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| An ice wall is made by sawing blocks of compacted snow. At the Happy Camper School, new arrivals learn and practice skills
that help them make ice walls. Douglas Fox |
Antarctica's required course is the Happy Camper School of survival
Do not go untrained into the 24-hour summer light.
from the January 24, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
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Earlier this afternoon Galen Dossin and Kevin Emery, our two instructors, drove us to our campsite several miles from McMurdo. They immediately called our attention to the inviting spot several hundred yards away where the ice reclines gently off the hills of Ross Island.
"There are monster crevasses over there," warns Galen as he points out faint horizontal lines striping the hills. The unseen threat suddenly snaps into focus: Those telltale lines crisscross not only the hills, but also an area of flat ice that lies in front of the hills, much closer to us. Those crevasses have swallowed at least one McMurdo resident in recent years. Some gaps are hundreds of feet deep and hide beneath brittle crusts of snow.
Crevasses usually crack open where the ice flexes as it descends a mountainside or collides with another glacier, but isolated ones can lurk anywhere. They represent a constant, if unlikely, threat – an Antarctic equivalent to random urban violence. Here at our campsite, red and green flags on bamboo poles mark the only confirmed crevasse-free routes on the ice. Rows of these flags run in three directions from where we stand – plus a lone yellow flag in the distance, next to a patch of yellow snow.
"This snow is pretty amazing," says our instructor Kevin as he scree-scraws a carpenter saw through the edge of a snow pit. "If you want to build an igloo, this is the best place on earth." He makes three cuts with the saw, pries with a shovel, and a straight-edged block pops free. It works because Antarctica's high winds pack the snow so densely, compacting one layer of snow atop another, imparting it with naturally straight fracture lines. This sort of shovel-and-saw work forms the core of survival snow craft (shovels and saws are included in the survival bags that travelers are issued when they leave McMurdo). We'll assemble these blocks into a wall to block the wind and create a table for cooking freeze-dried meals on camping stoves. We'll also use stoves to melt snow for drinking water. It sounds simple, but there are right and wrong ways to do this.
"Don't burn the snow when you melt it," says Galen. Each snowflake contains a speck of dust around which it crystallizes, he explains, and if you cook snow directly on a stove rather than melting it in a pot of water, you singe the dust. "It actually tastes burnt."
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