| Happy Campers: Kinsey |
[Nov. 9th, 2006|08:00 pm] |
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I woke up at Station 2 on Tuesday morning feeling exhausted. We had been running flights all day until about 3am, 17 total (including one C-17 standby which lasted about 3 hours). With only four hours of sleep, I was not looking forward to the next 36 hours. I was scheduled to attend what is affectionately known as "Happy Campers," or Snow School.
Snow School is designed to train us how to survive in the middle of nowhere, should the situation occur. We get dressed in all of our Extreme Cold Weather gear and go to a briefing and training session provided by the station's Field Safety Training Program folks. At the conclusion of the briefing we loaded our personal gear, along with tents and other equipment, into a Piston Bully (a vehicle on tracks, about the size of a Volkswagen van), and we piled into a Delta. Deltas are large wheeled vehicles designed to muscle their way through snow drifts on the roads. Roads in town are kept clear, however, the further out of town you get, the messier the roads may be. There were about 20 of us all together, not including the two instructors. Of those 20, there were 2 A-Shift lieutenants, a fire dispatcher, and 1 A-Shift and 2 B-Shift firefighters along with me. The 14 others were made up of various townies and scientists. Most of the people in the class were scheduled to deploy to field camps, satellite research stations with their base operations in McMurdo. For all of us, this class was a necessity. Should there ever be a helicopter crash, an incident at a field camp, plane crash, or any other god-awful emergency away from town, only those who take this survival course are allowed to go. After all, we are of no use to respond if we can’t take care of ourselves if the weather turns bad or if something unexpected happens. We reached the path to the camp site after a 30 minute ride onto the ice shelf. About 5 miles behind us was Scott Base, the New Zealand research station, which is a five minute drive from McMurdo. In front of us was Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s “semper fi.” Anywhere with a clear horizon is within site of the aged volcano. To our left was Castle Rock, a huge boulder which sits atop the peninsula of Ross Island. It was a beautiful day. Maybe as warm as 24 degrees? I never found out for sure. There was hardly a breath of wind, and the sky was as clear as I’ve seen it down here. All in all, we literally could not have had a better day for this training. Observing my surroundings, I wasn’t dreading this as much as I had been.
Observation Hill, with Scott Base at the left of its feet.
Castle Rock (on top of the hill), Mt. Erebus in the distance.
After getting off the Delta, we had to walk a mile or two to the camp site. We packed all our gear into a snow mobile that tagged along with us, and started our trek. Close to a half hour later we reached the grounds. In the area before us were the remains of previous camps. Scattered about like ancient ruins, old snow shelters and walls were decaying from the wind; corners smoothed off, fortifications made of snow blocks frozen during mid-fall. We unloaded our supplies and personal gear from the snow mobile and started the day’s activities.
Our first goal was to unpack the equipment we were going to use for building our structures. We had brought several tents with us, so those were unpacked as well. Our next task at hand was to build a Quincy Hut. The huts are used as shelters, and involve making a big pile of snow and digging out the center. The easiest was for this to be accomplished was to pile all of our gear bags in a tight group, cover them, and bury them in snow. After doing this, we would only need to dig an entrance way to them, and pull them out one by one after the snow settled. This would allow for the hut’s center to make itself.
A completed Quincy Hut. After 45 minutes of shoveling and packing the snow, we had a decent sized hut completed. Next on the agenda would be setting up tents and building a snow wall for protection from the inevitable winds. With the snow as dry as it is down here, it is pretty easy for us to build walls. Rather than simply pile snow on top of itself, we were actually able to use saws to cut entire 2 foot cubic blocks of snow. These blocks of snow were strong enough to stand on top of, but light enough to pick up and build like toy blocks.
Building the wall.
Snow block quarry
The finished product.
After we got rolling, the instructors said their farewells and left us alone. They would spend the night up the road in a heated building, far enough away for us to be self-sustaining, but close enough to assist in the event of an emergency. It probably took about 5 hours total to build the entire camp, but now that everyone has done it, should we have needed to build it in an emergency, we could probably knock it out in an hour or two. For as large as it was, I consider that to be a pretty good accomplishment. But, should conditions deteriorate faster than expected, in 30 minutes we could have enough built to survive, at least for a while. In any case… The rest of the night was ours. We boiled water using little camping stoves, and used that water to make our dinners; dehydrated meals of different items and flavors. I got lucky and got my hands on a chicken/pasta/vegetable thing. Others weren’t so lucky, and it was some mushroom mush for them. It wasn’t a bad meal. The pasta wasn’t hydrating for some reason, so in any given bite I’d have good tasting chicken chucks and hard, crunchy pasta bits. I could have been worse.
 Around 8 o’clock I went off on a hike with a small group of townies. We didn’t really have a destination; we just wanted to check out the view from down the road. We decided to walk to a trail which led up the several hundred foot hill to Castle Rock. About a mile away, I estimated. It took us about an hour or so to walk there. It probably ended up being close to 3 miles. It occurred to me how hard it was to tell distance. You could walk for miles, and objects that started out far away didn’t move an inch. The vastness of where you were engulfed you.
Chao, Galena, and I going on a hike.
We got back to camp a little after 10, and I decided it was probably a good time to try and sleep. I had claimed a Quincy Hut about 50 yards from our camp. This Quincy was used by another group a few weeks ago, and took a little bit of work before I could occupy it. The wind had chiseled away at it, creating some holes. I figured that I could cover them up a bit, and it would be good enough to inhabit for the night. Getting set up inside was a battle in itself. The interior was big enough for a hobbit to live in, so me in all my gear, trying to unroll pads, a sleeping bag, and unpack my backpack wasn’t working out too well. After fighting with my surrounding for a little while, I was set up and ready for bed. Once again, I was thrown back to Iraq as I tried to climb into my sleeping bag. I brushed up against the walls and ceiling as I worked to zip myself up. The good news, I thought, was that my close quarters would allow for me to keep warm pretty easily, as there wasn’t much room for any heat to escape. I was wrong. I woke up around 1 in the morning, and I was freezing. I started to notice all the daylight still visible in my Quincy. The wind had picked up while I was asleep, and the holes which I worked to refill were again gaping. Shit. Ok, training… think. I’ll eat something. Eating offers a quick fix for getting warm. Nope, not working. Do I have to pee? No. Damn. That usually helps too (as our bodies spend energy and heat in keeping our urine warm inside our bodies, so going to the bathroom allows for us to redirect our heat to other areas). I decided to fight with my hut again and attempt to dig some more of my ECW gear out of my bag. Heavier gloves (as mine had literally frozen), an extra layer to lie on, to keep myself off the frozen ground… nothing was working. I couldn’t stop shivering. My hands and toes were numb. Time to abandon ship. I grabbed my sleeping bag and padding and tried to find a new place to sleep. Any room in one of the tents? Nope. Nope. Ugh! You full? Ok, thanks away. Finally I came across the tent where Galena and Chao, two girls who I went on the hike with, were sleeping. After telling them what happened, they invited me in to stay the remainder of the night. It was like a sauna in there. Well, actually, it was probably about 30 degrees, but it was out of the wind and warmer than where I just came from, so it worked. I was able to fall back asleep after a little while, and slept like a log the rest of the night. The next morning we awoke around 7 to start disassembling the camp and make breakfast. Yummy oatmeal. Not the greatest breakfast in the world, but it was warm. It only took us about an hour to pack everything up. The instructors came back and we walked up to a building where we had a debriefing about the night’s events. We still had another day of school to go through, and we were all ready to go home. The rest of the day wasn’t nearly as interesting as the previous. Some training on using the radios (WWII style), searching for crew members during white-out conditions, and the such. We got back to town around 2, went through 2 small safety trainings, and it was over. After dinner I walked back to my dorm, took off my ECW gear, took a hot shower, and went to bed. I was off the next day, and was planning on sleeping as long as possible. And I did. It was glorious.
MJK
(All photos by Dan Duncan)
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