Snow School II
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| From Antarctica |
We built a wind wall by cutting blocks of snow out of the ground. Antarctic snow is solid and dense and you can easily slice through it with a saw like a warm knife through butter. Stacking blocks into a wall is the first step, so that you have a wind shelter for your tent and cooking.
Next we set up 4 mountain tents, 2 Scott Tents, and built an igloo-like structure called a quinzee*. To build the quinzee we stacked all our gear in a pile, covered it with snow, dug a hole in the side, pulled all our bags out, then climbed in and hollowed out the inside some more.
Then we cooked dinner (collect snow, boil it, add to dehydrated food packs), took a walk, and went to bed.
I slept in an old quinzee built by a previous group with two other people. Others from our group slept in tents, and some just dug a trench in the ground. When we went to bed it was -25C outside and 2C inside. The low at night outside was around -27C and inside it cooled down to -10C. I slept well for nearly seven hours with lots of gear on and a good sleeping bag.
The whole time, both days and every time I woke up during the night, I was snacking because our bodies were burning so much energy building things and keeping warm.
All together we were very lucky. We had two warm days, a fairly warm night, and zero wind. It was fun and now I really would love to spend a few days or weeks in a deep field camp rather than McMurdo.
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| From Antarctica |
*QUINZEE could be a really good Scrabble(TM)(R) word, but is not in any dictionaries.
