Learning how to keep safe when travelling further afield

Every new person who comes to Scott Base and wishes to venture beyond the ‘Scott Base footprint’ has to partake in Antarctic Field Training. It involves a morning of classroom learning, discussing the expectations, risks, hazards, rules etc. and then practicing lighting stoves and preparing your sleep and kitchen kits.

The sleep kit is very extensive to help keep you as warm as possible. You have a fleece liner, inside a sleeping bag, inside another sleeping bag, inside a cotton outer bag. This is on top of a thermarest sleeping mat and sheepskin mat. You can also have hand warmers and toe warmers, and fill your drink bottle with hot water at the end of the evening to act as a hot water bottle and also help it not to freeze solid overnight.

We packed our gear into a real life Hagglund (!!) and drove out to a quiet camp under the prominent landmark of Mount Erebus. We started with setting up the two tents that we slept in, yellow polar pyramid ones that are surprisingly easy to stand up once you dig some holes for the poles to nestle into. There was another tent already there which was the ‘ablutions block’.

Toileting in the field requires a lot of consideration. We packed individual pee bottles for an optional midnight pee without having the leave your tent, but the ablutions block had its own large pee bucket with funnel, and a red bucket equipped with a toilet seat for number 2s. Everything has to be contained and brought back to Scott Base which then is sent back to New Zealand, no traces left down here.

We enjoyed a dehydrated meal (rehydrated) for dinner. I got to make my first ‘sced’ (scheduled call) back to Scott Base at 7pm on the dot, where we covered off our activities for the day, anticipated time of arrival home, weather updates, and even exchanged a haiku and a joke.

Anything that you don’t want frozen solid in the morning needs to be in the sleeping bag with you, including phone, drink bottle, batteries, boot liners, gloves etc. Claustrophic nightmare, one might say…

As it was the final sunset of this season (the sun won’t go below the horizon again for about 6 months now), we took the opportunity to drive the Hagglund up to Castle Rock at 12:30am for a better view, and about an hour later it rose again.

After taking all the ECW gear off again at about 2am, and getting tucked back into my sleeping bag, I got a total of about 10 minutes sleep for the night. It really was cold, and it was a battle of my warm breath spreading across my cheeks which immediately condensates and then freezes in the cold, leaving me with a perpetually cold face. Sometimes the cold air would find a gap in my sleeping bag bundle and gradually settle in under my skin. An absolutely beautiful experience, albeit extremely challenging.