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Snow city

The radio training and survival scenarios took place during the first half of Saturday, but we had arrived at camp early the day before.

Helicopter Safety Our helicopter safety training can be summed up as follows: - Only approach a helicopter from the front in full view of the pilot. Helicopter tails contain a small stabilization rotor that's not easily seen and because of that can be very dangerous. - Carry all skis or equipment that is long horizontally not vertically. Otherwise your gear could get caught in the propeller on top of the helicopter and that would be bad. - Only approach a helicopter from the front in full view of the pilot. Otherwise a helicopter technician may have to run up and tackle you so you don't get too close to the rear rotor. - When a helicopter is taking off or landing near you, don't look at it. You might get a blast of dirt particles in your eyes. - Did we mention? - only approach a helicopter from the front in full view of the pilot.

The vast majority of our time had been spent building our very own snow city, complete with four different kinds of shelters.

The Scott Polar tent is the traditional polar exploration tent. When erected, it looks like a little pyramid. Designed for two people, the tents can, in an emergency, accommodate four. Since they are packed pretty much assembled, the tents can be set up in a short amount of time. They're secure in very strong winds. You can stand up in them. A top vent even allows you to safely cook in them. And their bright yellow color makes them not only visible but downright cheery. Their main problem is that at 80 pounds each, they're not always the shelter you want to lug along.

Putting up a Scott Polar Tent

Burrying an anchor for the Scott Polar Tent

Mountain tents in contrast weigh somewhere around 10 pounds and take up less space. They're more time consuming to erect, however. And you can't stand or safely cook in them. They're also not as capable of handling strong winds. But if you have a shovel and a saw handy, you can do something about that latter problem - make a snow wall to block the wind.

Start of snow cave

Making the snow cave

Snow block quarry

The dry snow that blankets much of Antarctica doesn't make good snowballs, but it's excellent for making snow blocks. First you have to identify a quarry site and mark block outlines. Then you saw into the snow and use the shovel to pry the blocks out so that you can carry them to your tent site. It works best if all the blocks are roughly the same size and are laid out in brick like fashion.

A quarry site can also be easily turned into another kind of shelter, a snow trench. If you're in an emergency situation and you don't have a tent handy, a trench is the most basic survival shelter. Its construction is simple and it doesn't take a lot of time to make one. Instead of transferring the blocks you dig to a tent site, you pile them up around the trench you create. You can dig out more blocks to make a roof.

Guy outside his snow trench

IGLOOS Igloos are perhaps the best known snow structure. Made by stacking snow blocks in a continuing spiral toward the center, they are warm and roomy. They are also much more time consuming to build and wouldn't be appropriate in an emergency situation. So our instructors didn't teach us to make them.

Gordon wonders, "Where's the cable TV?"

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