This quote comes from Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his opening sentence of the Introduction to The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry, as he was called, was one of the surviving support members of the fated Scott expedition to the South Pole.
Granted, I only spent one night in the cold, but it gave me a far greater appreciation for what the many (both historic and recent) polar expeditions have been up against. It is so hard to do anything with heavy gloves on and it is amazing how cold you can get even with the ECW gear on. We were all dancing or walking or jogging to stay warm. We also ate a lot of food so we would be burning calories to provide more warmth.
Getting out of our relatively warm bags and putting on cold boots was not fun. The smartest among us had put their clean socks for the next day into their sleeping bags with them so they were warmer when they put them on. We all went into the instructors' hut to share our experiences with the instructors and each other. Some folks didn't get much sleep and were pretty cold and some of us (including myself) fared better
The next step was learning to use the radios, both VHF (very high frequency) hand-held radios, and the larger HF (high frequency) radios that we had to set up antennas outside with at appropriate lengths for the channels we were trying to reach.
Sascha makes a radio call to MacOps from Happy Camp
Then we had an accident scenario. We pretended our vehicle was damaged and all we could rescue was one survival kit. Each survival kit has a tent, two sleeping bags, two wimpy shovels, two crummy saws for making ice blocks and a stove that most likely doesn't work. Then one of our team members got hypothermia that we had to treat. It really showed us how we had to work as a team and put our expertise in the best places to get everything done.
We debriefed the accident scenario and then had a white-out! The fun never ends at Happy Camp. To imitate a white-out we put buckets on our heads and then had to get on a rope attached to the Instructors' hut and search for our missing teammate. Good thing we found him before he died of exposure.
Bucketheads to the rescue!
Photo by Marcus Kolb
It was finally time to leave Happy Camp. The snowmobiles still were not working so we sledged our gear out to the waiting Delta where "Shuttle Bill" took us back to MacTown.
