How We Entertain Ourselves at Thirty Below

Here are two quick videos showing how we entertain ourselves at thirty below. Obviously when it comes to fun in the cold this is only the tip of the iceberg. At some point you’ve heard of someone in a cold place throwing a bucket of water out of a second story window and hearing it shatter when it hits the ground as ice. The video above was taken out in front of the Lake Hoare Camp hut. When you throw hot water into the cold air it changes state instantly, to either ice or vapor–the ice falls to the ground in little crystals and the vapor floats away–looking a lot like fireworks. On my homepage is a running slideshow of us doing this at Fryxell during a sunrise.

This video was taken in the Wright Valley when Cliff, Matt and I were taking a break from hiking. Being a couple days into our weekend, Matt surprised us both by offering us a slice of pizza from inside his jacket. Even though his body heat couldn’t warm the pizza past the hardness of a rock, it was still nice to have something besides dehydrated food or chocolate bars to eat. Later in the weekend we experienced the coldest temperatures of the season, and the water we threw into the air from the hut at Bull Pass didn’t hit the ground, it all vaporized.