Happy!
Most of you who are following me are in school - and I just spent two days in school too! The difference was that at my school the temperature wa F and I spent the night in the school room. I should also add that my class met on the ocean a mile or so from land - but we drove there in a funny kind of a bus. It's all a part of Happy Camper School!
In my last journal entry I wrote about the incredible beauty of Antarctica. It IS beautiful, but it's also an extremely hostile place, where weather can change in a matter of minutes and the wind can go from 0 to 100+ miles an hour in less time than you have to tie down your tent. Happy Camper School is the place you go to learn how to survive in this wild and wonderful place. Everyone who will be working outside of the main research station (town) goes to this school.
Let's compare the schools most of you are familiar with to the one I just went to:
- Normal schools have ceilings and walls - Happy Camper School doesn't
- Normal schools have heating and cooling - Happy Camper School is the same temperature as the outdoors.
- Normal schools have desks to sit at - At Happy Camper School you stand up or bring your own seat to sit on.
- Normal schools have tests - you don't know when or if you will ever be tested on what you learned at Happy Camper School.
In case you haven’t figured it out, Happy Camper School is survival training and it’s done outdoors in the same places you might be when you are faced with a sudden change in weather. To give us an idea of what could happen, our instructors showed us a brief video of a field camp that experienced winds that probably reached 150 miles per hour in 2007. The winds picked up a snowmobile and three drums of fuel and lifted them through the air for over . Luckily everyone survived the storm.
A School Day in Antarctica
We started with quick orientation in an indoor classroom, given by our instructors Ben and Alesdair. From there we put on our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear and loaded into our school bus, a Delta. This is a special rough terrain vehicle that’s outfitted with enclosed seating. It can get around on the roads in town, but it’s also able to travel over ice and less well maintained areas. After a 20 minute ride out onto the McMurdo Sound sea ice, we arrived at our camp.
Taking the school bus.
We got some more instruction and our group of 17 happy campers started putting up tents, building a snow-block wall to cut the wind, and prepared a kitchen area that gave the cooks some protection from wind. Everyone pitched in to help get the work done because even though the weather was absolutely perfect, it could have turned bad very quickly and you want to have everything in place to survive the worst-case scenario if it should happen.
Our field camp. Note the snow block wall to block the wind. The tall tent in the background is a Scott Tent - the same design used in Scott's 1912 expedition to the South Pole.
Our instructors watched us for a while, then went away to a nearby area and left us alone to finish camp, prepare dinner, and generally settle in as a group. It was a lot of fun! Like I said, the weather was perfect – very little wind, temperatud , no clouds – I’ve camped in much worse conditions in North Carolina! The down side of this great weather was that we didn’t get a good feel for just how bad it could be.
The best way to see what we did is to look at the pictures. Many of our group constructed snow shelters – trenches in the snow that give protection from the weather - , and some stayed in the tents we had set up. I elected to stay in one of the tents so I could walk around camp and photograph the activity rather than digging a hole. One thing to remember is that we have 24 hours of daylight. When I finally got into my sleeping bag at 10:30 that night, it was just as bright out as it had been at 8:00 that morning. It makes sleeping more challenging, but you learn how to work around it.
Eating dinner on the ice. Our kitchen is on the right edge of the photo.
Enjoy the pictures of our camp – more is coming soon.
The view from my tent door. Mount Erebus, the southern-most active volcano in the world. Note the steam coming from the top. The mountain is about 23 miles away and has an elevation over 13,000 feet.