Happy Camper School

The weather was bad on Wednesday and Thursday’s forecast had called for bad conditions so the flight schedule was pushed back 48 hours. Luckily for me this meant a lot of people didn’t come in on time and there was a free slot in the Friday-Saturday Snow Survival (aka Happy Camper) School.

Since class only started at 9am I got to sleep in a little on Friday. Sleep was a good thing since I had been out late Thursday playing shuffleboard in the smoking bar with my winter-over friends who were about to fly home. The morning was mostly classroom sessions talking about hypothermia and keeping warm in general. Most people don’t realize hypothermia most commonly kills when the weather is 50 degrees and raining.

After class we got to the fun stuff. The 36-ton Nodwell tracked vehicle is out of commission after it’s “incident” at Happy Camper School last week so we used three Piston Bullies to get out to camp on the ice shelf. The weather was spectacularly clear and after a brief introduction to the mountain ranges we could see we were making camp.

There were two kinds of tents used at happy camper. One called the Scott Tent has been used in the Antarctic since the “heroic age” in the 1900’s. The others were basic four season mountain tents very similar to what I use backpacking in Vermont. The Scott Tent weighs nearly 80 lbs, has double layered walls and thick metal tubes to make a pyramid shape. It’s designed to hold up in 80+ mile-per-hour winds, sets up fast and can squeeze in 10 people if the weather gets to condition 1. (it only sleeps four) You can stand up in a Scott Tent and the cotton walls breathe well enough to cook over a coleman stove with the door closed. Double layered cotton keeps it warm but would be useless in the rain. Luckily it never rains here.

The mountain tents weighed only about 10-15 lbs so even with extra tie-downs they can’t take as much wind. To keep them from blowing over we built a wall out of ice blocks as a wind break. We cut the blocks into the ground with hand saws and then wedged them out with shovels. We did a really good job considering the ice was either too soft to stay together or too hard to saw most of the time. Some of us put a lot of effort into sawing. Some of the people I was with seemed to have super-human endurance.

After some wall building I volunteered for cooking duty so I stayed up late and made sure everyone got fed. The side benefit was I got to stay in the Scot Tent with the stove running and stay comfortably warm. The low humidity meant vapor from the boiling water was everywhere and the kitchen felt more like a sauna. People were glad to come in and warm up before spending a night on ice 600 feet thick.

The next morning the piston bullies we had kept nearby had a dead starter so we pulled a lot of our gear back to the instructor hut by sled. After that we had some radio training where we learned how to use an HF radio “designed to be used by an 18 year-old marine in the jungle of Vietnam.” They take a bit to put together but they are bomb-proof and work long range. I was on the radio when we managed to get through to the South Pole Station. It’s odd though, when you have South Pole on the phone what are you supposed to ask? I managed to find out the guy there enjoyed the cereal he had that day for breakfast and it was -85F and clear outside.

Class finished up around 1 on Saturday and my boss gave me the rest of the day off. I changed out of my Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear and started my laundry before running into Etosha in the hall. Etosha and I had graduated from Olin together back in May and she had come in on the latest flight while I was out on the ice. Now we officially have 2 of 66 Olin Graduates in Antarctica.