAW format so forgive the low quality on some of these as they had the life compressed out of them to get them online. But at least you can get a sense of what it looks like in and around “town.” I’m going to leave this up for a two weeks, then trade them out once I build up a collection of photos from the field camps.