Sledging

January 19, 2009

Things are moving fast. We pull camp here in three days, then spend a week in McMurdo Station (with one or two more adventures) before departing Antarctica. We’ve still got a lot to do, though. Tomorrow, six people are being helicoptered in and we’re gonna band 1,000 penguin chicks!

We took down our “weighbridge” setup today, a fenced-in area with one entrance where penguins get scanned and weighed as they pass, and hauled the gear back up the hill. Michelle, David, Kirsten and I loaded about 350 pounds of fencing, tent, batteries, and other gear on a sled, tied ourselves into separate harnesses, and man-hauled the sled a mile uphill, wearing crampons to get a good grip on the ice as we leaned into our traces. Sometimes you feel like a sled dog!

We also took down our three sleeping tents today. Well, almost. My tent is putting up a fight: the fabric is frozen into solid ice. In fact, the entire floor of the tent, where I have been sleeping all season, is a frozen lake three inches thick. To get the tent free, I spent hours today melting snow on our cooking stove, boiling water, and pouring it on the ice around my tent, hacking with iceaxes and sledgehammers. The tent is still stuck, but I made good progress, and a couple more hours of work tomorrow should get it free – I hope! Meanwhile, we’re sleeping in the hut.