Me and Loralee

As requested, pictures of me and lovely Loralee, my preferred mode of transport here.

Happy Camper

Last week I got to go to Happy Camper School, a basic overnight cold weather survival class and it was AWESOME! Our group consisted 11 campers, most of us fingees. What a great group of people -- within about 10 minutes we had come up with nicknames for everyone. (Mine was Paradise, because I lived in the tropics.)
We did and learned so much. After about an hour of lecture time, we drove out to our campsite, an hour from McMurdo. At the instructor's hut, we learned some basic stuff like how to light a Whisperlite stove, got our gear and then walked to camp. There, we built a snow wall, set up a Scott tent (the only truly Antarctic shelter) and some regular tents, and made a Quinzhee: an igloo-like snow hut, made by shoveling lots and lots of snow onto a pile of duffel bags (our sleeping gear -- how's that for incentive to dig?), and then digging a tunnel into it to retrieve the bags, leaving a snow cave to sleep in.
Which I did! Amazingly enough, my roommate (Quinzheemate?) and I stayed relatively warm all night. Apparently the key to staying warm is to constantly eat and drink, which we did. And of course dress appropriately and exercise.
We also learned how to prevent and treat hypothermia and frostnip, operate a ham radio (we called the South Pole!), perform a search and rescue in a simulated white-out (wearing buckets on our heads), and all kinds of nifty stuff. We worked hard but had so much fun. Definitely a highlight of my time here.

The Happy Campers

Happy Campers: Paradise, Gingle Ho, The Satiator, Insatiable, Skull & Bones, Madge the Manicurist, Furnace, Tool Man, Sethamphetamine, Farmer Girl aka the Tick, and Frijolita!

Happy Camper - Home Sweet Home & Bucketheads

Carrying gear to campsite, quinzhee, sweet quinzhee, and the whiteout search & rescue drill.

Gettin' Schooled on Sea Ice

The other day I got sent to Sea Ice School, which is considered a morale trip, but also required for doing any kind of "boondoggle" on the sea ice. This was actually probably one of the last trips like this out on the sea ice, as it has become very active (meaning it's cracking and thinning -- good old summer thaw). After an hour in the classroom, we 8 students and one instructor piled into a Haglin (vehicle especially designed for traveling on ice) and drove north, towards Cape Evans and the Erebus Ice Tongue. We stopped at a couple of spots , looked and seals, skuas, and the cracks and pressure ridges in the ice. As we headed north, our instructor saw signs of flooding, so we stopped to measure the depth of the snow and ice by shoveling snow until we hit ice, then drilling holes into the ice until we hit sea water. We determined that the ice is about 6.5 feet thick, a definite change from its usual thickness of 9 feet. The weather that day was warmish, but incredibly windy -- we drove back in Condition 2.

Trip to Nowhere

On Sunday I went on a Recreation Dept. sponsored "Trip to Nowhere." Basically they took us out on Deltas (huge people moving on ice machines!) as far as we could safely go on the sea ice to see what we could see. The sea ice is being weird this year -- a huge iceberg that for the past five years has caused the sound to freeze solid, has moved, and that is causing these crazy pressure ridges on the ice, which look really cool. But what this also means is that the sea ice is fairly unstable and we can't go to places like Cape Evans or Cape Royds, where we would normally go to see other huts (like Shackleton's) or penguins. So we just went out of town a ways and were lucky enough to see some sleeping Weddell seals (the dark blobs in the background -- some scientists came by on showmobiles to check on them) and just be out on the ice on an incredibly beautiful Sunday. +30 degrees and no wind!