We've been here at Lake Joyce for a week now! Time sure flies. I'd love to share some photos and a bit about our living conditions here in camp.
Our Endurance tent – for cooking and hanging out.
Our first priority was to get our "endurance"-style tent set up. This is our communal tent where we cook, eat, and hang out. Its about 21 feet by 8 feet, and has many, many guy lines anchoring it down. The wind here gets really fierce, and the other night there was a particularly powerful windstorm. We were in the endurance tent when it happened and we could hear gravel pelting the outside of the tent. Inside the tent is crowded with stuff. At one end is a Coleman two burner stove on a table with a small heater underneath, and a second table for prepping our food. The other end has a camp chair for each of us and boxes of food stashed where ever they will fit. We also have a station of buckets for different kinds of wastes, which must be separated before they can be sent back to McMurdo. Outside the tent, we have a white box for storage (“the freezer”), some propane tanks for the stove and heater, and also a portable solar installation for recharging radios and computers. We call this tent "upstairs" as compared to the tent down on the ice where we have a lab set up ("downstairs").
Inside the endurance tent.
Also in our camp is a tent for each of us. These are very sturdy North Face four season tents. They've also been anchored down very well. Even so, Megan's tent was nearly airborne the other night during the windstorm. While in mine that night, I could feel the wind getting under the tent and rocking me in my sleeping bag. Our tents aren't heated but I've been staying warm. I have a ridiculous amount of stuff on me at night that includes a fleece liner sleeping bag and two regular sleeping bags rated to -40°F, and Big Red coat on top of that. You'd never find me in there!
Some of our personal tents.
The last tent to be set up is our Scott tent. A Scott tent is a style of tent shaped like a pyramid and named after Antarctic explorer Robert Scott. Our Scott tent is the toilet tent. Our toilet is a box, with toilet seat on it and a bucket inside (classy, right?). Before getting the Scott tent up, the box was just sitting behind a big rock and while it did have a spectacular view, everyone agrees that the tent was a welcome addition. The big drums on the side of the Scott tent are for liquid wastes that must be flown by helicopter back to McMurdo Station.
Our Scott tent – the toilet tent!
We've had a long and successful day of drilling in the ice. It's nearly dinner time and my turn to cook, so I'm going to go make some dijon chicken with rice now. Yummy!
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