Living Under the World: Surviving!

Hi, I know I am much overdue, and I deeply apologize for that. I just feel like I have not had a minute to myself in the last few weeks. Work is finally getting into full swing and getting us out the door first thing in the morning and back just barely in time for dinner. And I will admit that after dinner my next priority has been to socialize with my fellow expeditioners (which you all know know is as important as eating to me), and with the lack of darkness that easily occupies my whole evening.

That being said, the evenings I have not been making friends or saying goodbye to new friends (most of the winterers just took off this last week); I have been away on survival or travel training or just sleeping to make up for the big days.

Winds gusting past station in the morning

In order to leave Casey station and explore the surroundings, we all need to undertake “survival training”, a day and a half training period during which we go out, learn a bit about orienteering and survival skills that might be required should we get stuck in unfavourable (aka Antarctic) conditions. First we get issued with our survival bags, which we are to have with us at all times when we leave station limits. These include a sleeping bag, bivouak bag, dehydrated food rations, an ice-axe, throw bag (in case you fell through a bit of sea-ice and needed someone to drag you out) and all the survival clothing we need to have should the beautiful sunny day you leave on turn into a blizzard. These bags are quite sizeable, and once packed with the essentials do not leave much room for many personal items.

Fellow expeditionner survivors and our FTO

On the morning of our survival training we spend a while sitting around with compasses and maps of the area, learning to correct for the 101° (!!!) offset between compass readings and True North, and seeing how best to navigate the terrain when there are few visual cues. We get issued GPS's for the duration of our training and sent to the Comms office to check out. In order to leave station, every party needs to file a trip application, fill in an “intentions” board, and check in regularly via radio with the comms operators back at Casey. At first this might seem a little excessive, but frankly, after the horrible conditions we went out for our survival training in, it is quite comforting to know that someone somewhere knows where you are and when you are supposed to be back. So after all this hooplah, we finally set out for survival training, a small group of 6 of us, accompanied by our Field training officer (FTO). Oh, did I forget to mention the weather was quite shitty when we left and only supposed to get worse over night?`And by shitty I mean 65kph winds which eventually reached 130kph gusts over night (while we slept in bivouak bags), so even though we were lucky enough for it to not be snowing, any loose snow and even some of the hardened chunks of snow were getting picked up and blow past us at great speeds all day.

Myself (green goggles) and the chef,
making our way through the blistering winds

We set off for the recently explored land of Shirley Island (which you discovered in my last post about penguins), using GPS and navigation skills to get us there. After practising throwing our throw bags and being told to use our survival bags for flotations should we break through the ice, we drilled into said sea ice to make sure it was a safe thickness to allow for us to safely cross it, and wandered our way across the ice to Shirley for lunch.

Ice-drilling. The ice gets saltier as you approach
sea water. Think about it. Salty Ice. wtf?

Can you believe the ice only needs to be 20cm thick (if it is good quality) for us to safely cross it on foot? That seems MUCH too thin for my brain, especially when that does not change with distance from shore! But then again, they would not be putting us at any kind of unnecessary risk and the ice so far has been much closer to the 1.5 / 2 metre thick marks. As we crossed the ice we were greeted by a little group of incredibly curious Adelies, with whom we seemed to have a little bit of a stand-off before they got the courage to scurry past us.

Exepditioners vs Penguins

Lunch on Shirley would have been incredibly unpleasant had it not been for the “mega bivvy” we had brought. Essentially a parachute of wind-proof fabric which we pulled over the group and sat on, sheltering us from the blistering winds while we had a quick bite.

Mega bivvy, provider of warm noisy shelter!

Due to the extreme conditions we were facing with our particular training period (other groups had warm sunny days for theirs!), we had to modify our plans and head to the wharf to set up camp. We continued practising navigation skills, and made our way back against the wind, agreeing to not really cheat our survival experience and minimize our stop indoors on station where we needed to collect cooking supplies for the night.

Wharf road, between snow banks

Our trek down to the wharf was an adventurous one, as we walked the road I had meandered along a few weeks earlier in minimal gear, we were climbing 2m snow drifts that had formed across the road and fighting the winds which had picked up to about 100kph gusts by then, trying to not let our backpacks serve as sails.

Down at the wharf we got to see how much of the ice had broken out since I'd last been there, and set up a strategy as to whether we actually would spend the night in these conditions or talk our way through it and then return to station. Team moral was surprisingly high, and everyone was incredibly good at keeping track of each-other and the general understanding was that we would dig out the area where we intended to camp, have dinner and set up our bivvy bags. Then we would evaluate whether we actually spent the night in them or would use the blizzard-lines we set up around camp and emergency procedure we defined to reconvene in the hut nearby.

Whitecaps and broken ice

Don't burn the snow!

The doc in her bivvy

Some sat down for a delicious meal (the perks of having a chef in our group!), while others stubbornly ate dehydrated meals cooked in the melted snow we gathered. When we finally retired to our little “chip packets”, the winds were still increasing, but team moral was also still high. I actually found the small space surprisingly cosy, as it quickly warmed up while trying to crawl around and organise my bed.

Surprisingly cozy

After such an exciting day of fighting magical storm conditions, I must say I was quite exhausted, and surprisingly enough managed to get a decent amount of sleep; only waking up on a few occasions to the snow flurries on my face sneaking through the draw-string opening of my bivvy.

Room with a view

In the morning we woke up, packed up, and had a good cup of hot coffee before setting off across the wind-swept road back to station. The winds were still really strong, but we all found the energy to get through them and back home. Upon our return we were greeted as heroes (or at least like bad-asses), truly having survived some rough Antarctic conditions that our fellow expeditionners had spent the evening gawking at from their cosy station seats. What a rush to actually get to see how powerful nature really is down here, and the experience definitely instilled a deeper respect for the environment I am now living in.