Extreme camping

I’m writing this at 10:45 on Thursday night, but will not post it until Friday morning. I do not have Internet access from my dorm room, which is one excuse I’m using for not keeping you up-to-date.

About 15 minutes ago, I snapped the photo above from my second-floor dorm window. It’s cloudy or things would be brighter. The sun is still “setting” – that is, dipping below the horizon – for a couple of hours each night, but it’s not getting dark. Soon, the sun will not disappear again until after I leave in mid-February.

One reason I know this is that I spent Tuesday night camping out in the snow on a nearby glacial ice shelf. All night, as I woke up regularly and spent quite a bit of time not sleeping, it seemed like there was a strong night light in the tent. And that was in spite of considerable cloud cover.

Camping out was not a choice I made, but it is required as part of a safety course for those who leave the relative safety of McMurdo for field camps and other trips. They call it Snow Craft, I think, but everyone calls it Happy Camp. The two-day camp started with a short classroom session Tuesday morning. Twenty of us campers and two instructors, bundled up in our extreme cold weather gear, threw our considerable luggage onto two vehicles specially made for this terrain, one a track vehicle and another with huge balloon tires.

After unloading our equipment and bags, we trudged through blowing snow to a hut for a lunch of cold sandwiches and further instruction. Then we walked back to the staging area and went to work setting up camp. We labored together to pitch nine tents, build a wall of snow bricks to block the wind, set up stoves to heat water and put out flags to mark locations. To make us even happier, we got to do this in what they call Condition 2 weather. Temperatures were about 10 to 13 degrees below zero and the wind chill was about -50 degrees. Several in our group were experienced highlands campers, though they said these conditions were worse than they had stayed in before.

I’ll admit it. I was miserable and asking how in the world I ever got myself in this situation. I thought about quitting. They would let me sleep in the instructors’ hut. But, thankfully, I did not. There was a definite esprit de corps that developed in our team members. Any work I did not do, someone else would have to.

All the advice passed on in the lectures paid off. Most importantly, they said, we must keep feeding the body, giving it fuel to burn to keep us warm, as well as drink plenty of water. We learned to take a snack to bed and eat in the middle of the night. I also tucked my water bottle (carried all day inside my parka) into my sleeping bag so my body heat would keep it from freezing. It worked and I had water to drink the next morning. Regularly through the night, I “jogged” in my sleeping bag, working my legs and arms to keep warm. Actually, I was warm enough through the night.

Wednesday morning was probably as cold but without the strong winds. My job was to heat water while others took down the small tents. We removed the two large tents last and got ready for the instructors to return for our gear. We still were not through, though. We hiked the approximate quarter-mile (though it seemed a lot longer) back to the hut for hot drinks and more lessons. Then we were back outside to practice putting up an HF radio, staking out the long antenna wires. We were in the middle of building an emergency camp when we were told to break it down instead. Nobody complained because we knew the shuttle was coming to pick us up.

The instructors were great at teaching us, pushing, encouraging and praising. Instructor Susan asked me as we made the walk to the shuttle one last time if I would do it again. The question was often repeated and was understood to mean, “Would you do it again even if you didn’t have to?” “No,” I told her, “once is enough.” She understood and was probably accustomed to hearing it.