The sun is shining again! After a couple of rather blustery, snowy days, it is so nice to see the sun again. Although, with sun comes snowmelt which leads all the roads around McMurdo to become really muddy. Gotta love a town with nothing but dirt roads!
Heidi and the Transarctic Mountain Range
Tomorrow, Heidi, Collin, Mike, and I leave for an overnight class, affectionately called Happy Camper School. There we will learn how to build emergency shelters, what to do in a whiteout weather situation, how to use camp stoves, and a whole bunch of other very necessary and, as of right now, unknown things. I cannot post a journal entry from Happy Campers, so check out my blog in a couple days to find out more about my newly acquired survival skills.
Field Camp Gear
In preparation for Happy Camper School and for our upcoming trip to the field camp at Lake Fryxell in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the DOM team spent the morning taking inventory of and organizing all the gear Christine requested for our time in the field. Christine sent a field gear request to the Berg Field Center (BFC) in McMurdo a number of months ago and the staff at the BFC set aside all the gear Christine anticipates us needing in the field. We checked every sleeping bag, first-aid kit, backpack, sleeping mat, and even set up all five tents to make sure that everything was clean, all tears and holes patched, and that we had every item on the request list. We have a variety of tents and sleeping bags, and I could tell that everyone in the DOM team was scoping them out to see which one they wanted to live in at Lake Fryxell.
The requested field camp gear ready for inventory and sorting.
Sorting through all the field gear.
![Bottles galore!](/files/members/sarah-diers/images/bottles4everything.jpg "Hot water bottles, "P" bottles, hand-warmers and Heidi.")
Hot water bottles, "P" bottles, hand-warmers and Heidi.
How is checking out all our field gear preparing the DOM team for Happy Camper School tomorrow? Well, we are required to bring not only all our ECW gear to Happy Campers, but our sleeping kit as well. Our sleeping kit consists of a sleeping bag and flannel sleep sack, two sleeping pads, a camp pillow, a couple water bottles, and hand warmers. The supplies for our sleeping kit were all in the cage at the BFC and we had to pack them into duffel bags for use during Happy Camper.
Mike.
I need to remember to read the directions with erecting a new tent!
Once the DOM team completes Happy Camper School we are one very large step closer to getting to the main objectives of this expedition- field science and lab science tests on the relationship between Dissolved Organic Matter and bacteria located in glacial water. I am looking forward to the next couple of days, but even more so to collecting samples, and running the necessary tests to help us understand the DOM-bacteria relationship.