For the past two weeks I have been staying at a camp in the Dry Valleys on Lake Fryxell. The camp has a heated hut with a kitchen and electricity generated from solar and wind power.
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| From 2010-11-09 |
I sleep in a tent, but it doesn't get dark at night. Before going to bed I boil water and put it in two water bottles to put in the my sleeping bag to keep warm. This works pretty well. I have not been checking the temperature, but I think we have had a few days where it has been above freezing. There have been some cold days when my drinking water in my water bottles has frozen while I was out collecting samples. I have started warming up my water before heading out on hikes to collect samples.
We get water from "glacier berries" which are big ice chunks that fall off of a glacier that is near the camp. We collect these giant ice cubes and put them in the ATV and drive them across the lake back to the camp and melt them over our heater in the main camp hut.
We cook all of our own food at our field camp. We can use a radio or satellite phone to call McMurdo and order food, which is brought out by a helicopter.
We have mostly canned and frozen food, but we get fresh fruits and vegetables sometimes. We have cereal (like cinnamon toast cruch) and crackers (like cheezits) but most of the the snack food we get is past the expiration date. These snacks usually still taste fine, but we had some chocolate chip cookies that were really awful. We have normal dinners like pasta and fajitas and stew, but we have to make it with all frozen and canned ingredients. We also have desserts like these apple turnovers.
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| From A day in the life at Fryxell camp 2010-11-10 |
Our camp has additional huts that we use as labs to work on preserving soil samples and for getting our gear ready for collecting samples. In the picture below you can see some tents in the foreground, our James Way hut (our living space with the kitchen) is the left most "building" and the other 5 huts are our labs and storage areas. The solar panel is on the right. That snowy frozen area in the background is Lake Fryxell, and there are some glaciers in the background. I have really enjoyed living here for the past couple of weeks.
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| From 2010-11-09 |
2 comments:
Hello,
my name is Madison Banooni and i am in the 5th grade at Hillel Day School. My class and I learned in our Bible class about deaserts. Now I know deaserts arn't allways hot enough to make you feel like steemed brocolli. Even though you don't get fresh fruit and or veggies you get apple turnovers. (I don't get those anyways)A qustion I have for you is how are you going to celabrate Chrismas? Do you have gifts for the people with you?
Happy Holidays,
Madison B.
Hi Madison. Thanks for the question. Right now I'm at the McMurdo research station. There are probably about 900 people at McMurdo right now, and we will have a special Christmas dinner in the cafeteria on Christmas Day. There is a Christmas tree and lots of decorations in the cafeteria. Also, I think I will probably go on a hike on Christmas Day with some of the people I met while working down here, and we will also have a gift exchange.
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