Happy Camper
Sandwiched between Christmas and New Year’s I managed to have five days off in a row due in part to two days spent at Happy Camper. Happy Camper is another name for Snow Survival School. Survival? It was the closest thing to a vacation I’ve had here yet.
School takes place out on the sea ice just a few miles from base. Twenty of us piled into haglunds and piston bullies arriving at Snow Mound City where our Field Safety Training Program instructors, Trevor and CeCe, spent the next 24 hours teaching us how to survive this harsh continent if we happen to find ourselves stranded outdoors with a multitude of shovels, saws, camp stoves, dehydrated food, radios and tents. Unlikely. The idea is that if we do get stranded we would of course have a survival bag with us that contains the necessary items to… survive. All of the tracked vehicles carry survival bags. However, none of our shuttle vehicles do. Nor do any of us carry one when we head out to recreate. Really this training applies more to the grantees that are headed out in the field, but for us town folks, it’s a treasured boondoggle.
We began by learning how to recognize and avoid hypothermia and frostbite. Unfortunately I am all too familiar with both. We practiced lighting camp stoves, cutting ice blocks to build snow walls, setting up scott tents as well as standard mountaineering tents, using high frequency (HF) & very high frequency (VHF) radios, and my favorite of all, building a quinzee. A quinzee is a snow shelter akin to an igloo. We constructed it by piling 10 of our survival bags on the ground and then shoveling snow a couple feet thick all around them and then waiting a few hours before digging an entrance into the shelter and a back door to excavate the bags. I would have never believed the snow would hold, but much to my surprise and delight, it did. I was one of four lucky individuals who spent the night inside the quinzee. It was honestly the best night of sleep I have had here yet.
It was more or less a car camping experience on the Antarctic sea ice. I’m not sure that I feel better prepared to survive a night out in the elements, but afterwards I felt better prepared to appreciate the beauty of this place and the unique opportunity I have to be here once again. With so little opportunity to actually leave base and explore Antarctica as all of us here dreamt of doing before arriving, it is easy to become a bit disenchanted with the whole experience. But as I sat alone atop a snow wall gazing out at the light changing across the Antarctic night sky, I was reminded how many folks would give just about anything to be here, including myself six months ago.
Me & Cindy en route to Snow Mound City
The beginning of the quinzee
Packing the snow of the quinzee
Johannes & Jeff cutting blocks of snow for the snow wall
Snow wall and Scott tent
Buckethead training… this was to simulate what it would be like in Condition 1 weather… we had to find a lost teammate
Talk around camp
Me & Cindy inside the quinzee
Jeff lighting the Menorah before bedtime
see more of my photos at: http://ej.smugmug.com
Tags: Travel
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