Happy Camper

What I learned from Happy Camper:

1. I’m glad I’m a guy since it’s a lot tougher for girls to pee into a pee bottle in a sleeping bag.

2. One of the toughest parts of sleeping in a tent in Antarctica isn’t the snow or the wind—it’s the 24-hour daylight!

I just returned from Happy Camper! The real name for it is “Snow Craft 1 Training” but everyone calls it Happy Camper or snow school. Basically, we had a day of training, then our instructors left us out on the McMurdo Ice Shelf where we spent the night. In the morning, our instructors returned for more training.

The training covered lots of stuff, from setting up tents, properly anchoring them in the snow, how to make ice walls, how to use VHF and HF radios, safety for flying in helicopters, how to rescue someone if they're lost, and much more.

The goal of the training is to prepare you to survive in Antarctica for a few days in an emergency situation and to make a remote field camp. I won’t be making any field camps but anyone who is leaving station needs to be prepared for an emergency situation. Not everyone here goes through the training; for example, most of the support staff doesn’t have a reason to leave base so they don’t get the training. I needed it right away because I’m hopping in a helo tomorrow to go into the field on a day trip.

My group had 18 people in it, so we had 2 Scott tents and 6 mountain tents. Some people ended up building some snow trenches to sleep in but I decided I didn’t really want to do that (I’ve slept in a snow cave before and it was pretty uncomfortable!).

Our snow block quarry

Our mountain tents with snow trenches to the left and our snow wall behind

A Scott tent

Setting up our HF radio and antenna. We called the South Pole, got the temperature (-32!), and wished them a happy 100th anniversary!

Our scenario--trying to find a lost person in whiteout conditions

Mount Erebus-- the southernmost active volcano

Observation Hill, Scott Base (the New Zealand Antarctic base), and windmills

Some of the stuff seemed kind of silly, but I wish that I had learned some of the skills when I was in Boy Scouts because I could have been a lot warmer during the various snow camping trips.