Snow school! As part of getting our field season up and running, we attend a two day field training course on the Ross Ice Shelf (about 5 miles from the station). The class teaches basic survival skills for working and camping in the Antarctic environment. In the picture above, we are building a snow wall that would act as an windblock during the night. The weather was decent for this time of year...but that would soon change!

Our tent line. The ones in the front are standard mountain tents. The pyramid shaped tent in the back is a Scott tent. It is more or less an updated version of the type of tent that Robert Falcon Scott used on his pushes to the Pole. They're nice because they are tall and vented, so you can cook in them, out of the weather. Having said that, we made a nice little kitchen outside, out of snow blocks. See below.

I slept really well despite the fact that a large storm blew in around 2 am. It turned into a full blown Antarctic storm. We woke up to near white-out conditions, huge winds and plummeting temperatures. Breaking down camp was a challenge. Every task becomes a thousand times harder, as your hands freeze up. Just untying the guy wires on the tents took me nearly half an hour. Pictures were hard to take as my camera kept freezing! Here's a shot I was able to take and a picture of how bundled up we had to be. But we made it, and this may sound strange, but we had a great time. This is the true Antarctica, where weather changes on a dime!

We are just about done with training at this point and should be getting our fishing operation up and running in the next couple of days. More soon!