27-28 January 2004. Happy Camper School.
Everyone in Antarctica should be able to go to Happy Campers, but it is mandatory for field camp beekers, slaves who spend time outside on the ice, and winterovers. I got to go and consider myself lucky. Happy Campers is a snow school / Antarctic glacier camping survival course over a two day period where you learn and put to use very valuable skills such as snowchitecture, culinary arts, and being warm. Just in case I find myself camping or stranded on glacier with 100 pounds of survival gear in my 19 days left here in Antarctica.
7am. Keri wakes me up. “Dooooooooode. Happy Camper! Get up! The weather sucks! You can’t even see the mountains!”
Me: (waking up, rubbing eyes and face) “uuuuuhhhh…wha?? Is it condition 2?”
Keri: “I don’t know…. maybe.”
Crap.
9am. Field Safety Training Program (FSTP) classroom.
Eleven happy campers. Julie from rec. Me and Elaine from the galley. 4 Coasties. 4 NAVCHAP (Naval Cargo Handling Battalion). Instructor: Susan Detweiler. You want her on your side when the shit hits the fan. We learned about all about outdoor winter camping, heat production, heat loss, all the ways one can obtain hypothermia, frostbite, and other exciting ways to die in the cold.
After an hour or two of that, we took a Näägwell to the galley to pick up rations. A Näägwell looks like a 15-passenger tank with big tough-guy treads. I like it. I don’t know how to spell “Näägwell” but I figure it’s probably Swedish and has some umlauts somewhere. Anyhow, we decided against using the Näägwell when it lost its reverse and neutral capabilities, so a Hääglund came to the rescue. I know there are umlauts in Hääglund. And I’m pretty sure it’s also from Sweden. They’re cool and tanky, but not as tough-guy as the Nääg. Alas, the Hääglund whisked us away to the I-hut, the Instructor Hut beyond Snow Mound City on the Ross Ice Shelf. The Ross Ice Shelf is a permanent ice shelf a couple hundred feet thick, as opposed to the Sea Ice closer to McMurdo which is anywhere from 3-20 feet thick. Snow Mound is about a 20 minute Hääg ride from McMurdo, or about 10 minutes or so past Scott Base.
In the I-hut, we chowed on sandwiches and juice boxes and learned about XGK stoves; them small small small any-gas-will-do camping stoves that I’ve used a bunch when camping in Eastern Europe. Pretty confident with that, we went on to assemble our sleeping gear from the adjacent module. Two thermalite sleeping pads, a fleece cozy bag liner, the best North Face sleeping bag in the world, and a duffelbag later (times 11) and we trucked on to Snow Mound City.
Snow Mound City.
Beautiful there. Or it should be. Temp. –17F. We stood there to orient ourselves but it’s kind of hard to when everything is gray. Grey gray gray. We spun 360 degrees. “Over there is the invisible Scott Base, then the invisible Castle Rock, the invisible Erebus, the invisible Terra Nova and Mt. Terror, there’s Willy Field (airstrip) that you can’t see, there’s White Island, Minna Bluff which is due south, Black Island that you can’t see over there is where the repeater is for our comm. system so try to point in that general direction when using the VHF, then over there is the invisible Mt. Discovery, and the not really visible Ob Hill, and on the other side of that is Mactown. So yeah. How about that wind?”
I tried to mentally force the clouds and wind away. Go away. Go away. I want to see Erebus. I want a pretty Happy Camper. I’ve waited all season, hoping to go on a Happy Camper trip. I want pretty mountains to look at. Go.
We unloaded the stove boxes, food, sleeping duffels and our personal issue orange cargo bags off the Hääglund. Then we pulled a Scott tent from the Connex box as well as some backcountry tents, stakes, shovels, saws, ice axes, sleds, etc. The first thing we set up was the Scott tent, which is a really well designed practical tent, except for the fact that it doesn’t pack very small. In fact, you need a pickup truck to transport it.
but it’s very cool, and I suppose warm, as well.
Then we were told to build a windwall. Antarctica being the windiest place in the world (so I keep hearing), a wind wall can come in handy since the wind is terribly terribly fierce. I have exciting experience of this. Using saws and shovels, we created a snow quarry and popped out huge bricks of snow and architechted a wall.
The ideal place to set up a mountain tent (if you don’t have your Scott tent and pickup) is north of the snow wall. The crazy wind whips down off the polar plateau from the Continent, which is due south, and across the Ice Shelf directly in our general direction. Nice how nature planned that one.
Then we went on to build a Quinzee. Yay!!! I love Quinzees!! A Quinzee is kind of like an igloo, except not built with snow bricks. We stacked our sleeping kit duffels in a 9 foot stack, and chucked snow at it in an attempt to bury it. I have a silly blue elephant-and-giraffe gaiter on my head.
The idea is, after you bury the quinzee and let the snow set, you dig out your gear and hollow it out a bit, dig a cold sink in front of the entrance, and you (in theory) have a cozy quinzee. Calling it “warm” is a bit ambitious. It’s basically an ice cave that’s roomy, two to three people could sleep comfortably, and one could stand up and reach and not touch the top. Quinzees are awesome. At 5:00, our instructor Susan bailed as classes were finished for the day, and we were supposed to “survive” on our own for the night. I managed to whack myself really good in the shin with the corner of my shovel while digging out the rest of the quinzee. So while the digging was happening, I offered to make everyone coffee and cocoa.
Bad idea.
The pressure to the fuel line on my little “any-gas-will-do” kept going out, so I had to keep pumping the little tank to get the pressure back up. Susan had told us in training to not be afraid of the stove….the stove is your friend. As I was pumping the stove, something occurred which we like to call a “freak accident.”
I blew up the frickin stove. I torched my friend.
It caught on massive fire and luckily our kitchen and table was solely made of ice or I woulda been in trouble, but nonetheless, I destroyed a camp stove that your tax dollars paid for and for that I am sorry. Ahhh!!! What to do!!! This wasn’t part of the training!!!
Here is the aftermath: Note the black charred pieces in the upper left. That was the pump. It didn’t used to be two pieces.
So, needless to say, they barred me from the kitchen area. It was exciting. Exhilarating.
And my leg hurt.
I had to be of use to the camp somehow. I felt that entertainment was my last resort. So I got in my swimsuit and ran amok with my coworker Elaine, since the weather had cleared and the sun came out to warm us with a temperature of a balmy –2. And I am a fool.
And we hired a young, naïve NAVCHAP to manhaul us around camp. Thanks, Toad.
And yes. It was cold. Really really really freaking cold. After all that excitement, the snow finally boiled and we could consume armed forces dehydrated rations and cocoa. After that satisfying culinary explosion in the mouth, the sky turned a perfect blue and the only clouds in the sky were produced from the plumey farts of the neighboring volcano, Mt. Erebus. Julie and I decided to hike around Snow Mound City. There are a bunch of old quinzees, igloos, snowalls, trenches, etc, littered around from other Happy Camper outings (they go twice a week). Walking around them is like walking around ruins of Pompeii. We pointed out things like “I wonder what this structure was meant for? What the hell is this 8 foot ditch doing here?” and “that snowchitect decided to use Ionic columns as decorative pieces on the outside of their quinzee. Personally, I would have gone for the Doric, myself….”
This pic was taken from the inside of an old igloo looking up. And wind erosion does really really cool things to snow and ice:
There’s Julie (my quinzeemate) on the outside of the same old igloo:
Here’s an old quinzee that looks like Angkor Wat.
Then Julie crouched behind an ancient mini-amphitheater, grabbed a snow brick AK-47, and began blowing away the enemy, screaming “You’ll never take me alive! You’ll have to pry this snow brick from my cold, frostbitten hands!”
Not really. I just had a momentary lapse of Antarctic Apocalypse Now meets the NRA.
Man, wind eroded snowchitecture is the coolest. This is the last one. Then I’ll move on to the next exciting thing and geek out on that.
I have many many more pictures of the effects of wind erosion on snow and ice buildings so email if yer interested. One more thing to geek out on: digital camera effects:
Read Part 2